This installment of “The Inventio Fortunata” is brought to you by Lucky Strike. Enjoy a Lucky Strike! Our hero Erik the Red has succeeded in his plan! He’s gotten some of the most gullible people to settle down on Greenland, and everything’s looking golden! Except…
So we’ve already discussed why no one under any circumstances to move to Greenland. Now let’s discuss the Norse attempt to do just that. The Vikings had been cruising around for a solid couple of centuries by the time they stumbled across Greenland, with whacky…
Today, we get the rich telling us that we ought to go to Mars. Now, I don’t know about you, but I’ve never been too crazy about this plan. I mean, sure it’d be cool, I guess. For one thing, it’s dusty. For another, it’s…
Phantom Islands. We’ve talked about them before. Basically, sailors go crazy, and when they’re not fantasizing about half-fish half-women after spending six months at sea on a sausage-ship, they’re just hoping for a chance at dry land to stretch their legs. And can one really…
Odds are, if you’ve ever caught even a glimpse of a documentary on Antarctica, there’s a non-zero chance you’ve taken a gander at McMurdo station. McMurdo station is the largest permanent base in Antarctica, and is practically a small town in its own right. It’s…
I suppose I’m on a real mammoth kick lately, but I don’t think you can really blame me. There’s something to them: it may just be that my lizard brain is impressed by their large size. Or maybe it’s some sort of genetic memory, from…
We live in a tiny age. Think about it. Once upon a time, 65 million years ago, there were living things wandering across the surface of the earth that were as tall as a skyscraper. There used to be King Kong-esque apes, gigantic bugs, gigantic…
Columbus! Magellan! De Soto, Cortez, da Gama, de Leon. Cabot, Livingstone, Stanley, Cook. Hudson, Cartier and Champlain. These are the names of the men who stuck a flag in distant lands and claimed them for their countries and their God. In many ways, they’re the ones…
Edgar Allan Poe: Almost universally agreed to be one of the great American writers, if not artists. We know him today for his morose short stories and his forlorn poems that defined the genre of Gothic. What is often forgotten is his brief foray into…
Odds are, you’ve heard stories about someone discovering the Americas before Columbus. The most often one (and the only one that is confirmed fact) is that the Vikings settled in Newfoundland, but there are further, more exotic stories, like the Chinese, the Phoenicians, or even…