As a followup to my earlier post, and as requested, here are my arms and my husband's, from our more-active SCA days:

My husband's: http://www.bronzehelm.org/attachments/Image/Member_Devices/Odar_ODorney.gif
Blazoned: Or, two dragons combattant and an ermine spot gules.

Mine: http://www.bronzehelm.org/attachments/Image/Member_Devices/Athenais_Bryennissa.gif
Blazoned: Argent, a water bouget sable and a point pointed azure.
The water bouget is a stylized form of two water bags on a yoke. (I'm an artistic type, but my main demand for my arms and badge were "able to be drawn/painted/whatever on practically anything with practically no effort." I wanted simple.)

My badge: http://www.antirheralds.org/IL/2003/0403/submits/Alexandria2.gif (just imagine it black instead of white; the circle around it is due to the form and is not part of the badge.)
Blazoned: [Fieldless] A staple sable.
Yes, as in a staple (the nail kind, not the stapler kind).

To clarify: Arms can only be used by the person they belong to. In the SCA and in the real world (at least so far as the English and Scottish CoAs go), arms only ever belong to one person; there is no such thing as "a family coat of arms" that anyone related can use. There are lots of places you can pay to "research" your family tree that will tell you otherwise, but those places are generally referred to as "bucketshops" for a reason.

Arms are usually used in the "Hey, I'm here" sense - on your armor, clothing, tent, campsite (ideally only when you're present), etc. Badges are meant for the "this is mine" type of use; my badge has been scribbled, inked, painted, or otherwise put on everything from plastic totes to books to forms to favors to leftover boxes. (It's a handy shortcut when everyone in the household knows the symbol. *g*)

Thanks for such a wealth of great information:)

Sheesh, a full week, time for more history...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nellie_Bly

In 1888, Bly suggested to her editor at the New York World that she take a trip around the world, attempting to turn the fictional Around the World in Eighty Days into fact for the first time. A year later, at 9:40 a.m. on November 14, 1889, she boarded the Augusta Victoria, a steamer of the Hamburg America Line,[1] and began her 24,899-mile journey.

She brought with her the dress she was wearing, a sturdy overcoat, several changes of underwear and a small travel bag carrying her toiletry essentials. She carried most of her money (£200 in English bank notes and gold in total as well as some American currency)[2] in a bag tied around her neck.[3]

The New York newspaper Cosmopolitan sponsored its own reporter, Elizabeth Bisland, to beat the time of both Phileas Fogg and Bly. Bisland would travel the opposite way around the world.[4][5] To sustain interest in the story, the World organized a “Nellie Bly Guessing Match” in which readers were asked to estimate Bly’s arrival time to the second, with the Grand Prize consisting at first of a free trip to Europe and, later on, spending money for the trip.[3][6]

On her travels around the world, Bly went through England, France (where she met Jules Verne in Amiens), Brindisi, the Suez Canal, Colombo (Ceylon), the Straits Settlements of Penang and Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan. The development of efficient submarine cable networks and the electric telegraph allowed Bly to send short progress reports,[7] though longer dispatches had to travel by regular post and were thus often delayed by several weeks.[6]

Bly travelled using steamships and the existing railroad systems,[8] which caused occasional setbacks, particularly on the Asian leg of her race.[9] During these stops, she visited a leper colony in China[10][11] and she bought a monkey in Singapore.[10][12]

Another full week without history, so time for a bump, and.....

History of WNBC, another legacy radio station in the US

WNBC (660 AM) was a radio station that operated in New York City from 1922 to 1988. For most of its history, it was the flagship station of the NBC Radio Network. The station left the air on October 7, 1988; its former frequency has since been occupied by CBS Radio-owned all-sports WFAN.

WNBC signed on for the first time on March 2, 1922, as WEAF, owned by AT&T Western Electric. It was the first radio station in New York City.

The call letters are popularly thought to have stood for Western Electric AT&T Fone or Water, Earth, Air, and Fire (the 4 classical elements).[1] However, records suggest that the call letters were assigned from an alphabetical sequence. The first assigned call was actually WDAM; it was quickly dropped, but presumably came from the same alphabetical sequence.

