Quotulatiousness

April 11, 2024

The CIA would “brief the press on matters of national importance … when ‘we, the CIA, wanted to circulate disinformation on a particular issue'”

Filed under: Government, History, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Jon Miltimore outlines the fascinating revelations from 1983 about how the CIA directly manipulated American journalists to propagandize certain issues in the way the Agency desired:

One of Snepp’s many jobs at the Agency was to brief the press on matters of national importance. Or in Snepp’s words, when “we, the CIA, wanted to circulate disinformation on a particular issue”.

Snepp made this statement in a 1983 interview (see above) that I’d encourage readers to watch. In the video, the former CIA analyst discusses how the CIA manipulates journalists with lies and half-truths in pursuit of its own agendas.

    For instance, if we wanted to get across to the American public that the North Vietnamese were building up there force structure in South Vietnam, I would go to a journalist and advise him that in the past 6 month X number of North Vietnamese forces had come down the Ho Chi Minh Trail system through southern Laos. There is no way a journalist can check that information, so either he goes with that information or he doesn’t. Usually the journalist goes with it, because it looks like some kind of exclusive.

What Snepp was describing was one of the most simple tactics the CIA has used for decades to control information. He said the success rate of planting these stories in the media was 70-80 percent.

“The correspondents we targeted were those who had terrific influence, the most respected journalists in Saigon,” Snepp said.

Snepp even offered the names of the journalists he successfully targeted: Bud Merrick of US News and World Report; Robert Chaplin of the New Yorker; Malcom Brown of the New York Times; and others.

Snepp worked his way into these journalists’ trust exactly as one would expect.

“I would be directed to cultivate them, to spend time with them at the Caravel Hotel or the Continental Hotel, to socialize with them, to slowly but surely gain their confidence,” Snepp said.

All of this sounds sleazy, but it gets worse.

April 3, 2024

Canada’s The Idler was intended for “a sprightly, octogenarian spinster with a drinking problem, and an ability to conceal it”

Filed under: Business, Cancon, History — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

David Warren had already shuttered The Idler by the time I met him, but I was an avid reader of the magazine in the late 80s and early 90s. I doubt he remembers meeting me, as I was just one of a cluster of brand-new bloggers at the occasional “VRWC pub nights” in Toronto in the early aughts, but I always felt he was one of our elder statesmen in the Canadian blogosphere. He recalls his time as the prime mover behind The Idler at The Hub:

Some late Idler covers from 1991-92. I’ve got most of the magazine’s run … somewhere. These were the ones I could lay my hands on for a quick photo.

This attitude was clinched by our motto, “For those who read.” Note that it was not for those who can read, for we were in general opposition to literacy crusades, as, instinctively, to every other “good cause”. We once described the ideal Idler reader as “a sprightly, octogenarian spinster with a drinking problem, and an ability to conceal it”.

It was to be a magazine of elevated general interest, as opposed to the despicable tabloids. We — myself and the few co-conspirators — wished to address that tiny minority of Canadians with functioning minds. These co-conspirators included people like Eric McLuhan, Paul Wilson, George Jonas, Ian Hunter, Danielle Crittenden, and artists Paul Barker and Charles Jaffe. David Frum, Andrew Coyne, Douglas Cooper, Patricia Pearson, and Barbara Amiel also graced our pages.

I was the founder and would be the first editor. I felt I had the arrogance needed for the job.

I had spent much of my life outside the country and recently returned to it from Britain and the Far East. I had left Canada when I dropped out of high school because there seemed no chance that a person of untrammelled spirit could earn a living in Canadian publishing or journalism. Canada was, as Frum wrote in an early issue of The Idler, “a country where there is one side to every question”.

But there were several young people, and possibly many, with some literary talent, kicking around in the shadows, who lacked a literary outlet. These could perhaps be co-opted. (Dr. Johnson: “Much can be made of a Scotchman, if he be caught young.”)

The notion of publishing non-Canadians also occurred to me. The idea of not publishing the A.B.C. of official CanLit (it would be invidious to name them) further appealed.

We provided elegant 18th-century design, fine but not precious typography, tastefully dangerous uncaptioned drawings, shrewd editorial judgement, and crisp wit. I hoped this would win friends and influence people over the next century or so.

