GrayFoxD (MJT) › Comments

ROCHESTER — The ceremonial pipe organ of the 18th century was the Formula One racer of its time, a masterpiece of human ingenuity so elegant in its outward appearance that a casual observer could only guess at the complexity that lay within. - GrayFoxD (MJT)

Recipes, like songs and poems, are passed down from generation to generation. But some holiday recipes seems to have fallen through the cracks; they're passed - GrayFoxD (MJT)

One summer evening in 1889, a young medical school graduate named Arthur Conan Doyle arrived by train at London’s Victoria Station and took a hansom cab two and a half miles north to the famed Langham Hotel on Upper Regent Street. Then living in obscurity in the coastal town of Southsea, near Portsmouth, the 30-year-old ophthalmologist was looking to advance his writing career. The magazine Beeton’s Christmas Annual had recently published his novel, A Study in Scarlet, which introduced the private detective Sherlock Holmes. Now Joseph Marshall Stoddart, managing editor of Lippincott’s Monthly, a Philadelphia magazine, was in London to establish a British edition of his publication. At the suggestion of a friend, he had invited Conan Doyle to join him for dinner in the Langham’s opulent dining room. - GrayFoxD (MJT)

Cops caught an 18-year-old suspected of getting it on with horses at the Goshen Historic Track in Orange County. After a six-month sting, investigators used surveillance footage to nab Erick Rivera, who was hit with multiple charges for sexual misconduct - GrayFoxD (MJT)

Done wrong by one of the more bizarre infidelities in recent history, the First Lady of South Carolina has made losing a husband a shrewd career move. - GrayFoxD (MJT)

Some may have thought it was a prelude to a close encounter of the third kind. But evidence quickly emerged that it was probably a result of a Russian ballistic missile test. - GrayFoxD (MJT)

NEW BEDFORD, Mass. – A 98-year-old woman was indicted Friday on a second-degree murder charge that alleges she strangled her 100-year-old nursing home roommate after making the victim's life "a living hell" ...thought the woman was "taking over." - GrayFoxD (MJT)

A chemistry student from the northern Ukrainian city of Konotop was killed when a stick of chewing gum exploded in his mouth, Ukrainian media reported on Tuesday. - GrayFoxD (MJT)

The pure white snow atop the Andes Mountains may not be so pure after all. Scientists have found traces of toxic pollutants called PCBs in snow samples taken from Aconcagua Mountain, the highest peak in the Americas. - GrayFoxD (MJT)

Facebook makes you despair? Social networking makes you want to end it all? You may be ready for online ritual suicide with the aid of a new website that helps you kill your virtual identity. - GrayFoxD (MJT)

"What puzzles me is that it took him (or so he claims) 64 years to realize how important a book he had in his possession. Not for the importance of the rather shallow art contained in its pages, of course, but for the frustrated artist behind the art...his artistic frustration being one of the (alleged) elements behind the Fuhrer's madness." - GrayFoxD (MJT)

Sixty four years after WWII ended, a soldier has realized the historical significance of a book he took as a "souvenir" from Hitler's home in the Bavarian Alps: the Fuhrer's art book. - GrayFoxD (MJT)

It's like we always say, clothes before people. - GrayFoxD (MJT)

James Bradley author of “Flags of Our Fathers” and “Flyboys” has just published The Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of Empire and War. HNN contributor Aaron Leonard recently sat down with him in New York to discuss the book. - GrayFoxD (MJT)

In an embarrassing blunder, Gov. Charlie Crist mistakenly directed parents of uninsured children to call a toll-free sex line. - GrayFoxD (MJT)

A longtime Binghamton University anthropology professor known on campus as "a really nice guy" was stabbed to death in his office Friday by a grad student whose dissertation he was to judge, authorities said. - GrayFoxD (MJT)

When reading the mainstream church histories, I often come across the argument that an event, say the physical resurrection of Christ, certainly happened because there is no other historical interpretation which makes sense. It worries me. Most events in the ancient world are poorly recorded and we simply have no grounds to make any historical interpretation at all! We just have to say we do not know what happened. - GrayFoxD (MJT)

When Abraham Lincoln visited New York in February 1861, Walt Whitman noticed that an “ominous silence” greeted the president-elect as he arrived at the Astor House hotel. There was no overt hostility or shouted insult, Whitman wrote, but the “silence of the crowd was very significant,” compared with the “wild, tumultuous hurrahs” that typically greeted distinguished personages. - GrayFoxD (MJT)