In 1922, WEAF broadcast what it later claimed to be the first radio advertisement (actually a roughly 10-minute long talk anticipating today's radio and television infomercials) which promoted an apartment development in Jackson Heights near a new elevated train line, (the IRT's Flushing-Corona line, now the number 7 line).[2]

In 1926, WEAF was purchased by the Radio Corporation of America, making it a sister station to WJZ. RCA then formed the National Broadcasting Company, which operated two radio chains. WEAF became the flagship station of the NBC Red Network. The other chain was the NBC Blue Network, whose programming originated at WJZ (now WABC), also owned by RCA. As a result of the North American Radio Broadcasting Agreement of 1941, WEAF became a clear channel station, and could be heard across most of the eastern half of North America at night.

In 1943, the United States Supreme Court ordered RCA to sell off one of its radio networks, citing antitrust concerns. The company decided to keep the Red Network, and it was rebranded as the NBC Radio Network after the Blue Network was divested, along with several stations (including WJZ), to Edward J. Noble and rechristened the Blue Network as the American Broadcasting Company. WEAF's call letters were changed to WNBC in 1946, then to WRCA in 1954,[3] and back to WNBC in 1960.[4]

(Read it all in the full article here)

More than 2 weeks with no history.

Here's the history of... Wikipedia!

Wikipedia began as a complementary project for Nupedia, a free online English-language encyclopedia project whose articles were written by experts and reviewed under a formal process. Nupedia was founded on March 9, 2000, under the ownership of Bomis, a web portal company. Its main figures were the Bomis CEO Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, editor-in-chief for Nupedia and later Wikipedia. Nupedia was licensed initially under its own Nupedia Open Content License, switching to the GNU Free Documentation License before Wikipedia's founding at the urging of Richard Stallman.[110] Sanger and Wales founded Wikipedia.[111][112] While Wales is credited with defining the goal of making a publicly editable encyclopedia,[113][114] Sanger is credited with the strategy of using a wiki to reach that goal.[115] On January 10, 2001, Sanger proposed on the Nupedia mailing list to create a wiki as a "feeder" project for Nupedia.

Wikipedia was formally launched on January 15, 2001, as a single English-language edition at www.wikipedia.com,[117] and announced by Sanger on the Nupedia mailing list.[113] Wikipedia's policy of "neutral point-of-view"[118] was codified in its first months. Otherwise, there were relatively few rules initially and Wikipedia operated independently of Nupedia.[113] Originally, Bomis intended to make Wikipedia a business for profit.[119]

Wikipedia gained early contributors from Nupedia, Slashdot postings, and web search engine indexing. On August 8, 2001, Wikipedia had over 8,000 articles.[120] On September 25, 2001, Wikipedia had over 13,000 articles.[121] And by the end of 2001 it had grown to approximately 20,000 articles and 18 language editions. It had reached 26 language editions by late 2002, 46 by the end of 2003, and 161 by the final days of 2004.[122] Nupedia and Wikipedia coexisted until the former's servers were taken down permanently in 2003, and its text was incorporated into Wikipedia. English Wikipedia passed the mark of two million articles on September 9, 2007, making it the largest encyclopedia ever assembled, surpassing even the 1408 Yongle Encyclopedia, which had held the record for 600 years.[123]

Citing fears of commercial advertising and lack of control in Wikipedia, users of the Spanish Wikipedia forked from Wikipedia to create the Enciclopedia Libre in February 2002.[124] These moves encouraged Wales to announce that Wikipedia would not display advertisements, and to change Wikipedia's domain from wikipedia.com to wikipedia.org.[125]

Though the English Wikipedia reached three million articles in August 2009, the growth of the edition, in terms of the numbers of articles and of contributors, appears to have peaked around early 2007.[126] Around 1,800 articles were added daily to the encyclopedia in 2006; by 2013 that average was roughly 800.[127] A team at the Palo Alto Research Center attributed this slowing of growth to the project's increasing exclusivity and resistance to change.[128] Others suggest that the growth is flattening naturally because articles that could be called "low-hanging fruit" – topics that clearly merit an article – have already been created and built up extensively.[129][130][131]

