A Brief History On July 17, 1917, King George V of the United Kingdom changed the British royal family’s name from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to the more English-sounding Windsor. Digging Deeper A blatantly political move, changing the German name was done under pressure from a war-weary nation that had been fighting  in what at the time had been the biggest and costliest war in human history.  England had even been bombed by German bomber aircraft named Gotha, causing that much more resentment. As a cousin of both Czar Nicholas II of Russia and Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, King George knew the incestuous nature…

A Brief History “Fragment of a Novel” (1819) is an unfinished vampire horror story written by Lord Byron (1788–1824).  The story, also known as “A Fragment” and “The Burial: A Fragment”, was one of the first in English to feature a vampire theme.  The main character was Augustus Darvell.  John William Polidori (1795–1821) based his novella The Vampyre (1819) on the Byron fragment.  The vampire in the Polidori story, Lord Ruthven, was modelled on Byron himself.  The story was the result of the meeting that Byron had in 1816 with Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) where a “ghost writing” contest was…

A Brief History On July 13, 2013, self-appointed community watchman George Zimmerman, an Hispanic-American, was found not guilty of having murdered 17-year-old African-American Trayvon Martin on February 26, 2012.  The case was closely watched across America and prompted strong racial tensions. Digging Deeper Because of Zimmerman’s outward appearance, the public assumed, with help from the media, that he was white.  He is white but also Hispanic and has some African background.  The media also falsely portrayed the video and audio recordings of the incident where Zimmerman observed and then shot to death the unarmed black teen.  The 911 call was altered…

A Brief History “The Vampyre” is a short work of prose fiction written in 1819 by John William Polidori (1795–1821).  The work is often viewed as the progenitor of the romantic vampire genre of fantasy fiction.  The work is described by British educationalist Christopher Frayling (born 1946) as “the first story successfully to fuse the disparate elements of vampirism into a coherent literary genre.”  This work was published before January 1, 1923 and is in the public domain worldwide because the author died at least 100 years ago. Digging Deeper: The Story Extract of a Letter from Geneva “I breathe…

A Brief History On July 7, 1947, a mysterious object fell from the sky near Roswell, New Mexico, and was reported the next day in the local newspaper as a “Flying Saucer” captured by RAAF (Roswell Army Airfield) personnel.  One could hardly blame the newspaper, because the official Air Force press release said authorities had recovered a “flying disc.” Digging Deeper Thus, the most celebrated UFO incident of them all began, supposedly because of a typical government lie.  The Air Force later claimed the object recovered had been a weather balloon, while in reality it was a balloon carrying instruments…