Postcard from Bishkek

During the Falklands War, when Britain responded to the invasion of the islands in the South Atlantic, by sending a task force to retake the islands, there were a number of controversial moments.  Perhaps the most controversial was sinking of the Argentinian Battleship General Belgrano on 2nd May, 1982. The ship was outside the exclusion […]

I receive a number of newsletters every day and occasionally one of them carries a link to a site featuring photographs of vehicle registration plates from around the world. It night seem like a pretty esoteric topic for a website, but there are people who collect and study all sorts of ephemera:  stamps, postcards, coins, bus […]

Back in 1983, 18 April was endorsed as The International Day for Monuments and Sites by UNESCO. The aim of this special day is to raise public awareness concerning the diversity of the world’s heritage and the efforts that are required to protect and conserve it, as well as drawing attention to its vulnerability.   It […]

It’s gone down in history as a classic understatement – the moment when Mission Commander James Lovell reported to Mission Control in Houston that there had been an explosion aboard Apollo 13 which resulted in the mission having to be aborted. Apollo 13 had taken off from the , the seventh manned mission of the Apollo […]

Serving as the Bishop of Seville for more than three decades at the turn of the sixth and seventh centuries, St. Isadore may seem a surprising icon and patron of the distinctive feature of the modern world – the internet. A reformer and man of broad views, seeking to unite the Roman and Visigoth cultures […]

Today, March 28th, is commemorated in Scandanavian countries as Ragnar Lodbrok Day … in memory of this legendary king of the vikings … whose fleet of 120 longships and army of 5000 warriors was to wreak havoc through Western France and take the city Paris … … and possibly may have met his end, (as […]

It’s generally held that today marks the Spring Equinox, when day and night appears to be of equal length, (although, this year, the astronomers tell us that this actually occurred yesterday).  In Britain it is often considered to be the first day of Spring.  Here in Kyrgyzstan it is a Public Holiday – Norus, which is […]

Just in case you’ve missed it … today is a special day – it’s π-Day (Pi Day). There’s a catch, of course, because this relies on writing the date in the American format, (Month, Day, Year – 3/14/15), rather than using the more logical British format, (in ascending order of size: Day, Month, Year – 14/03/15), […]

In many, if not most, countries today, Sunday is special day, a day of rest, a non working day. In a way, it’s a hangover from the Jewish Sabbath … commemorating the seventh day when God rested after six days of creation. It’s the day of the week when it was forbidden to work, (unless […]

The world is changing … it always has and always will.  Most of those changes are small scale and happen slowly over a period of time … but just occasionally we can point to something as being so significant that they are a “signal event” – something notable out of the ordinary, a one-off event, […]