In November 2009, a researcher at the Rey Juan Carlos University in Madrid (Spain) found that the English Wikipedia had lost 49,000 editors during the first three months of 2009; in comparison, the project lost only 4,900 editors during the same period in 2008.[132][133] The Wall Street Journal cited the array of rules applied to editing and disputes related to such content among the reasons for this trend.[134] Wales disputed these claims in 2009, denying the decline and questioning the methodology of the study.[135] Two years later, Wales acknowledged the presence of a slight decline, noting a decrease from "a little more than 36,000 writers" in June 2010 to 35,800 in June 2011.[136] In the same interview, Wales also claimed the number of editors was "stable and sustainable," a claim which was questioned by MIT's Technology Review in a 2013 article titled "The Decline of Wikipedia."[73] In July 2012, the Atlantic reported that the number of administrators is also in decline.[137] In the 25 November 2013 issue of New York magazine, Katherine Ward stated "Wikipedia, the sixth-most-used website, is facing an internal crisis. In 2013, MIT's Technology Review revealed that since 2007, the site has lost a third of the volunteer editors who update and correct the online encyclopedia's millions of pages and those still there have focused increasingly on minutiae."[138]

In January 2007, Wikipedia entered for the first time the top-ten list of the most popular websites in the United States, according to comScore Networks. With 42.9 million unique visitors, Wikipedia was ranked number 9, surpassing the New York Times (#10) and Apple (#11). This marked a significant increase over January 2006, when the rank was number 33, with Wikipedia receiving around 18.3 million unique visitors.[139] In February 2014, Wikipedia was the sixth-most popular website worldwide according to Alexa Internet,[91] receiving 12 billion pageviews every month[140] (2.7 billion from the United States[141]). On 9 February 2014, The New York Times reported that Wikipedia has 18 billion page views and nearly 500 million unique visitors a month, "according to the ratings firm comScore."[13]

On January 18, 2012, the English Wikipedia participated in a series of coordinated protests against two proposed laws in the United States Congress—the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA)—by blacking out its pages for 24 hours.[142] More than 162 million people viewed the blackout explanation page that temporarily replaced Wikipedia content.[143][144]

Loveland and Reagle argue that, in process, Wikipedia follows a long tradition of historical encyclopedias that accumulated improvements piecemeal through "stigmergic accumulation".[145][146]

On 20 January 2014, Subodh Varma reporting for The Economic Times indicated that not only had Wikipedia growth flattened but that it has "lost nearly 10 per cent of its page-views last year. That's a decline of about 2 billion between December 2012 and December 2013. Its most popular versions are leading the slide: page-views of the English Wikipedia declined by 12 per cent, those of German version slid by 17 per cent and the Japanese version lost 9 per cent."[147] Varma added that, "While Wikipedia's managers think that this could be due to errors in counting, other experts feel that Google's Knowledge Graphs project launched last year may be gobbling up Wikipedia users."[147] When contacted on this matter, Clay Shirky, associate professor at New York University and fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for internet and Security indicated that he suspected much of the page view decline was due to Knowledge Graphs, stating, "If you can get your question answered from the search page, you don't need to click [any further]."[147]

(Read the full article here)

A timely post above since Wiki is once more asking for donations. I told some family members if they really want to gift me something, to donate to wiki.org in my name.


Here's a history post...


Spanish archaeologists claim they have found the exact spot where Julius Caesar was stabbed to death on March 15, 44 B.C.E. in Rome.

But it is possible that a cat is one-upping them in detecting archaeological finds in the Eternal City.

This past Tuesday, a cat chanced upon a 2,000-year-old catacomb in a residential area of Rome near the Via di Pietralata. Mirko Curti and a friend followed the cat from their apartment building to a low rock cliff of tufa, a porous stone that has been used for digging tombs over millennia due to its softness. Curti and his friend heard the cat meowing and, following it, discovered themselves in a small opening in a cliff full of niches like those the ancient Romans dug into the rock to hold funeral urns. Around their feet was a telltale sign of where they were, human bones.

Archaeologists summoned to investigate said that the tomb probably dates from the first century B.C.E. to the second century C.E. The bones strewn on the floor had most likely “tumbled into the tomb from a separate burial space higher up inside the cliff”; the urns in the niches themselves contained the ashes of the dead.

Heavy rains at the start of the week in Italy had revealed the long-hidden tomb, by causing rocks at the entrance to crumble and show their long-hidden contents to a curious cat that, thanks to its smaller size and agility, as able to squeeze its way to the ancient site.

There’s no doubt about what the cat-uncovered catacombs hold. In contrast, Spanish archaeologists who say they’ve found the spot where Julius Caesar was stabbed admit that their finding is “open to dispute.” This site was identified based on ancient written sources that hold that Augustus, Caesar’s adopted son and heir who became the first Roman Emperor, had a concrete structure ten feet wide and nearly seven feet high erected over the spot where Caesar was stabbed.

