SKIRMISHER

Maybe because, as nutshells go, the convenience of seeing lotsa things in a single glance is just, well, convenient! So if you want to apply that convenience to something long and hard and full of fun, like the Internet, feel free to hit this.

This video has been circulating in the youtubes, and it apparently shows Anne Frank from a window, shot by a neighbor — the only existing video, so far, of the famous diarist and Holocaust victim.
The 21-second, black-and-white video, filmed on July 22, 1941 about a year before Anne and her family went into hiding, shows [...]

Just got these from the email: a bunch of vintage, rare photos of turn-of-the-century Manila. Not a lot, but enough to remind us of how everything was.

The rest after the cut.

In 1780 the Italian anatomy professor Luigi Galvani discovered that a spark of electricity could cause the limbs of a dead frog to twitch. Soon men of science throughout Europe were repeating his experiment, but it didn’t take them long to bore of frogs and turn their attention to more interesting animals. What would happen, [...]

People across Europe awoke on 6 January 1709 to find the temperature had plummeted. A three-week freeze was followed by a brief thaw – and then the mercury plunged again and stayed there. From Scandinavia in the north to Italy in the south, and from Czechoslovakia in the east to the west coast of France, [...]

As an Illuminatus, an important part of Christian Neefe’s duty was to covertly inculcate promising young people in the ideals of the order, then to recruit them when they came of age. Beethoven was as promising as young people get. So did Neefe inculcate this student? Surely he did. Was Beethoven recruited to the order? [...]

These are the photos some people didn’t want you to see.
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New research suggests that Stonehenge was used as a cemetery for more than 500 years, much longer than previously thought. The new findings also show that people used the area as a burial site long before placement of its trademark stones (or sarsen stones) was complete.
The team was led by Mike Parker Pearson, an archaeology [...]

Using clues from star and sun positions mentioned by the ancient Greek poet Homer, scholars think they have determined the date when King Odysseus returned from the Trojan War and slaughtered a group of suitors who had been pressing his wife to marry one of them.
It was on April 16, 1178 B.C. that the great [...]

“Kaniya-kaniyang Rizal…”
–Cris Villanueva in Bayaning Third World–
Today, the Philippines, as always, celebrates its national hero’s 147th birthday. As always, renowned politicians, attention-hungry statesmen, and a wild caboodle of TV-familiar faces who are in control of government and business are all over public plazas frothing out “nationalistic” fervor in relation to Rizal’s life, works, and influence. [...]

April 15, 1912: Man’s technological hubris hits an iceberg and sinks, literally, as the RMS Titanic founders on its maiden voyage.
The liner, in many ways state of the art for the day and trumpeted by her owners, the press and others as “practically unsinkable,” struck an iceberg south of the Grand Banks and went down [...]

Photos of Old Japan before Hiroshima and Nagasaki became proud venues of world-changing new technologies. This one is of a bijin (beautiful woman) postcard, circa 1918.

TV “makes your kids smarter and behave better.” From the 1950s.
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In 1996 a number of companies were looking to standardize the industry around a short-range radio link for doing a number of things which seem obvious today (not so obvious in 1996).
Within Intel, I had started a program called Business-RF; Ericsson had a program called MC-Link; Nokia had a program called Low Power RF. At [...]

William Henry Bonser Lamin, aside from being a dude with an annoyingly long name, was a World War 1 soldier, and WW1: Experiences of an English Soldier is his blog. On it you’ll find transcripts of Lamin’s letters from the first World War, posted exactly 90 years after they were written. Intriguing! So what happened [...]

Could this be true? 
Extraordinary indeed, but evidence does exist. Conspiracy investigators (most notably superstar writer Alex Constantine) have presented strong evidence of CIA-DOD links to various nefarious activities, ranging from a pedophilia scandal at the Presidio to a cover-up in Franklin, Nebraska (which also involved high-ranking GOP operatives and a crooked savings and loan). Dead [...]

If you think Pepe Alas‘ historical rants are weird, then you haven’t read this book yet. Click here quick!
Fact or fiction? Only history will tell.