Today Geoff and Amanda and I went to the Boston Antiques & Design Show in Wilmington, MA. We’d never been to this show before and we actually heard about it in a book we found at a used book sale at MIT. The book was awesome, it’s here if you want to check it out, but it may have mentioned that the show is held in a Shriners Auditorium. Shriners, like the guys wearing little fuzzy red fezzes.
Tag: history
Baby it’s cold outside
Yes, Geoff is correct in the post that he just put up. It isn’t cold outside. At all. But I’m not talking about actual weather, I’m talking about that blasted song. I’m talking about that “Christmas Song” that’s commonly referred to now as “The Rapey Song.”
You know the one. Once you actually listen to the words you get uncomfortable each time you hear it. It’s a duet. It’s ostensibly about flirting, a date, and a storm.
I think a few Commandments got broken here…
Well, well, well.
It appears that the Greens, the “Christian” family that owns Hobby Lobby, the same lovely people who think that there are one set of laws for them and another for everyone else when it comes to employee healthcare, may have gotten themselves in some hot water with the Federal government.
You see, with their billions of dollars, they have been building quite a collection of historical artifacts associated with the Bible: some 40,000 items, including the second-largest collection of Dead Sea Scrolls, all of which are unpublished (can’t have any more of those “funny” Gospels floating around now, can we?) And a huge number of Jewish scrolls, including many that survived the Nazis and the Inquisition.
It turns out that some of the items in their collection may have been acquired under, shall we say, murky circumstances.
Continue reading “I think a few Commandments got broken here…”
Two judges cause much celebration
I haven’t been able to do a lot of writing here on the blog lately. It’s been a combination of having a very full schedule and not sleeping well. I am working on trying to fix the part about not sleeping well. The full schedule will start easing off a bit after October 10th. I will probably post more about that in the near future.
In the meantime, I wanted to say something about two stories in the news that are related to the title of my post. One is in regards to civil rights, the other is in regards to one of New England’s favorite athletes.
Continue reading “Two judges cause much celebration”
A big story of Massachusetts maritime history is coming to the movies
I don’t know what it is, but something about the sea fascinates me, and has for most of my life. Maybe it’s because the sea has played various roles in my family history – some big and some small. Maybe it’s because ships captured my imagination as a little boy the way trucks or cars or airplanes do for most young boys. For years as a kid, my favorite “souvenir” I would get from my trips to the Cape or Martha’s Vineyard was one of those little wooden ships, usually a fishing boat of some kind, that you find in local shops. And I have been reading books about New England maritime history for years.
So anyway, it turns out that early next year there is a movie coming out based on the Michael Tougias book The Finest Hours.
Continue reading “A big story of Massachusetts maritime history is coming to the movies”
Charleston, the Confederate flag, and the Civil War
It has taken a while for me to process everything that has happened in the past couple of weeks. And truthfully, I am still processing it.
Never, in my life, would I have predicted that the discussion to get rid of the Confederate flag once and for all would begin in Charleston, South Carolina.
The same place where the Civil War began, all those years ago.
Continue reading “Charleston, the Confederate flag, and the Civil War”
The two different kinds of apocalyptic fiction
The first is the kind that I read and/or watch. Stuff like The Walking Dead comics, or Mira Grant’s awesome Newsflesh trilogy of novels, or movies like Deep Impact, and even video games like Left4Dead 2 and Fallout 3. I guess the thing I find most interesting is seeing how people adapt. It’s compelling drama. And while I find it entertaining, it does have a certain amount of practical value if it makes emergency preparedness a little less dull, as even the CDC has discovered.
Then there’s the other kind. The kind that makes seemingly ordinary people lose their minds, because they think it’s real.
Continue reading “The two different kinds of apocalyptic fiction”
It’s official – we broke the record
After the light snow we got last night, it seems that Boston has officially broken the record for most snowfall in a single season. Our current snow total is now 108.6 inches, beating the old record of 107.6 inches from the winter of 1995-1996. Here in Boston, they began keeping records of snowfall in 1872.
Thankfully a lot of snow melted in the last couple of weeks, so the new snow hasn’t really done a whole lot to make anything worse. But as the snow melts, it is revealing all the garbage and other stuff that got buried in the massive piles.
Ah, spring.
-Geoff
Happy Birthday Frederick Douglass aka give the people what they want
Much of the world seems to be celebrating Valentines Day today. Regular readers of this blog will know that I usually celebrate the anniversary of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre aka the Mob war in Chicago. I have also been known to wear all black and express my affection to my Spirit Animal, St. Grumpy Cat.
Today I’ve chosen a different tack.
Continue reading “Happy Birthday Frederick Douglass aka give the people what they want”
MLK and cultural appropriation
As a historian, and as someone who grew up in the South, I can’t help but shake my head at how a generation after the tumult of the 1950s and 1960s, we as a society are still struggling with virtually all of the issues that Dr. King fought against. Don’t get me wrong, we have come a long way, even in my lifetime, but that progress still doesn’t mean that we live in a “post-racial” society.