We would later be described as an “elegant, brilliant and often irritating thing, proudly pretentious and nostalgic, written by philosophers, curmudgeons, pedants, intellectual dandies. … There were articles on philosophical conundrums, on opera, on unjustifiably unknown Eastern European and Chinese poets.”

We struck the pose of 18th-century gentlemen and gentlewomen and used sentences that had subordinate clauses. We reviewed heavy books, devoted long articles to subjects such as birdwatching in Kenya or the anthropic cosmological principle, and we printed mottoes in Latin or German without translating them. This left our natural ideological adversaries scratching their heads.

March 4, 2024

“Whatever his flaws, Brian Mulroney was a serious person”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, History, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the free-to-cheapskates teaser from this week’s dispatch from The Line, nice words are said in memory of the late Brian Mulroney, former Prime Minister of Canada:

Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, Mila Mulroney, Nancy Reagan, and President Ronald Reagan at the “Shamrock Summit”, 18 March, 1985.
Photo from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library via Wikimedia Commons.

Brian Mulroney died last week. He was 84.

The first thing you could be forgiven for taking away from the news coverage is how far we have fallen.

Brian Mulroney did big things. Negotiating Free Trade. Fighting Apartheid. Getting the Americans to crack down on acid rain. Comprehensive tax reform that saw the old Manufacturers’ Sales Tax (which taxed productivity) replaced with the GST. Sending Canadians to war in Desert Storm. Striking the Royal Commission on Aboriginal People which led to many of the legal advancements Indigenous communities were able to make through the 90s and into this century.

Even when he failed, as he did at Meech Lake, Brian Mulroney was trying to do something fundamentally transformative in Canadian politics.

And nobody who came after him had anywhere near that kind of guts. Not one of them.

There are things people will gripe about when it comes to Mulroney. Karlheinz Schreiber will be pretty close to the top of that list. Mulroney also tends to poll pretty poorly out west for any number of reasons ranging from a perceived over-emphasis on Quebec via Meech Lake and Charlottetown, to awarding the CF-18 maintenance contract to Montreal’s Canadair after (allegedly) promising it to Winnipeg-based Bristol Aerospace.

Mulroney was not beloved when he left office, to put it mildly. His party was basically annihilated in 1993, and the Canadian conservative movement shattered — it has still, in some ways, yet to fully recover. These are facts about which no one made more, or better, jokes than Mulroney himself. But that fall from esteem was almost never seen internationally. As he watched his contemporaries pre-decease him, Canadians got to see how respected the man was on the world stage. Mulroney was asked to eulogize American presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush as well as British prime minister Margaret Thatcher. In this, Mulroney embodied one of the greatest cultural cynicisms of this country: sometimes, the only way for us to claim a Canadian as one of our own is to first watch them make it abroad.

Mulroney’s great triumph is free trade. Yes, because it meant jobs for millions of Canadians. Yes, because it locked us into an economic pact with the world’s powerhouse economy. But also because, in doing it, he went head-on at one of this country’s great cliches: the idea that reflexive, Laurentian, anti-Americanism was somehow a basis for governing instead of just the hallmark of a deeply insecure cultural elite.

Nobody is picking those fights now. Nobody is taking on the big battles to remake the country. We have been treated to almost 30 years of some of the pettiest, small-ball sniping imaginable. Various wedge issues are dusted off by either side, and hurled like stale buns at their opponents. Culture wars are imported for the purposes of giving our political class something about which they can feign moral outrage. Our leaders are afraid of big things either because they’re hard, or because they are unlikely to pay off in a single four-year election cycle. Mulroney is, arguably, the last Canadian prime minister whose vision of what Canada is, or could be, was not limited by a four-year horizon.

We are a serious country that is not led by serious people. And that is brought into focus when you lose a serious person.

Whatever his flaws, Brian Mulroney was a serious person.

The Line‘s editors say that Mulroney wasn’t well liked on leaving office, but the utter obliteration of the Progressive Conservatives in the 1993 federal election can’t be completely blamed on him. His successor as PC leader, Kim Campbell, went out of her way to alienate western conservatives and libertarians during her brief time in office and during the election campaign that followed. She became Prime Minister with a surprising level of tentative support that she jettisoned in record time, taking her party from a majority in the House of Commons to two (2) seats — only one other Canadian PM has ever been defeated in their own riding (Arthur Meighen … but he had it happen twice, first in 1921 and again in 1926).

