Category: History

Posted on

Where We’ve Been

rooftopclouds101511.jpgberkeleydawn.jpeg

October 16. Out of curiosity I checked what, if anything, I posted last year on this date. The image at above left is what I found, under the title “Rooftop Clouds.” I can see from my pictures that I went for a walk in the hills and arrived home as the sun was going down, climbed on the roof, and snapped a few shots of the scene in the west.

OK. Of what did I take note on October 16, 2010, then? See the picture at above right, titled “Berkeley Dawn.” That’s in the backyard, looking east. The difference a year makes: a 180 degree shift in perspective, daylight seen from opposite ends of the day. Conclusion: I like clouds, I guess, and that low slanting light. And I’ve got a photo blog here.

So how about this date in 2009? “Please Help Me Find Him: The Resolution.” I wrote about a missing-persons poster I had spotted in the Mission and the story’s happy ending.

2008: “Utah Door,” a picture of a colorful domicile entrance on Potrero Hill.

2007: “Memories of Suction Past,” pictures of an abandoned vacuum cleaner and a brief reflection on the regular appearance of cast-off vacuums on the local streets.

2006: “The News from Iraq.” Here’s the first paragraph: “So, the news from Iraq is bad. But maybe we’re lucky we’re getting any news at all. The Associated Press has a story today on the number of journalists now "embedded" with U.S. troops in Iraq. From a high of 600 at the war’s glorious beginning, participation has dropped recently to 11. Eleven. Fewer than a dozen reporters and news organizations out with the troops to find out what’s happening on the streets and in the countryside. The rest of the news gets reported out of the Green Zone in Baghdad or secondhand through Iraqi stringers.”

2005: “Behold a Pale Hose.” I acquiesce to the reality of another Cubs-free postseason and resolve to enjoy the White Sox trip to the World Series.

2004:”Local Politics.” A political campaign from foreign parts sign magically appears on our lawn.

And there is no 2003 for this date, because I didn’t start in on this project until the following month.

Posted on

Journal of Arcane Baseball Research

Update: The Giants won, and that means they're the first team to come back from a two-nothing deficit at home to win a five-game series with three straight wins on the road. This was the second five-game series (the history goes back to 1969) in which a home team didn't win a single game (the first was Texas-Tampa Bay in 2010, when the Rangers clinched at the Rays' dome). 

Previously:

"Arcane baseball research." Is there any other kind?

That fine point aside, the San Francisco Giants have a chance for a rare playoff achievement today: They could become the first team in baseball history to lose the first two games of a five-game playoff series at home, then go on to win the final three games on the road. In fact, the Giants are only the fourth team to force a fifth game after losing the first two games of a five-game series on their home field. Here's how that history breaks down:

Teams that forced a fifth game in five-game series after losing first two at home*:

2-3 configuration (two at home followed by three on the road; 1969-1998, 2012):

  • 2012 Giants (vs. Reds; series tied 2-2).
  • 1981 Brewers (vs. Yankees; Yankees won 3-2. at Milwaukee).

2-2-1 configuration (two at home-two on road-one at home; 1999-2011):

  • 2001 Yankees (vs. A's; Yankees won 3-2; fifth game at home).
  • 2010 Rays (vs. Rangers; Rangers won 3-2; fifth game on the road).

Other teams that lost first two at home in five-game series (and result), any configuration:

  • 2010 Twins (vs. Yankees; Yankees won 3-0).
  • 2008 Angels (vs. Red Sox; Red Sox won 3-1).
  • 2008 Cubs (vs. Dodgers; Dodgers won 3-0).
  • 2007 Phillies (vs. Rockiers; Rockies won 3-0).
  • 2006 Twins (vs. A's; A;s won 3-0).
  • 2006 Padres (vs. Cardinals; Cardinals won 3-1).
  • 2004 Angels (vs. Red Sox; Red Sox won 3-0).
  • 2002 Diamondbacks (vs. Cardinals; Cardinals won 3-0).
  • 2001 Astros (vs. Braves; Braves won 3-0).
  • 2000 White Sox (vs. Mariners; Mariners won 3-0).
  • 1997 Mariners (vs. Orioles; Orioles won 3-1).
  • 1996 Dodgers (vs. Braves; Braves won 3-0).
  • 1995 Rockies (vs. Braves; Braves won 3-1).
  • 1984 Royals (vs. Tigers; Tigers won 3-0).
  • 1981 Royals (vs. A's; A's won 3-0).
  • 1979 Reds (vs. Pirates; Pirates won 3-0).
  • 1979 Phillies (vs. Dodgers; Dodgers won 3-1).
  • 1976 Phillies (vs. Reds; Reds won 3-0).
  • 1974 Pirates (vs. Dodgers; Dodgers won 3-0).
  • 1970 Twins (vs. Orioles; Orioles won 3-0).
  • 1970 Pirates (vs. Reds; Reds won 3-0).
  • 1969 Braves (vs. Mets; Mets won 3-0).