Is this the right moment to inaugurate a huge double-decker biography of Bing Crosby? Since his death, in 1977 (which took place, appropriately enough, on a golf course, where the seventy-four-year-old crooner had just shot a very creditable 85), his reputation has gone into eclipse. He hasn't, to be sure, vanished from the cultural map. Yet Crosby increasingly seems like the sole inhabitant of a kind of white-bread Mount Rushmore. He's not hip or sexy or tortured enough to rise from the show-biz ashes in the manner of, say, Tony Bennett (who, happily, lived long enough to enjoy his own resurrection) - GrayFoxD (MJT)

On August 23, 1989, officials from the newly reformed and soon-to-be-renamed Communist Party of Hungary ceased policing the country’s militarized border with Austria. Some 13,000 East Germans, many of whom had been vacationing at nearby Lake Balaton, fled across the frontier to the free world. It was the largest breach of the Iron Curtain in a generation, and it kicked off a remarkable chain of events that ended 11 weeks later with the righteous citizen dismantling of the Berlin Wall. - GrayFoxD (MJT)

Nearly 30 petrified passengers were trapped on a Midtown hell train yesterday with a knife-wielding madman and the blood-soaked body of a straphanger he just stabbed to death in a senseless argument. - GrayFoxD (MJT)

George Frideric Handel's Messiah was originally an Easter offering. It burst onto the stage of Musick Hall in Dublin on April 13, 1742. The audience swelled to a record 700, as ladies had heeded pleas by management to wear dresses "without Hoops" in order to make "Room for more company." Handel's superstar status was not the only draw; many also came to glimpse the contralto, Susannah Cibber, then embroiled in a scandalous divorce. - GrayFoxD (MJT)

On December 8, 1934, the dirigible Graf Zeppelin—named for one inventor of hydrogen airships, Graf (Count) Ferdinand von Zeppelin—departed its Friedrichshafen, Germany, home base on its 418th flight, bound for Recife, Brazil. At the height of the Christmas season, the 776-foot-long dirigible carried 19 passengers, holiday mail and a load of freshly cut Christmas trees. - GrayFoxD (MJT)

America's Thanksgiving holiday goes back at least 388 years to the year following the arrival of the Pilgrims in Massachusetts in 1620. The Pilgrims were among a number of sects called Puritans, and like many Puritan sects, the Pilgrims came to America essentially because they thought 17th Century England much too bawdy. That England of the time was bawdy -- a raucous bawdiness in full bloom -- there's no doubt. But the idea that the Puritans (and Pilgrims) suffered from religious persecution in England is probably a myth. What they suffered from was unease (and maybe too much temptation) at the general licentiousness of English life. - GrayFoxD (MJT)

Two obscure 16th-century German scholars named the American continent and changed the way people thought about the world - GrayFoxD (MJT)

Apocalyptic predictions, such as those warning of global destruction in 2012, are nothing new – they have been around for millennia - GrayFoxD (MJT)

About 17 percent of our $14 trillion dollar economy is dedicated to health care. We pay more for health care than we do for food. Too much of what we spend on our care does nothing to improve our health. We pay for our highly bureaucratic and unwieldy health care system not just with dollars, but with the lives and well-being of millions of Americans. The Affordable Health Care for America Act will reform our health insurance industry so companies prioritize policyholders’ health instead of investors’ profits. - GrayFoxD (MJT)

In Cold Blood" is remarkable for its objectivity--nowhere, despite his involvement, does the author intrude. In the following interview, done a few weeks ago, Truman Capote presents his own views on the case, its principals, and in particular he discusses the new literary art form which he calls the nonfiction novel... - GrayFoxD (MJT)

Drawing the line between polish and pretension is trickier, especially when last year’s costume can be this year’s classic, and next year’s yawn. Just consider the steady infiltration of 19th-century haberdashery into the 21st-century wardrobe. Garment after garment has arrived on the scene that one might think more Gilbert and Sullivan than Bergdorf and Goodman, only to be taken up by the young beards. - GrayFoxD (MJT)

Like tens of thousands of young men and boys before him, Tom Manfre first caught sight of Charles Atlas in the back pages of the comic books he read so voraciously. With a sculpted chest, leopard briefs girdling his hips, a piercing look on his granite-jawed face, Atlas seemed to be jabbing his finger at Manfre as he commanded: "Let Me Prove in 7 Days That I Can Make You a New Man!" - GrayFoxD (MJT)