What both findings emphasize is how many archaeological sites are literally under the feet of residents of Rome. An ancient Roman road was discovered in a parking lot of an Ikea store on the outskirts of Rome, notes the Guardian.

The softness of the tufa, the very quality that made it a useful site for digging tombs, is also a reason that the catacombs are threatened today. Once a site, long closed up and preserved, is exposed to the elements it starts to decay.

Earlier this year, the roof of the Villa of the Mysteries, which contains elaborate red and gold frescoes, in the ancient town of Pompeii collapsed after a 13-foot supporting beam fell. As Valentina Stefano from the Italian Confederation of Archaeologists said to the Telegraph, “The Italian government is always talking about the importance of our culture and heritage, but the fact is they have been cutting funds for the sector” — namely, funds for archaeological sites and archaeologists. It’s perhaps all the more reason to laud the cat who found the catacombs as it did so gratis, for no fees.

Read more: http://www.care2.com/causes/curious-cat-discovers-2000-year-old-catacomb.html#ixzz3LSoy00Zv

Hearing about current conditions in Michigan from tinyE in another thread, I had to look up snowfall totals.

NOAA
August 2, 1999

It's official – Mt. Baker, Wash., has set a new record for the most snowfall ever measured in the United States in a single season, the Commerce Department's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported today.

The Mt. Baker Ski Area in northwestern Washington State reported 1,140 inches of snowfall for the 1998-99 snowfall season. The figure was scrutinized by the National Climate Extremes Committee, which is responsible for evaluating potential national record-setting extreme events. The committee, composed of experts from NOAA, the American Association of State Climatologists, and a regional expert from the Western Regional Climate Center, made a unanimous recommendation to the director of NOAA's National Climatic Data Center to accept the figure.

"In accepting the validity of the 1,140 inches of snowfall at Mt. Baker, the National Climatic Data Center recognizes that a new record has been set," said Tom Karl, director of the center. "The previous U.S. seasonal snowfall record was 1,122 inches, set during the 1971-1972 snowfall season at Mt. Rainer [sic] /Paradise, a station located at 5,500 feet on the slopes of Mt. Rainer [sic], about 150 miles south of Mt. Baker."

[cute how NOAA misspelled Rainier in their release]

The committee was concerned only with national records for the United States. However, this total also stands as a world record for a verifiable amount.

The heavy snowfalls normally experienced in the Cascade Mountains of Washington State are the result of several factors. Winter is naturally the wettest season as the west-to-east planetary circulations expands southward and strengthens in speed, with storms striking the Pacific Northwest every few days. Air laden with moisture after its journey across the Pacific is forced to ascent the Cascade Range, dropping abundant precipitation. Freezing levels average about 4,000 feet over the winter months, so that near this altitude snowfall amounts increase very rapidly with just small increases in elevation. This season, a moderately strong La Niña pattern is credited with accentuating this stormy pattern, with a much higher frequency of wet and cold weather systems affecting especially the area from the Cascade Range westward. Freezing levels remained abnormally consistently low throughout the winter.

Full document: http://www.publicaffairs.noaa.gov/releases99/aug99/noaa99056.html

Holy crap, this thing was just barely not archived.

The Roop County War in Susanville... uh... Nevada?

(via a website on Lassen County History and Culture)

On Sunday morning, February 15, 1863, the quiet of the town of Susanville was broken by the sound of gunfire as forces of Roop County Nevada and Plumas County California battled for control of the Honey Lake region.

The stage had been set for this conflict two years earlier when an act of Congress approved the boundaries of Nevada as a territory. The concluding line of the act read as follows: '..excepted from the area covered by this description any portion of California that might be included, unless that State should assent to such segregation.'

Surveyors had measured out the boundaries of Nevada such that the town of Aurora in the Esmeralda gold fields was on the Nevada side of the line, and the town of Susanville in the north was on the California side. Both states claimed jurisdiction over these areas and attempted to govern them simultaneously. Saloon fights, and embattled tax collectors became common place.

Despite pleas by Nevada Governor James Nye, the California Legislature refused to acknowledge the Nevada claim to the Honey Lake region. Bowing to the wishes of some of the citizens of the area, that they not be ruled by the officials of California's Plumas County, Nevada organized the disputed area into a new county called Roop. Named after Isaac Roop, Nevada's first Territorial Governor, it's county seat was established at Susanville.