*100 5-game series since 1969; approximately 52 with 2-3 configuration. Twenty-five teams have started a five-game series with two games at home and lost both those games. Prior to this year, one won the series 3-2; two lost the series 3-2; five have lost 3-1; 17 have lost 3-0.

Posted on

The Arctic 2012: A View from Above

seaiceextent091912.png

One of the Tweet-worthy current events items I’ve come across in the last couple of days is news that climate scientists say the Arctic ice pack has reached its lowest extent since the satellite records began in 1979. The National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado says the Arctic sea ice appears to have reached a season minimum this past Sunday, September 16, of 3.41 million square kilometers (1.32 million square miles). That’s half the average seen in the years 1979-2000 (and above, that’s a graphic from the NSIDC showing the sea ice extent for September 19).

What does it mean? Here’s a decent summary of the basic thinking from today’s PBS NewsHour:

The ice is younger and thinner than it was in the 1980s. Of the ice surveyed this summer, the majority was one to two years old and three to five feet thick on average. That’s down from 10 to 13 feet thick in 1985.

Losing sea ice also has immediate impacts on Arctic wildlife. Walruses that normally rest on the ice while hunting ocean fish moved ashore by the thousands last year. Arctic seal populations have already declined as a result of disappearing ice. And a 2009 United States Geological Survey estimated that by 2050, the world could lose two-thirds of its polar bears as their ice-dwelling food sources disappear. The ice is also home to delicate microorganisms, which, if lost, could upset the entire Arctic food chain, Meier said.

Ted Scambos, senior research scientist at NSIDC, said that changes in the Arctic’s ice and snow are making the Arctic warmer, which may mean major weather and climate changes for the rest of the planet. Sea ice reflects the sun’s rays, which helps regulate the planet’s temperatures, especially during the summer. Losing the reflective ice surface causes temperatures to rise. If the North Pole is not as cold as it used to be, that has the potential to change wind and weather patterns throughout the Northern Hemisphere.

“But a wider impact may come from the increased heat and moisture that the Arctic is adding to the climate system,” Scambos said in a press release yesterday. “This will gradually affect climate in the areas where we live…We have a less polar pole–and so there will be more variations and extremes.”

Having read some of the accounts of the sea ice retreat yesterday, I went looking for images of what the Arctic looks like. A favorite resource: NASA, which publishes a bunch of cool images of various Earth features every day. One of the services, called MODIS(MODerate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer), includes daily mosaics of the Arctic snapped by NASA satellites. Every time I see these images of Earth from space, the thought that seizes me–or maybe it’s more of an emotion–is what an incredibly beautiful place this planet is.

Looking at the Arctic day to day, I wondered whether I could turn the images into a “movie.” Well, I could, sort of. I downloaded 185 days worth–from March 20 through September 20–then turned them into a slideshow, saved that as a movie, and uploaded it to YouTube. Here it is:


I will say up front that while the view is breathtaking, the Arctic weather screens the view of precisely what’s happening with the ice. It’s not as stark as you might expect (and of course, this is just one season we’re looking at; there’s nothing here to give a comparison to how this scene unfolded 30 years ago).
One note of orientation and explanation: The North Pole is near dead center in the images. Greenland is clearly recognizable at the lower left; Iceland is at the lower center, and Scandinavia and the northern coast of Russia are at the lower right. Siberia dominates the right side of the map (these images show weeks of heavy smoke from fires there). At the top margin, the Bering Strait, where Siberia nearly meets Alaska, is just left of center. Alaska appears inverted at the left, with the Gulf of Alaska at the top left corner.

