The ghost of Richard Lee “Dick” Stuart was alive and well that warm, languid evening at Angel Stadium of Anaheim on Gene Autrey Way. Many of you weren’t born when Stuart, infamously known as Dr. Strangeglove following the Stanley Kubrick 1964 classic of the same name, held court and, oopsy-daisy, drop-kicked balls from 1958 to 1969. Stuart didn’t just butcher the rawhide. He stewed, filleted,…
Et tu Brute? Beware the Ides of March. It’s a day cloaked in infamy and the assassination of the Emperor Julius Caesar, a turning point in Roman history; March 15, 44 B.C.E. Let that be a lesson to you, Donald Trump. Time for you to go to prison. But we digress. And, according to the Smithsonian Museum, a lot of other notable events have taken…
March 14 is celebrated as Pi Day because the date, when written as 3/14, matches the start of the decimal expansion 3.14159… of the most famous mathematical constant. By itself, pi is simply a number, one among countless others between 3 and 4. What makes it famous is that it’s built into every circle you see – circumference equals pi times diameter – not to…
Feb. 29 is Leap Day, 10 points one might want to consider. 1. Monthly salary — oops. An extra day when getting paid on a monthly basis doesn’t account for much. It counts, actually, for nothing. People getting paid a monthly salary are paid the same whether the month is 28 days or 29. 2. Tale of the tape — yeah. The sun rose at…
Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps: He was a giant Oh, what a long —- and sudsy —- trip it has been for Dr. Emmanuel H. Bronner and the soap he created, then popularized along with a cleansing dose of proselytizing. Bronner may be gone now, but nowhere near forgotten given the hundreds upon hundreds of Web pages devoted to his memory. These pages are devoted to…
‘ALL-ONE’ soap aside, and sudsy philosophy notwithstanding, Dr. Emmanuel Bronner has emerged from beyond the grave with an appropriately nostalgic series of ruminations released on a vinyl LP. Or as the publicity department said: “‘Sisters & Brothers’ is a long-play record that features original recordings of Dr. Emanuel Bronner—visionary, soapmaker, grandfather and founder of Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps. Recorded between 1970 and 1995, on a variety of…
I’ve talked about poltergeists before and we learned that if you don’t actually see what threw the plate at you then it was, most likely, a poltergeist instead of a ghost. Ghosts don’t fool around in the background of life. They are right there to scare the puddin’ out of you every chance they get. But why? Why does a ghostly spirit get his kicks…
Always a bit of an oddity, and itself a colorful exhibition of an Escondido antique dealer’s lifelong hobby, the Roynon Museum celebrating all things dinosaur, went the way of the creatures celebrated within, that is to say, extinct, on June 30, 2019. Applying the lofty title of Roynon Museum of Earth Sciences and Paleontology to its decidedly idiosyncratic exhibit and purpose, museum officials this week…
My days at the department store weren’t the most memorable, but a friend I knew briefly stands out, and the job had its moments. Who knows who makes these personnel decisions. Some genius at store management had the brilliant idea of assigning me, at first, to women’s shoes. It didn’t take long to realize that women, at least the ones who shopped at our store,…
It rained a lot this past winter. However, as we all know, that hasn’t always been the natural state for the arid San Diego region. It took Charles Hatfield to make it rain 107 years ago in San Diego. The only problem was he couldn’t make it stop. A deep dive through the San Diego Historical Society archives courtesy of the OB Rag reveals the…