March 2, 2024

Brian Mulroney, RIP

Filed under: Cancon, Government, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In a guest post at Paul Wells’ Substack, Ian Brodie describes former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s role in ending the Cold War:

Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, Mila Mulroney, Nancy Reagan, and President Ronald Reagan at the “Shamrock Summit”, 18 March, 1985.
Photo from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library via Wikimedia Commons.

Mulroney’s role has long been poo-poohed by intellectuals on the Canadian left. He was said to have an unhealthy obsession with pleasing the Americans. As a young boy, his fine voice won him an opportunity to entertain visiting American executives with a song. Amateur psychologists diagnosed a disturbing link between Mulroney’s having grown up in a company town, under the shadow of a US owned mill, and his reinvigoration of St. Laurent’s post-war grand strategy.

Mulroney never automatically fell in with US positions on the global issues of the day. His opposition to the apartheid regime in South Africa ran counter to the positions of both Reagan and Thatcher. But he drove the effort to link the American and Canadian economies through the free trade agreement. He backed our allies in the strategic competition with the Soviet bloc. And in helping to create the International Democratic Union, he helped put the west’s centre-right parties on the side of international political cooperation on the side of democracy, liberty, and the rule of law. The contrast with an earlier prime minister who could not bring himself to condemn the declaration of martial law in Poland a few years earlier was clear.

His personal relationships with a generation of American leaders gave substance to the transactional successes. As the Soviet Union came apart, he secured a spot for Canada as the first NATO country to recognize Ukraine’s independence and bolstered the independence movements of the Baltic republics. When Iraq tried to establish a precedent that, following the Cold War, large, powerful countries could invade their neighbours with impunity, Mulroney backed the US led coalition to liberate Kuwait with all the diplomatic and military power he had on hand.

And along the way, he so closely befriended both Reagan and the first Bush that he was given a privileged platform at two US state funerals, an honour never extended to a Canadian leader before and unlikely to be extended to one again soon.

Mulroney deserves to be remembered along with St. Laurent as Canada’s grand strategist of the 20th century. A trusted confidant of world leaders.

September 14, 2023

QotD: Going to “the mall”

Filed under: Business, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

“How was the mall?” Mom would ask when you got home.

“Eh, it was dead,” you might say.

“What did you do?”

“Nothing.”

Neither was true. Every trip to the mall had a routine. You’d swing by the sausage and cheese store for samples. You’d go to the record store to leaf through the sheaves of albums, nodding at the rock gods’ pictures on the wall, content in the cocoon of your generation’s culture. Head over to Chess King to see if there was something stylish you could wear on a date, if you ever had one; saunter casually into Spencer Gifts to look at the posters in the back, snicker at the naughty gifts, marvel at some electronic thing that cast colored patterns on the wall. Then you’d find a place, maybe by the fountain in the center, and watch the world go past in that agreeably tranquilized state of mall shopping.

Dead? Hardly. Okay, maybe it was the afternoon, low traffic. No movie you really wanted to see, the same stuff in the stores you saw last week. Of course you’d go back tomorrow, because that’s what you did with your friends. You went to the mall.

A dead mall is something else today: a vast dark cavern strewn with trash, stripped of its glitter, its escalators frozen, waiting for the claws to take it apart. The internet abounds with photos taken by surreptitious spelunkers, documenting the last days of once-prosperous malls. We look at these pictures with fascination and sadness. No one said they’d last forever. But there wasn’t any reason to think they wouldn’t. Hanging out as teens, we never thought we’d outlive the mall.

James Lileks, “The Allure of Ruins”, Discourse, 2023-06-12.