One more video: This year’s Arctic ice melt as presented by NOAA’s Environmental Visualization Laboratory:

Posted on

Journal of Airliner Seat Photography 2

byronnuclearplant091012.jpg

Further notes on my occasional hobby/obsession with snapping pictures while strapped into an airliner seat: The scene above shows the Byron Generating Station (a nuclear power plant) in Ogle County, Illinois, about 70 miles west of Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. The view here was taken July 26, 2012, from American Airlines Flight 1661, to San Francisco, about 12 and a half minutes after takeoff (we lifted off the runway at 6:43 p.m. CDT, about two hours late). The view here is north/northeast. The Rock River is at the left, and the town of Byron is at the upper right, about three miles from the plant; the town of Oregon, Illinois, is just out of the frame at the lower left.

As it happens, Kate and I were driving in this area last week, and when I saw the plant’s cooling towers in the distance I started looking for a place to stop and take a picture. We found Razorville Road, which runs north-south about a mile west of the plant, and pulled off. The roadside was studded with “No Trespassing” signs, and I was careful not to stray beyond them. I half expected armed guards to show up, but none did. I got my pictures, and we drove off to another local attraction, the Black Hawk statue at Lowden State Park.

byronnuclearplant091012a.jpg

Posted on

‘A Private in Uncle Sam’s Army’

sdb1946-1.jpg

It’s my last night in Chicago for a while–now early morning, actually. I’ve stayed up way too late looking through a collection of letters Dad wrote when he was in Army basic training. That was in 1946, after World War II ended. The story we heard growing up, and I’ve got no reason to doubt it, is that Dad tried to enlist at the outset of the war but was rejected because he had a punctured eardrum. That condition gradually healed, and he was rated fit to serve and drafted in late 1945 and inducted into the Army in January 1946.

Part of his parents’ legacy that I heard about growing up was a collection of more than 100 letters my grandfather, Sjur Brekke, wrote my grandmother, Otilia Sieverson, during their courtship and early marriage in the first decade of the last century. (The courtship started at a Lutheran parish in Chicago, where he was a visiting minister in training and my grandmother’s family were charter members. Sjur was a smooth operator. We have a note he wrote to Otilia on the back of a business card; the subject was a couple of volumes of commentary on scripture he had “taken the liberty” of loaning her. He also offered to hook her up with more such volumes if she liked the first two.)

Sjur died in 1932, when Dad was 10, and he said his mother not only hung onto all those letters, but read and re-read them. She numbered them and kept each one in its original envelope; she wrote key phrases from each letter on the envelopes, apparently her way of prompting herself as to the contents. When she died in 1975, the letters passed on to my dad. They’re among the papers he left behind. (If you’re wondering about my grandmother’s letters to my grandfather, well, so do we. She destroyed them at some point after he died.)sdb1946-2.jpg

What I didn’t know, though, was that my grandmother kept a second letter archive. She saved all the correspondence Dad wrote during his year-plus in the Army, starting with a postcard from Fort Sheridan, north of Chicago, the day he arrived for processing.

“Dear Mother: Here I am, a private in Uncle Sam’s Army,” he began. I’m guessing the postcard was something the Army had its new inductees do to reassure the home folks they were OK.

There are about 75 of these letters in all–20 or so from his time in basic training, which took him to Fort Bliss, near El Paso, Texas, and another 50-some from his time serving in the occupation of Germany.

Leafing through the basic-training letters the other day, I felt like I was getting to know a person about whom I had only heard vague accounts. One thing comes through very clearly: the Army wasn’t really for him. He was interested in learning what he could in the ranks–he was being trained in a field anti-aircraft battery–but he had his own agenda, which always seemed to come back to music and whether he could finagle a way into an Army band (he didn’t). He also loved the opportunity to see a part of the country, dry, desolate West Texas, that was completely new to him.

I read a few of the letters aloud the other day to my siblings. One in particular delighted us. Dad describes a trip up to an artillery range to fire anti-aircraft and machine guns at aerial targets. It sounds like he enjoyed that somewhat. But he also liked the chance to camp out:

“Monday nite we slept under the stars on the New Mexican sand. The sand retains the heat pretty well and I had warm blankets along, so slept very comfortably. In fact it was a lot of fun. 4 or 5 of us slept near each other and sang songs and ate cookies and candy far after dark.”

Sounds like a kid at camp. He was also thrilled to go without shaving or bathing and said the grime made him “look as dark as a negro” (of whom there were none in his unit, of course). I’m not sure he ever really had any significant outdoors adventures before this. His parents were older and given to recreations like attending revival meetings. During an extended stay in Los Angeles in the early ’30s, they took Dad to see Amy Semple McPherson preach at her Church of the Foursquare Gospel.

