A Brief History To our North American readers, please be safe this week as we our currently being slammed by an historic winter storm. Digging Deeper In Ashland, Ohio, where I live, I woke to about half a foot of snow on my driveway and spent an hour or so working the snow blower as my father drove the tractor with the snow plow blade on trying to clear our country driveway.  My morning class at Kent State University at Stark was also cancelled.  In fact, some 165 closings and delays occurred in Northeast Ohio alone this morning due to Winter Storm Juno, part…

A Brief History One week ago, on January 19, 2015, we featured 10 sets of famous siblings who had achieved greatness.  Today, we list 10 more sets of famous siblings with whom you may or may not be familiar, but who at one point in time had been prominent. This time we are including fictional siblings as well as real relatives.   Digging Deeper 10. The Thompson Twins (fictional). Not really twins or even siblings, this rock group, who played from 1977 to 1993, hit the charts with “Hold Me Now” and “Doctor Doctor” among other hits.  Honorable mention to Twisted Sister,…

A Brief History One year ago today, on January 25, 2014, an unknown thief or thieves stole a reliquary from an Italian mountainside chapel containing a piece of the bloodied robe Pope John Paul II had been wearing when he had gotten shot during the failed 1981 assassination attempt on his life.  Obviously, if a person or persons were true believers in the Catholic faith, they would not steal such a holy relic because whatever magical properties it might have had would certainly be cancelled by the wrath of God, or at least so you would think. Digging Deeper Italian police believed the theft was…

A Brief History On January 24, 2003, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security began its operations.  This new agency was born from the ashes of the terrorist attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001.  It had been painfully obvious that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the National Security Agency (NSA) and military intelligence agencies had not been effectively communicating with each other and that unless something was done to institutionalize such coordination, the U.S. would be vulnerable to more such attacks. Digging Deeper Given the mission of protecting the United States and its territories from both manmade and natural disasters, as…

This Just In! While cleaning King Tut’s famous mask, conservators at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo got a little carried away and accidentally broke off the beard!  These “restoration experts” must not have been too professional because they then used epoxy, a type of adhesive suitable for metal or stone but not for the materials in the mask, to glue it back on.  Now there is a noticeable gap between the beard and the chin comprised of transparent yellow resin!  And that is not all.  Apparently drops of glue fell on the mask and were allowed to dry before being scraped off, leaving…