Dead Confederates, A Civil War Era Blog

Small items that don’t warrant posts of their own:

• Dude gets arrested for digging relics at the Kennesaw National Battlefield Park during the government shutdown. That’s good, but for every one that gets caught I bet there are ten who don’t.
• Savas Beatie has a new book by Donald Hopkins coming out, Robert E. Lee in War and Peace: The Photographic History of a Confederate and American Icon. Seems like one of those books you’d assume always existed, until you discover that it didn’t until now. Check out the video here.
• Jared Elkin is a young filmmaker in Los Angeles who’s using Kickstarter to fund a film project, Between Good Men, set around the Battle of Valverde in New Mexico. Go look at his pitch and, if you’re interested, drop him a few bucks.
• During the federal government shutdown, a man from South Carolina (“too small for a republic. . . .”) has started cutting the grass at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. Irony is alive and well, y’all.
• A real estate developer in Warrenton, Virginia has decided not the name his 135-home project “Mosby’s Crossing,” in deference to requests from nearby residents. The usual suspects are infuriated.
• In news from the UK, a drunk Oakland Raiders fan on a flight from Malta was yelling obscenities on the flight, got off the plane, stripped naked, urinated on the side of the terminal and challenged the pilot to a fistfight on the tarmac before being tasered. I think we all know what it’s like to be that guy, amiright?
• You’ve heard the story how, in the 1960s, NASA spent over a million dollars on developing a special ball-point pen that would write in zero-g while the Russians, faced with the same problem, simply used pencils?  Great story, but it’s not true.
• If you ever get that time machine you’ve been tinkering with in the basement to work, and you decide to visit 1880s San Fransisco, Susan Schulten has a map to make your visit a memorable one.
• I may have mentioned it before, but Baylor University has what I think its a complete set of plates from the OR Atlas available in high-resolution on Flickr. May want to bookmark this one.

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