After reading Stephen King’s 11/22/63, I found renewed interest in the JFK assassination. I was in Dallas this week and I had an hour of daylight to spare, so I drove by. I didn’t have enough time to park and visit the 6th Floor Museum, which closes at 6:00pm. I could only drive by. When [...]
Archive for the ‘History’ Category
Visiting JFK’s Assassination Site
Posted in History on March 17, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
Demise of the Roman Empire
Posted in History on January 11, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
Empires rise and fall, sometimes very fast, like the Mongol Empire and the Soviet Union, both of which lasted a hundred years or less. Hitler’s empire, if we can call the Third Reich an empire, lasted twelve years. The Roman Empire ruled the world for about a thousand years. It died from within, when further expansion was [...]
Ruminations on the Age of Hawaii
Posted in History, Nature, Travels on November 15, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
I am in the process of reading the book Evolution by Stephen Baxter. It starts 140 million years ago, when dinosaurs were dominating life on earth. It chronicles the crashing of the Yucatan comet into earth, the distinction event of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Now I am here on Maui, and whenever I am [...]
Worst Genocides in the 20th Century
Posted in Commentaries, History on September 17, 2011 | 1 Comment »
People usually think of Hitler as the worst mass killer. He is close to the top, but not at the top. 1. Mao Ze-Dong – 49 million to 78 million 2. Jozef Stalin – 23 million 3. Adolf Hitler – 12 million (some estimate up to 20 million indirectly) Here is a link to Piero [...]
Final Shuttle Flight – the End of an Era
Posted in Commentaries, History, Science on July 17, 2011 | 2 Comments »
I was a twelve-year-old boy when Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon in 1969. I was awed. An entire generation of children around the world were awed. Many of the U.S. astronauts are now younger than I am and they may have been too young to be there to watch that momentous step. For [...]
San Francisco 1905
Posted in History on April 21, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
Oh, how our world has changed: http://www.wimp.com/sanfrancisco/
Mongol Empire
Posted in History on February 19, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
If you had lived anywhere in Asia between 1200 and 1300, you would have thought of the Mongols as the rulers of the world. The Mongol Empire, during the later part of that century, covered a good part of the known world then. In actual numbers, it covered 33 million square kilometers (about 13 million square [...]
Movie Review – The King’s Speech
Posted in History, Movies on January 3, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
One of the best movies of the year 2010. The acting is superb, so good, that you can’t tell they are acting. King George VI of England took the throne after his father, George V, died and his older brother David abdicated – because parliament and the country did not approve of a king marrying an [...]
Movie Review: The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
Posted in History, Movies on December 4, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
In Nazi Germany around 1940 in Berlin, Bruno is an eight-year-old boy who is proud of his father, who happens to be a soldier. That was a status symbol in Germany at the beginning of the war. When his father is transferred to “the country” for a more responsible position, the boy loses all his friends. He is bored [...]
Non-Santa Figures
Posted in Commentaries, History on December 24, 2011 | 1 Comment »
We Americans think of Christmas associated with Santa Claus, and we don’t realize that other countries and cultures don’t have such a person. The key figure of the Russian New Year is Ded Moroz, known as Grandfather Frost, or Father Frost, who wears a red caftan, somwhat like Santa’s suit, decorated with traditional embroidering and edged [...]
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