The scan of the full letter is below.

Posted on

‘The Smallest Minds … The Cowardliest Hearts’

Current reading: “Beyond the Hundredth Meridian,” by Wallace Stegner. It’s a biography of John Wesley Powell, known popularly for making the first boat trip through the Grand Canyon (in 1869), for being among the founders of the U.S. Geological Survey, for his thorough and sympathetic study of Native Americans and their culture, and for promoting a rational approach to the settlement of the arid West. (Among other details I didn’t know, Powell was also a faculty member at the college that became Illinois State University, in Normal, and lived in Bloomington).

Anyway, at one juncture, Stegner stops to contemplate federal government policy on the West. He quotes Mark Twain’s “portrait of the Congressman: ‘the smallest mind and the selfishest soul and the cowardliest heart that God makes.’ ” Harsh, but apt for our time, I thought (and sure, there are some who would say it’s a description with eternal currency).

I wanted to know the source of the quote. One’s first Google search turns up the fact it’s widely cited (to express disgust with today’s crop of solons) though the source is hard to come by. The closest you can get is along the lines of “an 1891 letter to an unknown correspondent.”

Twain died in 1910, and in 1912, someone named Albert Bigelow Paine came out with a massive biography that reprints the letter in full (or nearly full–there’s no salutation, thus the name of the recipient, if any, is unknown, and it begins with an ellipsis). The letter appeared five years later in a collection of Twain’s letters. The subject is the Twain’s real-life experience and how it has fitted him for the profession of novelist. Here’s the paragraph that’s the source of Stegner’s quote:

So, the quote was more expansive and changed somewhat as it passed through the many hands between Twain, Paine, and Stegner. Or maybe not. Stegner cites an edition of “The Portable Mark Twain” edited by his friend and mentor, the historian Bernard De Voto, as his source, and De Voto’s quote was identical to those printed earlier. Stegner appears to have cleaned it up and narrowed the context to fit his needs.

In any case, the original message was: Those lawmaker-government types–they’re all bums.

Posted on

War of 1812: A Quiet Bicentennial

madison1812.jpg

President James Madison’s proclamation of war against Great Britain. (Library of Congress. Click for larger image.)

I’m not hearing a lot about the 200th anniversary, on Friday, of President James Madison asking Congress to declare war on Great Britain, opening the way to the War of 1812. The president’s message outlined the provocations that led to war, and it reads like a musty reminder of junior high history class: impressment of American sailors into British service; British interference with American commerce and a naval blockade of U.S. ports; Britain’s insistence that the United States repudiate its diplomatic and commercial detente with France; and British support for Indian raids on the American frontier. The president concluded on what today is a foreign-sounding note:

“Whether the United States shall continue passive under these progressive usurpations and these accumulating wrongs, or, opposing force to force in defense of their national rights, shall commit a just cause into the hands of the Almighty Disposer of Events … is a solemn question which the Constitution wisely confides to the legislative department of the Government. In recommending it to their early deliberations I am happy in the assurance that the decision will be worthy the enlightened and patriotic councils of a virtuous, a free, and a powerful nation.”

“Foreign-sounding” because—well, when’s the last time a president treated the legislative branch as if it had a real role in deliberating whether the nation goes to war or not? That’s despite living in an era of one war (or conflict, or police action, or retaliation, or high-level drug bust) after another. Since the last time a president deigned to go before Congress, we’ve fought in Korea, Vietnam, the Dominican Republic, Cambodia, Laos, Grenada, Libya (Reagan edition), Panama, Iraq, Somalia, the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya (Obama edition). The only question is who’s next.

Oh, yes: Congress is still a convenient fig leaf for a determined chief executive. A recent president, addressing the nation on the need to go to war to eliminate weapons of mass destruction in a foreign land ruled by a former ally, noted that “recognizing the threat to our country, the United States Congress voted overwhelmingly … to support the use of force.” The president didn’t see fit to mention the campaign of lies and half-truths he and his underlings waged to persuade the legislators and the people that the danger was imminent. That wouldn’t become universally understood until later. But the president left no doubt about his view about where the sole responsibility for committing the nation’s blood and treasure lay:

“Before the day of horror can come, before it is too late to act, this danger will be removed. The United States of America has the sovereign authority to use force in assuring its own national security. That duty falls to me as commander in chief by the oath I have sworn, by the oath I will keep.”

