Author Archives: Tom Scheinfeldt

Top of the Pops

I can’t tell who’s in charge of The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, but he or she is definitely dedicated. Since late October, a blogger named “Xadai” has been counting down his or her favorite music videos, beginning with one of my personal favorites, #500, Boston’s “More Than A Feeling.” Each song gets its own post, which includes original historical commentary and a YouTube embed. As of this afternoon Xadai is down to #401, which at this rate means we should see #1 sometime in early spring.

Dumb Dumb

When I first came across 2Spare.com’s Top 10 Dumbest Personal Names Ever, I assumed it wouldn’t qualify as found history. There are, after all, lots of Top 10 lists that have nothing to do with history (e.g. Top 10 Fonts Used by Churches or Top 10 People Most Affected by Election 2006). But when I saw Cotton Mather on the list, I thought better, and in addition to Mather the list describes some less well known historical figures, including Thursday October Christian and World B. Free.

The motivating instinct behind Found History was the sense that history is lurking everywhere. I should learn to trust that instinct.

Silly Geeky

Another quick one for the weekend: Game Set Watch—an “alt.video game weblog”—gives us the Top 10 Silliest Computer Mag Covers in History. Note that this isn’t a casual effort. It is the product of a long term commitment to collecting and cultural history. “Game Mag Weaseling” columnist Kevin Gifford combed though his personal collection of more than 2500 computer magazines to arrive at the ten kitchiest covers from the “classic era” of home computing, the 1970s and 80s. “Who’s silliest” may not be the kind of question scholars would ask of this corpus or this period, but Gifford’s careful consideration of the past and his meticulous attention to the sources certainly qualify his efforts as history.

Best, Worst, Most, Least

I have never intended Found History as a place for serious or systematic research into popular historymaking, so it’s hard to talk about “findings,” “results” or “conclusions.” But over the course of nearly a year of anecdotal stumbling, some definite trends have emerged. One is the general public’s tendency to conceptualize history in terms of “best” and “worst” and “most” and “least”; to argue history in terms of “ever” and “of all time”; and to pen history as “top 10” and “top 20” lists. Yesterday’s post on Drivl’s “Top 20 Hackers in Film History” is a very good example of this.

Because it is such a prevalent phenomenon (and also because I have struggled lately to post consistently), today I begin a new series called “Tops of All Time.” Each day between now and the New Year (with maybe a couple breaks for Thanksgiving and Christmas), Found History will present a different Top 10, Top 20, “best of” or “worst of” list from somewhere on the web. Some of these are bound to be more interesting than others, and where they are, I will offer some commentary. Where they’re not, I’ll just post them for your casual contemplation. At the end of the series, I’ll try to say something smart about what we’ve seen.

So sit back and enjoy the best (only) Found History series of all time.

Lunch Break

Most days, Ask Dave Taylor is a great place to go for Mac tips and support. Today it’s a great place to go for a spirited (bad, I know) history of gin. It’s really no substitute for a three-martini lunch, but maybe it can suffice for those of us stuck at our desks surfing the web over sandwiches and diet cokes.

No Second Troy

No Second Troy Last night I stayed out a little too late for a Thursday, but that doesn’t mean I slacked off completely. I spent the evening at the Rock and Roll Hotel listening to No Second Troy, a local band whose guitarist is a friend of my wife. Their name is an allusion to the Yeats poem of the same name, which is itself an allusion to Homer’s Iliad. Moreover, the stickers they handed out featured this image from one of their recent album covers, putting us in mind of Iwo Jima as well. By my count, that’s three good pieces of found history in one smokey club. Not bad for a night out.