August 5, 2023

The rotten luck of the American Orient Express

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Railways, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Train of Thought
Published 5 May 2023

In today’s video, we take a look at the American Orient Express, an attempt made by several businesses to replicate the charm and appeal of the real deal that just kept running into bad luck.
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August 1, 2023

Dire Straits – Tunnel Of Love (Rockpop In Concert, 19th Dec 1980)

Filed under: Britain, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Dire Straits
Published 28 Apr 2023

Dire Straits performing ‘Tunnel Of Love’ at Rockpop in Concert on December 19th 1980.
Footage licensed from ZDF Enterprises. All rights reserved.
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July 9, 2023

Grain Elevator

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Food, History, Railways — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

NFB
Published 30 Sept 2015

This documentary short is a visual portrait of “Prairie Sentinels”, the vertical grain elevators that once dotted the Canadian Prairies. Surveying an old diesel elevator’s day-to-day operations, this film is a simple, honest vignette on the distinctive wooden structures that would eventually become a symbol of the Prairie provinces.
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June 25, 2023

Fifty years after The Princess Bride was published

Filed under: Books, Humour, Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

William Goldman’s novel The Princess Bride was not a blockbuster, nor did the movie adaptation get a huge box office when it released in 1987. Yet despite apparent early mediocrity, it became a cult classic. It’s now fifty years after the book came out, and Kevin Mims has a look back at both the novel and the movie:

Even by the eccentric standards of fantasy literature, William Goldman’s 1973 novel The Princess Bride is extremely odd. The book purports to be an abridged edition of a classic adventure story written by someone named Simon Morgenstern. In a bizarre introduction (more about which in a moment), Goldman claims merely to have acted as editor. Unlike Rob Reiner’s much-loved 1987 film adaptation, the book’s full title is The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern’s Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure, The “Good Parts” Version. Yes, all that text actually appeared on the cover of the book’s first hardcover edition (all but the first three words have been scrubbed from the covers of most subsequent editions).

In the 1990s, I worked at a Tower Books store in Sacramento. Every few months, someone would come into the store and ask if we had an unabridged edition of S. Morgenstern’s The Princess Bride. The first time this happened, a younger colleague who had worked there longer than I had told my customer, “The Princess Bride was written by William Goldman. There is no S. Morgenstern. Goldman made him up.” The customer wasn’t convinced. “It’s metafiction,” my colleague explained. “A novel that comments on its own status as a text.” When the customer had left, my colleague told me that a lot of people still believe there is an original version of the novel available somewhere, written by Morgenstern. Having fallen in love with the story via the Hollywood film, they were now looking for the ur-text.

Although I was a big fan of William Goldman, I had never read The Princess Bride. My wife and I saw the film when it first appeared in American theaters, and we have rewatched it several times since on VHS and DVD. Only about 10 years ago did I actually get around to reading the novel. And when I did, I found myself sympathizing with all those people who still believe that, somewhere in the world, there exists an unedited edition.

In his introduction, Goldman tells us that S. Morgenstern was from the tiny European nation of Florin, located somewhere between Germany and Sweden, which is where the story’s action takes place. Such a place never existed, but it’s not surprising that many 21st-century American readers don’t know the names of every current and former European kingdom. European history is littered with microstates that rose briefly and then vanished without leaving much of a trace. Back in the 1990s, before Internet access became commonplace, confirming the existence of a small defunct European statelet would have involved a trip to the library.

But readers in the 1970s might have been more alive to Goldman’s ruse. Back then, metafiction was all the rage. John Barth became a literary superstar (among the academic set, anyway) with books like The Sot-Weed Factor (which, like The Princess Bride, is a fantastical comic adventure supposedly written by a fictional author) and Giles Goat-Boy (the text of which, Barth writes in the foreword, was said to have been written by a computer). In 1983, Goldman would publish a second novel behind the Morgenstern pseudonym, titled The Silent Gondoliers, but this time he removed all mention of himself, even from the copyright page.

April 22, 2023

QotD: The yawning vaccuum that used to be “white culture”

Filed under: Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Current Year White people are not allowed to have a culture. Any culture. Hence, in a perverse way, hipsterism.

First: I think we can agree that there’s no such thing as a black hipster, or a Latino hipster, or an Asian hipster. What would be the point? Those groups already have a culture, in both the “personal identity” and “grievance group” sense. […]

The 1990s were the last time there was some common ground. Growing up as I did in the Tech Boom South, I saw it firsthand. It was just accepted that your Hispanic (not “Latino”, and certainly not “LatinX”) friends would have certain cultural specific things they’d have to do from time to time. If you were friends, they might invite you. If they were good friends, they wouldn’t invite you (do not, under any circumstances, go to your buddy’s sister’s quinceañera. You will meet a whole bunch of hot, horny young Mexican nubiles. You will also meet their brothers and fathers and cousins and uncles and etc., so you will spend the whole evening running around like a homo, doing everything in your power not to talk to girls. It’s torture*).

