Why didn’t anyone inform me that licorice-flavored gum is a thing? (Today I learned that Black Jack has been around since 1884, that it was the first flavored gum in the United States, and that it was the first gum to be offered in sticks.)
Category: history.
30 years ago
When I checked the calendar for something unrelated earlier this week, I realized that I turned in my gear and became a civilian again exactly 30 years ago this month, after serving 4 years and 2 months in the German Army. I was only 21 when I got out because I was barely 17 when…
Memento mori
I used to have a lot of those silly old things. Now I only have this one because I could not bear to get rid of it when I cleaned house. It’s a 1935 Royal DeLuxe that was owned by a dear old friend of mine who passed away in 2007 at the age of…
A decidedly mixed-breed pedigree
I did one of those ancestry DNA tests a little while ago, and the results come as an absolute…lack of surprise. German father (the green area), Croatian mother (the blue one), and my paternal grandmother was from East Prussia (the very top of the western part of the pink area.) No idea where or when…
One war, many perspectives, 35 years ago.
Writing a story set in 1982 during the Falklands War, so I’ve been doing a lot of research over the last few weeks. This is one of the best documentaries I’ve found, highlighting combatants on both sides and civilians caught in the middle. It doesn’t focus on combat footage, but on personal accounts from sailors,…
on the holocaust and self-deception.
The BBC flew a drone over the Auschwitz concentration camp, and the footage is, as you might expect, profoundly haunting. Of all the conspiracy theorists, Holocaust deniers piss me off the most, because they blithely try to minimize or outright eradicate from history the industrialized extermination of eleven million people–men, women, children, infants, the infirm. And…
relics.
The idea for the different beret colors for the service branches of the NAC military in my Frontlines novels isn’t unique to my fictional universe, of course. Every military that issues the beret as headgear has a color-coding system for the particular branches and military specialties. In the Frontlines universe, the NAC issues midnight blue…
walls and fences.
25 years….don’t they go by in a blink. A quarter-century ago, the Wall between East and West Berlin finally came down, and a divided city and country began growing back together after 45 years of enforced separation. I was in the military at the time. When the Iron Curtain became porous, and the flow of…
bow & arrow.
Back when I went to community college in Tennessee, I took archery as one of my P.E. classes, and found that I really enjoyed it. Ever since then, I had plans to get a bow of my own and shoot it regularly, but we didn’t have the space in Tennessee, and other priorities got in…
they can thank “blackboard jungle” for that one.
This excellent and thorough Village Voice article on the outdated, arbitrary, and capricious knife laws in New York City is about “gravity knives”, but those laws share the hallmarks of most weapons-related legislation: They were passed in an emotional atmosphere fanned by perceptions and media coverage They have little to no basis in demonstrable facts or science Their intent…