The St. Bonaventure College baseball team in the 1890s.  How can you play the game without a splendid uniform? Probably the nastiest team in the history of baseball—or in any sport, ever—were the Midnight Terrors.  The Midnight Terrors started out in the 1890s not as athletes but as a teenage street gang, operating out of Manhattan’s First Ward—what’s now known as Battery Park and the Financial District.  Their ages ranged from 11 to 19, and they gave themselves that name because they did their best work at night.  When forming baseball teams got popular, they got the idea to form their own team.  They weren’t allowed to form a team unless they had their own uniforms, which was a problem.  Uniforms cost money, and no one was willing to sponsor them.  Their solution was to start the Midnight Terrors’ Uniform Fund, which was supported entirely by a rash of armed robberies.  They picked pockets, snatched purses, robbed people at gunpoint and knifepoint, and even robbed business

“Hail, Emperor, those who are about to die salute you!”—De Vita Cæsarum “That which is not good for the beehive cannot be good for the bees.”—Marcus Aurelius “His labor is a chant, His idleness a tune; Oh, for a bee’s experience Of clovers and of noon!”     —Emily Dickinson, The Bee In 1912, Austrian children’s writer Waldemar Bonsels wrote what would be a classic book that would endure for over a century.  It was a short book titled Die Biene Maja, or in English, Maya the Bee.  Maya has been translated out of German and into many languages since, and has been adapted to a feature film twice (in 1924 and again in 2014), and twice to television, as well (first in a 1975 Japanese production, a second Japanese production in 1979, and then in a 2012 French production).  The 1975 cartoon was introduced to the United States in 1990 by the American-Israeli television production company Saban, using an all-Canadian cast of voice actors to dub the show.  (An earlier dubbed version

Sarah's burial cave.  (The gate was added later.) Sarah died at 127 years of age, and it was hard on Abraham.    After mourning a while, he realized that, like a lot of people, he hadn’t given much thought to estate planning.   He asked the Hittites if they could help him out, and one among them said, “Sure, we can provide your wife’s lot.”   Abraham glowered at the one-liner. “Aren’t you the card?” he said saltily. “Oh, sorry… too soon?” Ignoring the matter, Abraham went on with his request.   “I like your cemetery, but really, what I had in mind was more of a cave, specifically the cave owned by Ephron, son of Zohar.   Any chance you guys could help me persuade him to give me that cave?” It turned out Ehron was there among the Hittites when Abraham asked, and he was only too happy to do it.   “Look, Abraham, the land and the cave retail at around 400 shekels, but you can have it gratis.   Go ahead and salt your wife away in there; I don’t mind.” Abr

What can you do with your father’s old hats?  If you were born after, say, 1955, the answer is probably “Not much.”  Men were still wearing fedoras in the 1970s and 1980s, but by 1990, fashion had turned to the point where unless you were Indiana Jones, the hat didn’t look right.  Some blame Jack Kennedy for starting it all, strutting around perfectly coiffed and bare-headed in the early 1960s.  In 1953, Harry Truman, a haberdasher by trade, stepped out of office, and just eight years later we had a president who didn’t care for hats?  The times, they were a-changin’. If you set the WABAC machine to the 1920s or 1930s (when Indiana Jones was supposed to have lived), you would see the fedora was still very much in style.  Men just didn’t leave the house without a hat of some kind, and for what remained of the middle class, the fedora was the topper of choice.  But like any other piece of clothing, hats wear out, too.  When that happened, you’d just throw it away.  Though if there were