Same thing with the Chinese kids, and the Indian kids, and all the rest. You’d never see your Asian buddies on Friday nights, because that’s when they had Chinese school (yes, of course their parents would schedule something academic on a Friday night). Diwali was cool, because your friends’ moms would make those crazy-sweet Indian desserts and send you a care package (also known as “diabetes in a box”). That was just an accepted part of life, the same way those guys wouldn’t start a pickup basketball game until after 10 on a Sunday morning, because they knew we’d be in church. Nobody thought much of it, in the same way all our moms just kinda learned by osmosis to keep tortilla chips and salsa in the cupboard as an all-purpose snack (no worries about anyone’s religious food prohibitions).

This worked, because there was still enough of a monoculture back then — this is the late 1980s / early 1990s — to provide common ground. Alas, as White culture disintegrated, the other guys started subsuming their cultural identities into their grievance group identities: The Chinese kids were worried about being called “bananas” (yellow on the outside, White on the inside); the Indian kids were ABCDs (American-Born Confused Desis); and so on. And the White kids were the most anti-White of all, since they’d gone to college for a semester or two and had learned how to parrot pop-Marxism (technically, pop-Gramscianism and pop-Frankfurt School-ism and pop-Marcuse, but who’s counting?).

Thinking back on it, those were the ostentatious “slackers”; the real “Grunge” kids — White kids who found their own Whiteness “problematic” (a phrase debuting in egghead circles around that time). I always assumed it was a problem with traditional, cock-rocking masculinity — not least because that’s what all the male “Grunge” rock stars said it was — but in retrospect I think it was a rising problem with Whiteness itself. Maybe all the grievance groups had a point, and maybe they didn’t, but either way the dominant Boomer culture sucks, so what else can you do?

I know how naive that must sound now, but 30 years ago …

    * It wasn’t my buddy’s fault. He warned me. But c’mon, man — his mom invited me. We’d spent the whole summer working together on his dad’s landscaping crew; I practically lived at their house. What was I gonna say, no? Looking back on it, Mrs. Rodriguez was either trying to set me up with her daughter, or was Aztec goddess-level sadistic.

Severian, “To Mock It, It Must Exist”, Founding Questions, 2022-12-29.

March 26, 2023

Billy Joel – “The Downeaster Alexa“

Filed under: Media, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Billy Joel
Published 3 Oct 2009

In 1989, Billy Joel released his album Storm Front, a successful album that hit #1 on the Billboard 200 charts and went quadruple platinum. Watch the official music video for “The Downeaster Alexa“, about the hard lives of Long Island fishermen.
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February 20, 2023

QotD: The early “cyberpunk” writers versus the folks who built the internet

Filed under: History, Media, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I have been using the Internet since 1976. I got involved in its engineering in 1983. Over the years, I’ve influenced the design of the Domain Name System, written a widely-used SMTP transport, helped out with RFCs, and done time on IETF mailing lists. I’ve never been a major name in Internet engineering the way I have been post-1997 in the open-source movement, but I was a respectable minor contributor to the former long before I became famous in the latter. I know the people and the culture that gets the work done; they’re my peers and I am theirs. Which is why I’m going to switch from “them” to “us” and “we” now, and talk about something that really cranks us off.

We’re not thrilled by people who rave endlessly about the wonder of the net. We’re not impressed by brow-furrowing think-pieces about how it ought to written by people who aren’t doing the design and coding to make stuff work. We’d be far happier if pretty much everybody who has ever been described as “digerati” were dropped in a deep hole where they can blabber at each other without inflicting their pompous vacuities on us or the rest of the world.

In our experience, generally the only non-engineers whose net-related speculations are worth listening to are science-fiction writers, and by no means all of those; anybody to whom the label “cyberpunk” has been attached usually deserves to be dropped in that deep hole along with the so-called digerati. We do respect the likes of John Brunner, Vernor Vinge, Neal Stephenson, and Charles Stross, and we’re occasionally inspired by them – but this just emphasizes what an uninspiring lot the non-fiction “serious thinkers” attaching themselves to the Internet usually are.