Injunctions were issued by both sides to prevent the other from conducting governmental business, and both sides ignored these injunctions. Finally, Plumas County Judge E. T. Hogan sent Sheriff E. H. Pierce and Deputy J. D. Byers to Susanville with arrest warrants for Probate Judge John S. Ward and Roop County Sheriff William Naileigh.

They arrived in Susanville on the 6th of February, and were immediately served with a counter warrant from Judge Ward. After several arrests and counter arrests, during which Naileigh, Ward, Pierce, and Byers were in and out of each others custody things began to come to a head on the evening of February 13th. About 9 o'clock that night a group of over zealous Roop citizens at Toadtown heard of the latest arrest and release of their officials and rode to Susanville to set things right. Taking the beleaguered Judge and Sheriff into a kind of protective custody they retreated to an old log fort on the edge of town. They posted sentries and settled down to see what the Plumas contingent would do next.

The morning of February 15th found thirty or so Roop county men inside the old stockade originally build by Isaac Roop as a defense against Indians, and almost 100 Plumas County men occupying an old barn on the corner of Union and Nevada streets, about 150 yards away. While attempting to collect lumber to help fortify the barn, the Plumas men came under fire from the men stationed in the old fort, and the battle was on.

The hostilities soon settled into a 4 hour exchange of mostly intentionally inaccurate gun fire. Both sides feeling the disagreement was not worth killing or dying for. All the while negotiations were going on between members of each party that slipped in and out of their respective strongholds. Finally both sides agreed to a 3 hour truce and broke for dinner together at the Cutler Arnold Hotel. Men who had spent the day shooting at each other now spent a pleasant meal talking and trading stories about the recent fighting!

After dinner the men parted company and headed for their respective redoubts to strengthen the fortifications for the next day's battle. Pierce quickly sent for reinforcements, but learned it would be ten days before any help could be expected. He knew by then his own small force would probably be surrounded by the local Roop County men. When a delegation from the town showed up with a petition to cease the hostilities, Pierce took the opportunity to offer the Roop men a deal. An armistice was signed pledging to cease the battle and submit the grievances of both side to the proper officials in California and Nevada to be settled.

A new survey was ordered and it was determined the town of Aurora lay in Nevada and the Susanville and Honey Lake areas were in California. These boundaries were ratified by both state's governments by early 1865, stranding the Roop County people over the border in California. Unable to completely accept this situation, the Honey Lake residents finally gained independence from Plumas County by forming Lassen County with it's seat at Susanville.

Oh, that's awesome! I traveled through that general area pretty regularly growing up and never knew any of that.

Now that I've bookmarked this thread, I should look up some info on the town I did grow up in. It's got some interesting history of its own. :)

The California/Nevada boundary is a fascinating story and was not fully resolved until... 1980! By the U.S. Supreme Court.

I have seen it in the field in one particular place near Lake Tahoe. I'm a county highpointer and the highest point of Placer Co., CA was long believed to be the summit of Granite Chief 9006'. In 2008, a county highpointer out of Montana, just perusing maps, found a contour line - on the border of Nevada - that reached 9040'+. The day after it was reported, a couple of intrepid friends of mine from the Denver area were on a plane and in the field that afternoon for a first ascent. :) I hit the point (a rock outcrop just inside the line) in 2010 with a group that included Dave Covill, one of those two guys. Dave gave us a tour of their visit, having done hours of map, compass, sight level, and gps work and leaving several small cairns to make sure they were actually on the border... which is the Von Schmidt line from 1873.

For more detailed information on the sweet history of the CA/NV boundary, see this document:
http://www.dot.ca.gov/hq/row/landsurveys/Study_material/State_Boundaries/ca-nv-border-p1-2.pdf

EDIT: LOL, that site, peakbagger.com, now shows 4 (!) ascents of the Placer Co. highpoint before it was actually discovered. :)

Fibbing about ascents sadly has a long tradition in mountaineering, but it's pretty tainting to a legacy if found out! We found one big liar in the county highpointers in the late 2000s, had been believed to be one of the best around. Unfortunately for him, all the huge and awesome ascents he (probably actually) did in the Sierras in the 60s are clouded with doubt.