It’s common knowledge in the West how Roman numerals work.  Some Roman numerals get more use than others.  Smaller numerals, like I, V and X (meaning 1, 5 and 10) get the most use, while the higher ones like L, C, D and M (meaning 50, 100, 500 and 1,000) aren’t as common.  They’re more often found in official use.  Movie credits often give the date in Roman numerals, maybe because MMXVII looks more impressive than 2017 (or, more to the point, MCMLXXXIX looks more impressive than 1989).  The date of the founding of the United States appears on the Great Seal as MDCCLXXVI (have a look at the base of the pyramid on a $1, if you want to see), and writing it that way does seem a lot grander, a lot more appropriate for the founding of a nation than the simpler (and clearer) 1776.  Even the Super Bowl gets a Roman numeral for its title.  (In 2016, what might have been Super Bowl L was marketed as Super Bowl 50, since the NFL had difficulty designing a logo for the game around the L.  As a si

In 1929, the plot of the daily comic strip Thimble Theater, was starting another adventure.  The plot sent one of its main characters, Castor Oyl, down to the docks of the fictional town of Sweet Haven to find transport to Dice Island, where he intended to break the bank at Fadewell’s Casino.  Castor was sure he could do it, because he’d recently acquired Bernice, a rare bird called a wiffle hen, which brings good luck when you rub her head.  To get to Dice Island, Castor needed to find a sailor, and find one he did.  Sitting by the docks was a one-eyed, tough-looking old mariner smoking a corncob pipe.  No one knew it yet, not even Elzie Segar, the strip’s creator, but Thimble Theater was about to acquire a new star.  This was the entrance of Popeye the Sailor into the strip, and into American culture. Castor Oyl first encounters Popeye, January 17, 1929. From the beginning, Popeye was tough.  More than tough: he was indestructible.  He could get punched, knocked on the head, and

Quick: where can you find a ghost town?  You probably imagined a dusty old town in the American west, probably in or near a desert, the decrepit façades of a once-thriving boomtown looming over an abandoned main street.  You can imagine the cowboys and the stagecoaches and other signs of Old West civilization, all of which pulled stake and moved on when the nearby gold mines played out.  Ghost towns aren’t restricted to the American west.  They occur anywhere that people have picked up and moved along for whatever reason.  There’s more of a romance with Old West ghost town, thanks mostly to Hollywood, but there are plenty of others.  One ghost town not found in the Old West is Pithole \pɪtˈ hoʊl\, Pennsylvania.  Pithole didn’t exist before 1865, following the oil boom in western Pennsylvania that started in the wake of the construction of the Drake Well in Titusville in 1859.  For a brief period in the 1860s, western Pennsylvania was producing most of the world’s crude oil.  This might