Transcript Odds are, if you have ever seen a photo of the president of the United States over the last 60 years, there has been someone in the background or walking a few steps behind, who had in their hand a leather satchel. In that bag was everything the President would need to start armageddon. …
Transcript The musical Brigadoon is about a Scottish village which appears for one day every 100 years. The village can be thought of as a metaphor for things that are fleeting, or why we must take advantage of opportunities when they appear. Brigadoon doesn’t exist in our world, but we do have the next best …
Transcript In the year 1184 in the Dutchy of Thuringia, in what is today the country of Germany, a conflict raged between the Count of Thuringia and the Archbishop of Mainz. To resolve this dispute, the German King Henrich VI called the parties to the city of Erfurt to settle their outstanding issues. Things did …
Translate Wars can start with a bang but end with a whimper. Often an attack or an invasion will begin a war, but even one when one side surrenders, it can take days, weeks, or months for word of the capitulation to get out to everyone. While the European theater of World War II officially …
Transcript In the 1970s NASA embarked on a mission it had never attempted before. Due to a fortunate alignment of planets, they were going to attempt to send robotic probes on a flyby mission to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, before being sent to deep space, out of the solar system. Some of the mission …
Transcript I’m sure all of you have heard the 12 Days of Christmas song. It is the holiday equivalent of 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall, and no one ever sings it to completion because it’s so long. But it does raise the question, what are the 12 days of Christmas? Why are there …
Transcript If you think of Spain as the country on the Iberian Peninsula which is sandwiched between France and Portugal, you are not wrong, but you are also not totally right. There is also a significant part of the country which is located in the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of Morocco: The Canary Islands. …
Transcript On Christmas Day, 2020, Reginald Foster passed away at the age of 81 in a nursing home facility in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He had been diagnosed with COVID-19 a few days before. This episode is not necessarily about his passing however, it is about his life, and in particular how he had one of the …
Transcript In the waning days of the 19th century, a passenger steamer crossing the Pacific Ocean en route from Canada to Australia did a particular thing, at a particular place, at a particular time. If it wasn’t for a last-second decision of the captain of the ship, we wouldn’t be talking about the ship today …