Analog Nation

• On June 8, 1654, Louis XIV celebrated his coronation as King of France by kicking off a feast that lasted 94 days. For the duration of the feast, the sixteen-year-old monarch rose from his chair only to relieve himself, returning swiftly to his place at the head of the table. He slept in short [...]

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• On November 18, 1967, meteorologists from around the world came together in Barcelona for a intense, three-day summit. They met behind closed doors, allowing no contact with the outside world. On the third day, five hours behind schedule, the doors finally opened, and a lone weatherman emerged from the smoke-filled conference room to announce [...]

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“As you can tell from these photographs, the hieroglyphs inscribed in the tomb’s antechamber are fairly straightforward. Here we see a kneeling man followed by an eye, some water, two ravens and a foot — which, as our best Egyptologists indicate, can be loosely translated as ‘foreign interloper.’ Here, the man is shown entering the [...]

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• On June 22, 1936, British astronomer Melvin Tinsdale stunned his Oxford colleagues by announcing that he had discovered a new planet. Located between Uranus and Neptune, the planet was to be called Demeter, after the Greek goddess of fertility.* Tinsdale had already mailed a paper for submission to The Astronomical Journal when it was [...]

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• On February 19, 1891, the Other Treaty of Ghent was signed, ending the bitter war between Seychelles and the Faroe Islands. The war, which raged for nearly a decade, had been sparked when the Seychellois* regent boasted in the Times of London, “We are the finest nation of tiny islands anywhere on this [...]

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The first documented game of modern-rules, 9-on-9 baseball ever to take place in France was played on June 2nd, 1918, just behind the Allied front near Ypres. A team of U.S. soldiers (who named themselves “The Fighting Bears”) took on a team from the French army (“La Malaise”) as part of a friendly wager. [...]

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