What's in Dave's Head

I recently picked up a copy of Le Morte d’Arthur , the 938-page telling of the legend of King Arthur written by Sir Thomas Malory in 1469. The misleading title belies the fact that the book is, except for the final 20 pages, about Arthur’s life, rather than his death. The stories themselves were first written in the thirteenth century in French; Malory translated and compiled them into this work while in prison for various crimes that may have included rape, armed robbery, and attempted murder. There is little hard evidence that King Arthur is other than a legend. This is not like the happy, feel-good Disney version of the Arthurian legend. It portrays a darker, more aggressive Arthur, who slaughters hundreds or thousands on the battlefield and uses his position and power to sleep with women. Like King Herod in Bethlehem, Arthur orders all male infants born at the same time as his son Mordred (the product of Arthur sleeping with his half-sister), to be put on a ghost ship to d...

Last year Donna gifted me an Ancestry.com DNA test. According to the spit I sent them, I’m:    38% British    17% South European    14% West European    11% Irish/Scots/Welsh      9% Scandinavian      7% East European      3% Spanish/Portuguese       That surprised me – I thought I was mostly Scots, German, and Swiss – and got me interested in my heritage. I have collected a good amount of genealogical information from my mom, who was our family historian. Most of the information I have is on my maternal grandfather’s side of the family tree. I have records of my mother’s side of the family going back eight generations before me, to the birth in 1704 of Jacob Hochstetler, who emigrated from Germany in 1736 with his wife to the American colony of Pennsylvania. Below is a hair-raising account according to Descendants of Jacob Hochstetler, the Immigrant of 1...

Years ago, I was in the publishing business, specifically of subscription business newsletters. I went from reporter to editor to publisher of groups of regulatory and compliance newsletters for various industries – telecommunications, pharmaceuticals, food safety, information technology, even fashion and waste management. We would trade or rent out to other publishers or marketers our subscriber lists. But because our customer information was such a valuable asset, we took steps to make sure lists were used appropriately by others. For instance, we would “seed” them with phony names so we could monitor who was mailing to them. When mail would come to my address with a fake name, I knew the sender had used our list and could verify whether they had permission to do so. The tactic isn’t used just for mailing lists. Reference works such as encyclopedias and dictionaries include fake entries so they can tell if a publisher is plagiarizing their content. In a recent Washi...