What Dungeons and Dragons character are you? I am told I am an Lawfull Good Half Orc Ranger………….

June 15th: Today in 1215 King John signed the Magna Carta. As soon as he got out of the range of the barons he of course immediately repudiated it, and had the Pope declare it void, but it came back and forms the basis of the legal systems in England and countries using the English [...]

June 14th: Today in 1822 Charles Babbage proposes building a Difference Engine, a mechanical computer to the Royal Astronomical Society. Given funding to try to build the device the machine consumed his life, the first stalled and he tried others, each becoming more clever as they went. Version 2 has been completed by the London [...]

June 13th: Today in 1966 the Supreme Court decided that prior to being interrogated a suspect must be read his rights in the Miranda v. Arizona, leading to the famous lines we all know from T.V. and movies, You have the right to remain silent…. I talking in a crowd of folks from around the [...]

Be sure to check out Exploding Gecko, the newest of the Gecko Blog family. It is by a good friend who is doing a tour of duty in Afganistan at Khandahar. Please stop by his site and wish him good luck!

June 12th: Today in 1939 the Baseball Hall Of Fame opened in Cooperstown, NY. I have been there and it is great fun. Early on it heavily featured the absolutetly false story of Abner Doubleday inventing baseball in Cooperstown, but today it has a more detailed and fact checked history of the game.

June 11th: Today in 1936 pulp writer Robert E. Howard died. Most famous for Conan, Howard wrote a broad selection of pulp stories with one common underlying theme, civilization always falls to the barbarians. A compempary of H.P. Lovecraft, he suffered many of the same sort of mental problems, but both are extremely visionary, [...]

June 10th: Not the best Today In History, I can’t prove out the accuracy and my best source contradicts it, but here you go. In Early June 1977 the Apple II began to ship. I was TRS80 guy and got mine in 1980 or so, but I did lust after Apples. Color screens! Sweet [...]

This is a very cool site on the Deerfield Massacre of 1704. As the site points out there are many different angles on what happened, and they do a good job of showing what happened. I really enjoy the really early colonial stuff and this is the best I have seen on the web.

June 9th: Today in 1934 Donald Duck makes his film debut in the Wise Little Hen, seventy one years of outraged fowl follow.