In Madison’s case, asking Congress for a declaration of war was more than a gesture undertaken by an executive who took it for granted he could do whatever he pleased. Congress had never considered such a request before. And it took nearly three weeks before they approved. When they did, it was with plenty of opposition: the House passed the resolution 79-49, the Senate went along, 19-13.

Posted on

Bridge Expedition

filbertsteps052712.jpg

Filbert Street steps, San Francisco.

Last night, we went on an expedition over to the city (or “The City” to conform to the old San Francisco Examiner stylebook) to watch the Golden Gate Bridge 75th birthday fireworks. It was Kate’s idea, and I was lukewarm to it at first mainly because I figured there’d be a huge crowd with attendant problems getting to and from the event. But we came up with a plan: to go to Coit Tower, on Telegraph Hill, which would probably have a decent view of the fireworks and not be in the thick of the mob. We’d be able to take BART over, walk up to the tower (about a mile) using the stairways on the eastern side of the hill. To make the evening complete, we discovered that our boat, the Oakland-Alameda ferry, is running on a summer schedule and that the last trip back to the East Bay would leave the Ferry Building at 10:45.

So: We drove to Oakland, left our car near the ferry, walked to Oakland West BART (getting stopped for a few minutes on the way by an Amtrak train that pulled across the street in front of us and stopped), raced through the tube under the Bay to Embarcadero Station, then hiked north to the Filbert Street steps, just west of Levi’s Plaza. The beacon drawing us on: Coit Tower, bathed in “international orange” light (in honor of the GG Bridge’s paint job).

I have worn out the sidewalks and shortcuts across other parts of the city, but this is a piece of the urban landscape I rarely visit. It’s one of the older settled places in San Francisco, and it feels that way, maybe because of the many fragile-seeming older masonry structures along Front and Battery streets. And when you head up the steps, you enter a different world altogether: a warren of narrow paths and alleyways crowded by garden yards and lined by a jumble of cottages, apartment buildings old and new, humble and spectacular. Every little bit, the tower would reappear, closer and redder, above us.

When we got to the drive winding up to the Coit Tower parking lot, the sparse procession of people we’d been among heading up the steps joined a crowd converging on the hill’s summit. Traffic was stopped. Around the base of the tower, people were staking out positions to watch the show. We found a space looking west toward the bridge through an opening among the branches of a eucalyptus tree. Maybe 40 or 50 people, a mix of people, were perched at the same spot: some families with kids, some younger folks, some older folks. The mood was restrained until the fireworks started with a cascade of white fire along the entire length of the bridge. “I love this city!” a woman next to me said. (Later, she said, “What a great show! She deserves it.” “Yeah,” a friend of hers said, “she didn’t go down 20 years ago (during the Loma Prieta earthquake).”

And then it was over. On the way back down the steps, I was impressed by how steep and long they are–especially the last pitch (pictured at top), which is flung down a sheer drop at the base of Telegraph Hill above Battery Street. Kate said that section made her a little nervous, and steep as it was I could see her point, especially with blackberry shoots making a bid to reach across the handrail and snag you.

We walked down the Embarcadero to the Ferry Building and waited for the boat to Oakland. It was a little late because it had to negotiate some heavy traffic with hundreds of small boats heading back to marinas along the bayfront and across the bay. The boat wasn’t jam-packed, but it did have an unusually large Sunday night crowd. We got off at Jack London Square, picked up our car, and came home.

Posted on

Titanic on the Sea of Unawareness

Item: Some among us apparently are not aware that the story of the Titanic was a real, honest-to-goodness, true-life historical event as opposed to a James Cameron “King of the World” extravaganza. (The evidence: a string of Twitter posts from users expressing surprise that the Titanic existed outside movies. The list appears to be real. Checking the accounts of some of the Twitter users who appear there, some seem to concede that they were ignorant of the Titanic’s existence (though some say they were in doubt about the reality of the love story depicted in the Cameron film). In fact, most of the people on the list have gotten pounded with responses pointing out how dumb they are.

