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Fifty years ago this month in 1975, the Altair 8800, one of the first commercially available personal computers, was released in kit form.
January 29 is National Puzzle Day!
This got me thinking about the history of jigsaw puzzles: when were they invented, what is a jigsaw, and any other nerdy things I could research. Here are some fun facts I discovered.
Summer is here! Summer Reading is here!
A leap year, also known as an "intercalary year" or "bissextile" year, is a calendar year that contains an additional day, or in the case of a lunisolar calendar, an entire month, compared to a "common" year.
I grew up in El Paso in the 1970s and 80s, a city that wraps around the Franklin Mountains out on the tip of west Texas, adjoining Ciudad Juárez across the Rio Grande in Chihuahua and a short drive from New Mexico to the north.
Have you ever seen countless hot air balloons drift weightlessly across the sky like vibrantly colored jellyfish? This is something you might have viewed live, or on the internet, TV, or glimpsed on the glossy pages of a book or magazine.
I have been an avid puzzler all my life, but because of Covid, I have rekindled my love of doing puzzles. 1000 pieces are my jam, and I can usually finish one in the course of 2 to 3 evenings or a marathon weekend.
Two of history’s most terrifying volcanic eruptions took place in August: Mount Vesuvius, on August 24-25 in 79 A.D., and Krakatoa, on August 26-27 in 1883. Each blasted colossal volumes of burning ash and rock high into the atmosphere and killed thousands of people for miles around.
Before Barack Obama, Hiram Revels and Shirley Chisholm helped govern the nation. William Wells Brown wrote a novel before Toni Morrison. Phillis Wheatley published poems before Langston Hughes. And Oscar Micheaux made films before Spike Lee and Ava DuVernay.
Los Angeles is a city whose theater scene is typically overlooked, yet every now and then we are host to a production that is monumental.