Gotta love this:

"If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin." ... "Let there be no mistake in the history books about that. Richard Nixon was an evil man -- evil in a way that only those who believe in the physical reality of the Devil can understand it. He was utterly without ethics or morals or any bedrock sense of decency." ... "He was not only a crook but a fool. Two years after he quit, he told a TV journalist that "if the president does it, it can't be illegal." Shit. Not even Spiro Agnew was that dumb. He was a flat-out, knee-crawling thug with the morals of a weasel on speed." ... "Nixon's spirit will be with us for the rest of our lives -- whether you're me or Bill Clinton or you or Kurt Cobain or Bishop Tutu or Keith Richards or Amy Fisher or Boris Yeltsin's daughter or your fiancee's 16-year-old beer-drunk brother with his braided goatee and his whole life like a thundercloud out in front of him. This is not a generational thing. You don't even have to know who Richard Nixon was to be a victim of his ugly, Nazi spirit. He has poisoned our water forever. Nixon will be remembered as a classic case of a smart man shitting in his own nest."

www.theatlantic.com

It gets better:

"Richard Nixon looks like a flaming liberal today, compared to a golem like George Bush. Indeed. Where is Richard Nixon now that we finally need him?"

"Nixon was a professional politician, and I despised everything he stood for -- but if he were running for president this year against the evil Bush-Cheney gang, I would happily vote for him."

And finally, one quick blurb on GW Bush: "Bush is a natural-born loser with a filthy-rich daddy who pimped his son out to rich oil-mongers. He hates music, football and sex, in no particular order, and he is no fun at all."

Gone are the days of making fun of Dubya... ...well, not completely gone.

The Little Professor has lots and lots of links in the left sidebar.. You'll be busy 'til 2011!

I'm pretty sure that some of you will love this site!

Illustration: High Street, Whitechapel (ca. 1894)

articles and images relating to the Tower Hamlets area in the 19th and early 20th Century.

Via THE CARTOONIST

And he made a molten sea, ten cubits from the one brim to the other: it was round all about, and his height was five cubits: and a line of thirty cubits did compass it about. (I Kings 7, 23) 3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841971693993751058209749 445923078164062862089986280348253421170679 821480865132823066470938446095505822317253594081284811174502 8410270193852110555964462294895493038196 442881097566593344612847564823378678316527120190914564856692 3460348610454326648213393607260249141273 724587006606315588174881520920962829254091715364367892590360 0113305305488204665213841469519415116094 330572703657595919530921861173819326117931051185480744623799 62749567351885752724891227

Bell 'did not invent telephone' Claims that a German scientist invented the telephone 15 years before Alexander Graham Bell are supported by evidence from newly surfaced archive papers.

Successful tests on a German device manufactured in 1863 were covered up to maintain the Scot's reputation, the previously unseen files have revealed.

They show the "Telephon", developed by German research scientist Philipp Reis, could transmit and receive speech.

It is alleged UK businessman Sir Frank Gill was behind the cover-up.

The evidence is contained in files from the archives of the Science Museum in London.

The documents were rediscovered in October by the museum's curator of communications, John Liffen.

Contract bid

Gill was chairman of Standard Telephones and Cables (STC), the company that conducted the tests on Reis's' device.

The company was at the time bidding for a contract from the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, which evolved from the Bell Company.

Gill thought that if word got out of the test results, it would scupper STC's chances of winning the contract.

Some researchers have argued for many years that Reis beat Bell to the invention of the telephone. The archived documents seem to support their claims.

A memo, dated 18 March 1947, from Gerald Garratt, a predecessor of Mr Liffen's, show STC's reports on Reis's device were given to him under the strict condition that they would never be publicly referred to or published without permission.

STC then became anxious to retrieve the documents. In a subsequent letter, Garratt wrote: "I am left with the thought that there is something so secret about [the documents] as to be a matter of first class historic interest.

"You must know as well as I the old controversy: 'Did Bell invent the telephone?' and I have here an unpublished manuscript of over 400 pages which proves pretty conclusively that he didn't.

"Does your anxiety to retrieve these reports rather suggest that you agree?"

In 1955, LC Pocock, a research scientist in STC's acoustics laboratory, wrote a letter to Garratt explaining: "[Frank Gill's] decision was that he didn't want the STC name mentioned in any further controversy that may arise as a result of the Reis device."

The "Telephon" could transmit speech very faintly. It could receive good quality speech but only at a low efficiency.

"If by telephone, you mean a device that could communicate over any sort of distance, then [Reis] did invent the telephone," said Mr Liffen.

Scottish-born scientist Alexander Graham Bell is often credited with making the first transmission of speech from one point to another by electrical means in 1876.

But, as with so many of these "world firsts", there are competing claims. Researchers Antonio Meucci and Elisha Gray were also known to be working on speech transmission devices at the same time as Bell and Reis.

Story from BBC NEWS:

We are in the Beginning of the 21st Century and and shit like this is still happening it makes me very sad. Check out the web site Justice in Jena! its time for no more strange fruit.

In the inter-war years Berlin was renowned, or perhaps notorious, for its sophisticated and diverse culture. Explore Weimar Friedrichstadt with forty minutes of audio. A guide to the exotic and erotic cabarets and revues of the era, its literature, music and cinema. MP3 download now at
Audiosnacks.com

Here is a rare video from 1989. The quality aint too good, but now there is no doubt that the Hoff ended the cold war on his own.

Short clip about the first anniversary of the wall -Universal Newsreel (1962/08/16)

Video from the 80s: Down by the Wall (what movie is this from?)

Video: Crossing the Berlin border on the S-Bahn (late '80s)

Video: Tearing down the wall at Potsdamer Platz 12th of November 1989

Newseum: The Berlin Wall Interactive

Wikipedia: The Berlin Wall (lots of links!)

City Maps: The Berlin Wall - Map with sectors and districts

Weird!

Thank you Welsh people for your oh-so-generous & useful Contributions!

Primary sources from American Pop Culture

"Adolf allein in Berlin", that funny shortfilm by german comic-mastermind Walter Moers with english subtitles. Everyone wants one of those Adolf-rubberduckies...

Photos by Terence Nunn Also: WARD LOCK & Co'S Illustrated Guide Books

Great site created by Lee jackson, author of several historical thrillers.