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August 2, 1100 –You may often wonder when this phrase came into being – Act of God. You’ve all seen it long enough and you may unfortunately experienced it when you went to collect on you home insurance policy. As with most things, the English can pinpoint the first popular usage of the phrase. WilliamContinue reading “Force Majeure:”

August 2, 1989 –Universal Pictures released Ron Howard’s film, Parenthood, starring Steve Martin, Mary Steenburgen, Dianne Wiest, Martha Plymton and Keanu Reeves on this date. This movie is based on Ron Howard, Brian Grazer, Lowell Ganz, and Babaloo Mandel’s experiences as parents. And so it goes

August 1, 1769 – Spain sent an exploratory expedition from San Diego to Monterey to survey the area and identify places worth sending more people to become Catholic. The expedition was led by Gaspar de Portola, nephew of the celebrated Spanish comedian Uncle Porky, and included a number of religious missionaries assigned to imposing afternoonContinue reading “The weather is either magnificent or unusual”

The festival of Lammas marks the beginning of the harvest, when people go to church to give thanks for the first grain to be cut. This is the long way of saying that it’s August again. How did a single month become so important? Like almost everything else that’s difficult to understand, the history ofContinue reading “That last flicker of fun and heat before everything fades and dies”

July 31, 1964 –The American space probe Ranger 7 transmitted the first photo moon’s surface ever taken by a U.S. spacecraft, mapping the surface for a future lunar landing, on this date. Ranger 7 carried six slow-scan vidicon TV cameras capable of transmitting high-resolution television pictures of the lunar surface. A total of 4,308 photographsContinue reading “Wait, don’t go – there’s a lovely view of Earth tonight”

It was on this day in 1954 that human feet first stood upon the summit of Pakistan’s K2 mountain, the second-tallest mountain in the world. K2 was known to the Chinese as “Great Mountain” and to Indian and Pakistani locals as “That Big Thing Over There.” It was not until 1856, when T.G. Montgomerie ofContinue reading “All rock and ice and storm and abyss….”

Prague has always been a tough town for elected officials. On July 30, 1419, Jan Zelivsky, a Hussite priest at the church of the Virgin Mary of the Snows, led his congregation on a procession through the streets of Prague to the Town Hall. The town council members had refused to exchange their Hussite prisoners,Continue reading “It’s tough to be an elected official in Prague.”

We were away for a week and had limited access to the internet. Here is sometime we missed posting about – July 28 – Today is Lasagna Day. I’m not going to lie to you – I don’t believe you can just whip up a lasagna together in a day. It’s going to take youContinue reading “Lasagna: the world’s most perfect food!”

We were away for a week and had limited access to the internet. Here is sometime we missed posting about – July 28 – Today is Milk Chocolate Day. American eat on average 12 lbs of chocolate per year; The Swiss on the other hand eat a little more than 26 lbs a year (thatContinue reading “What evil mind would celebrate it during the summer?”

We were away for a week and had limited access to the internet. Here is sometime we missed posting about – July 27, 1984 –Warner Bros. gift to an unsuspecting world, Purple Rain, starring Prince, premiered on this date. Morris Day apparently had a substance abuse problem throughout production, and was high during most ofContinue reading “Honey, I know, I know, I know times are changing”