Analog Nation

The 1959 White Sox featured a guy who didn’t have thumbs. Ron Jackson, who lost both thumbs in a fishing mishap the previous winter, played 5 games at first base, and was also a pinch hitter. Conventional wisdom of the time held that first basemen didn’t really need thumbs anyway, so White Sox [...]

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The world’s most poisonous deer, hands down, is Odocoileus toximortica, the North American spotted whitefoot. Native to forested or mountainous terrains, the whitefoot can be found in most regions of the US and Canada. It is thought to be the only carnivore of family Cervidae.
The bite of the whitefoot is a dual-tiered assault. [...]

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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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Ask any freshman lit major about Dante, and you’ll likely get an answer about the Divine Comedy. In his time, however, Dante was actually better known for a long-running column which was syndicated in several local periodicals. The column, “Alighieri d’Angolo” (or “Alighieri’s Corner”), put a fresh spin to the issues of the [...]

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Prior to 1876, baseballs were made by wrapping leather around a core of orphans’ hair. Teams would go to orphanages and shear the children bald; standard payment to the headmaster was 2 pennies and a burlap sack. Many players believed that the uglier the orphan, the more hop the ball had. A particularly well hit [...]

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