There are specific recurring kinds of errors in speculative writing about the Internet that we get exceedingly tired of seeing over and over again. One is blindness to problems of scale; another is handwaving about deployment costs; and a third is inability to notice when a proposed cooperative “solution” is ruined by misalignment of incentives. There are others, but these will stand as representative for why we very seldom find any value in the writings of people who talk but don’t build.

We seldom complain about this in public because, really, how would it help? The world seems to be oversupplied with publishers willing to drop money on journalists, communications majors, lawyers, marketers manqué, and other glib riff-raff who have persuaded themselves that they have deep insights about the net. Beneath their verbal razzle-dazzle and coining of pointless neologisms it’s extremely uncommon for such people to think up anything true that hasn’t been old hat to us for decades, but we can’t see how to do anything to dampen the demand for their vaporous musings. So we just sigh and go back to work.

Yes, we have our own shining visions of the Internet future, and if you ask us we might well tell you about them. It’s even fair to say we have a broadly shared vision of that future; design principles like end-to-end, an allergy to systems with single-point failure modes, and a tradition of open source imply that much. But, with a limited exception during crisis periods imposed by external politics, we don’t normally make a lot of public noise about that vision. Because talk is cheap, and we believe we teach the vision best by making it live in what we design and deploy.

Here are some of the principles we live by: An ounce of technical specification beats a pound of manifesto. The superior man underpromises and overperforms. Mechanism outlasts policy. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a pilot deployment is worth a million. The future belongs to those who show up to build it. Shut up and show us the code.

If you can live by these principles too, roll up your sleeves and join us; there’s plenty of work to be done. Otherwise, do everybody a favor and stop with the writing and the speeches. You aren’t special, you aren’t precious, and you aren’t helping.

Eric S. Raymond, “Those who can’t build, talk”, Armed and Dangerous, 2011-07-28.

January 30, 2023

QotD: Teaching … back in the day

Filed under: Education, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

There’s so much truth to this. The “authority figure” thing is especially interesting. As I started in “education” fairly late, I was conspicuously older than most of my graduate school cohort. They had discipline problems in their classes; I never did. This was because I at least looked like an adult, and dressed like one, too. Every other TA was all of three months removed from undergrad, and tried to show up to teach wearing backwards hats and ratty school apparel. The one kid who took my advice and switched to teaching in “business casual” didn’t have a single discipline problem afterward (poor bastard, he no doubt got killed by his peers for “ageism” or something).

Of course, this was so long ago that students used to be unsure how to address me. Most professors had gone “hip” and had students call them by first name, but there were enough crusty old codgers around who insisted on “Dr. So-and-So” that they didn’t assume. After which I started telling them “you can call me whatever you want, but as a general rule life runs smoother if we respect each other’s station. If you know someone has a title, it’s best to use it unless they specifically tell you otherwise, and it’s always good to respect the social distance between yourself and someone who has something you want. So, choose accordingly.” 20 years ago, most of them got it, and addressed me by my title. 15 years ago, I started getting lots of puzzled puppy dog looks (“what’s a ‘social station’?”). 10 years ago, they all just assumed first names were fine, and before I retired I counted myself lucky if I got so much as a “hey dude”.

Meanwhile, as far as the students were concerned, my job went from “trying to teach them something” to “the annoying meat puppet whose presence we have to tolerate until he puts the A+ in the gradebook for record-keeping purposes”.

Severian, responding to a comment on “Movies Made On Mars”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-02-04.

December 30, 2022

My Top 10 Favorite Avalon Hill Games

Filed under: Gaming, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Legendary Tactics
Published 1 Apr 2021

Avalon Hill has such a rich history as a board game company, and has contributed so much to our hobby, our sense of history, and our lives. I sat down to reminisce about my top 10 favorite Avalon Hill games of all time. Are these the best games of all time? What games would make your list? Let us know in the comment section below.
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December 17, 2022

The history of America’s most famous toys

Filed under: Business, History, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

J.J. McCullough
Published 20 Aug 2022

The story behind some of America’s most iconic postwar toys, including GI Joe, Play-Doh, Monopoly, and Stretch Armstrong.
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