But let us not be harsh. Let us say “credulous” or “unaware,” not “dumb.” Well, there’s unaware, and then there’s unaware. After all, we are the nation where:

  • Fewer than half of poll respondents were certain their current president was born in the United States–two and a half years after he took office.
  • Two in five poll respondents say God (yes–The God) created humans in their present form and one in six say we’re the product of evolution.
  • A 2006 survey of younger Americans (ages 18-24) found that seven out of eight couldn’t find Afghanistan on a map of Asia. (On the other hand, we do have some certified geography whizzes among us.)
  • A survey found “more than 50 percent … wrongly attributed the quote ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’ to George Washington, Thomas Paine, or President Barack Obama, when it is in fact a quote from Karl Marx.”

As a service, we’re offering a brief lists of people and events that have appeared in movies, both recent and classic, that historians say are real (as well as a few that are in fact apparently fictional):

  • George W. Bush
  • Nelson Mandela
  • Bill Clinton
  • Prince
  • Frost and Nixon
  • Vietnam and Vietnam War
  • World War II
  • Seabiscuit and Phar Lap
  • Gandhi
  • World War I
  • Wild West, Bat Masterson, Wyatt Earp
  • Custer, Indians, Little Bighorn
  • The Civil War
  • Lincoln
  • Slavery
  • George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams
  • George III, Henry V
  • Pope Gregory–the calendar guy
  • Rome, gladiators, Claudius, Caligula
  • Egypt, Cleopatra
  • Ancient Greece, Alexander the Great

Jury still out on: Various religious figures, burning bushes, parting seas, Helen, Trojan War, Natty Bumppo, Ishmael, David Copperfield, Pip, Cyrano de Bergerac, The Man in the Iron Mask, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Man With No Name, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (and Liberty Valance), The Man in the White Suit, Sherlock Holmes, Elmer Gantry, Tom Swift, Tom Joad, Dr. Strangelove, Dr. Quinn (Medicine Woman), Smiley, Miss Piggy, E.T., Tatooine, Endor, Luke Skywalker, Undercover Brother, Jason Bourne.

Posted on

Titanic on the Sea of Unawareness

Item: Some among us apparently are not aware that the story of the Titanic was a real, honest-to-goodness, true-life historical event as opposed to a James Cameron “King of the World” extravaganza. (The evidence: a string of Twitter posts from users expressing surprise that the Titanic existed outside movies. The list appears to be real. Checking the accounts of some of the Twitter users who appear there, some seem to concede that they were ignorant of the Titanic’s existence (though some say they were in doubt about the reality of the love story depicted in the Cameron film). In fact, most of the people on the list have gotten pounded with responses pointing out how dumb they are.

But let us not be harsh. Let us say “credulous” or “unaware,” not “dumb.” Well, there’s unaware, and then there’s unaware. After all, we are the nation where:

  • Fewer than half of poll respondents were certain their current president was born in the United States–two and a half years after he took office.
  • Two in five poll respondents say God (yes–The God) created humans in their present form and one in six say we’re the product of evolution.
  • A 2006 survey of younger Americans (ages 18-24) found that seven out of eight couldn’t find Afghanistan on a map of Asia. (On the other hand, we do have some certified geography whizzes among us.)
  • A survey found “more than 50 percent … wrongly attributed the quote ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’ to George Washington, Thomas Paine, or President Barack Obama, when it is in fact a quote from Karl Marx.”

As a service, we’re offering a brief lists of people and events that have appeared in movies, both recent and classic, that historians say are real (as well as a few that are in fact apparently fictional):

  • George W. Bush
  • Nelson Mandela
  • Bill Clinton
  • Prince
  • Frost and Nixon
  • Vietnam and Vietnam War
  • World War II
  • Seabiscuit and Phar Lap
  • Gandhi
  • World War I
  • Wild West, Bat Masterson, Wyatt Earp
  • Custer, Indians, Little Bighorn
  • The Civil War
  • Lincoln
  • Slavery
  • George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams
  • George III, Henry V
  • Pope Gregory–the calendar guy
  • Rome, gladiators, Claudius, Caligula
  • Egypt, Cleopatra
  • Ancient Greece, Alexander the Great

Jury still out on: Various religious figures, burning bushes, parting seas, Helen, Trojan War, Natty Bumppo, Ishmael, David Copperfield, Pip, Cyrano de Bergerac, The Man in the Iron Mask, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Man With No Name, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (and Liberty Valance), The Man in the White Suit, Sherlock Holmes, Elmer Gantry, Tom Swift, Tom Joad, Dr. Strangelove, Dr. Quinn (Medicine Woman), Smiley, Miss Piggy, E.T., Tatooine, Endor, Luke Skywalker, Undercover Brother, Jason Bourne.