In 1897, a rash of airship sightings were reported in newspapers across Michigan and other states. These airships often had blinking colored lights and were unlike anything known at the time. This webpage has collected all the news stories it could find from the time.

“Rebecca Ransohoff, 9, watches Vice President Al Gore explain how to hypnotize chickens.”

Oh! Uri Gellar was what made the olympic flame stall during the Sydney opening ceremonies! That rascal!

The Cathar religion was extinguished by 1230 by the brutal Albigensian crusade. But that hasn’t stopped all kinds of wackos from appropriating the Cathar name.

10 years before L. Frank Baum had a bestseller with The Wizard of Oz , Baum was publisher of The Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer in Aberdeen, South Dakota. It was 1890, a dangerous time to be in South Dakota, especially if you were Native American. Chief Sitting Bull was murdered. The U.S. Army killed about 300 Lakota men, women, and children at Wounded Knee Creek. And L. Frank Baum, in his editorials, called for “the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians.” I had no idea.

There’s another presidential debate Wednesday (go Cardinals!). Tom Tomorrow has summed up the last one nicely in this week’s This Modern World.

The University of Georgia football team beat hated rival Tennessee at home Saturday night, in a game that was televised on ESPN. The evening ended in a near-riot as fans stormed the field (early, at that, nearly resulting in Georgia forfeiting the game). During the “celebrations,” a young woman was nearly killed and the stadium suffered over $100,000 in damages. The day before the game, this amusing letter to the editor ran in the local paper.

Human rights defenders from around the world tell their stories for a PBS special presentation.

Here’s a long and thought-out case for euthanizing The Simpsons I found on MSNBC. The author descibes the transformation over the last several years of the original Simpsons characters, especially Homer, into what he calls “the meta-Simpsons”, or, less civilly, “jerkass Homer.” An interview with George Meyer, the last of the staff old guard, helps the author make his case.

My co-worker Paul has a conversation on software code reuse.