James McIntyre (1828-1906), a Scottish immigrant to Canada, liked cheese. He liked cheese a lot.  He settled in what was then Canada’s dairy country, in Ingersoll, Ontario. There he ran a business manufacturing and selling furniture, but his true calling was as … Continue reading Cheese Poet Day Thread

Many children write letters to Santa Claus, but very few receive such lengthy replies as J.R.R. Tolkien’s children did. Starting in 1920, when the eldest, John, was three, each year the Tolkien children received an envelope in the post, complete with … Continue reading Letters from Father Christmas Day Thread

Some fifty years after child prodigies Nannerl and Wolfgang Mozart impressed the crowned heads of Europe with their musical ability, another pair of sibling prodigies appeared on the music scene. Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn were the eldest of the four … Continue reading Fanny Mendelssohn Day Thread

In a letter written in 1764, Leopold Mozart wrote that his child “plays the most difficult works that we have… with incredible precision and so excellently” and “only 12 years old, is one of the most skilful players in Europe”. … Continue reading Day Thread of Nannerl Mozart

One of my favorite poems by J.R.R. Tolkien is “Winter Comes to Nargothrond”, a piece of verse that was spun off from a part of his “Lay of the Children of Hurin” into a short standalone poem. It’s in alliterative … Continue reading Winter Comes to the Day Thread

Nine Men’s Morris is a board game that was highly popular in medieval England and remained well known into early modern times. It was played on a grid of twenty-four points connected by lines in a distinctive pattern, and carvings … Continue reading Nine Men’s Morris Day Thread

Chess and its relatives were far from the only historical abstract strategy games. In the Germanic and Celtic world, a group of games generically known as tafl (“table” in Old Norse) was very popular in the dark ages and middle … Continue reading Tafl Day Thread

The ancient game chaturanga spread outward from India along two main paths: a western branch, where it eventually evolved into modern chess, and a northern one, through which it was introduced into east Asia. Sometime around the 10th or 11th … Continue reading Shogi Day Thread

Did you know that chess is just one of a family of games that evolved from a common ancestor originating in India? That game, chaturanga, spread to Persia where it became shatranj, which spread to Europe where it became chess. … Continue reading Xiangqi Day Thread

Modern chess evolved, by incremental changes in its rules, from a Persian game called shatranj. Shatranj, in turn an import from India where the original game was chaturanga, spread throughout the Muslim world after the Arab conquest of Persia. The … Continue reading Shatranj Day Thread

“Late Mediaeval avant-garde music” would perhaps seem to be an oxymoron. But there was a remarkable, if short-lived, musical style in the late middle ages that could quite reasonably be described as just that – a style that, like atonality, … Continue reading A More Subtle Day Thread

For most people, the ragtime genre is synonymous with the name Scott Joplin. Joplin was, of course, the undisputed master of the form, but he was far from its only major composer. Indeed, ragtime had an internal stylistic history of … Continue reading The Day Thread of Novelty Rags

Æthelflæd was the daughter of King Alfred the Great of England, the king who in the late 9th century defended that nation from conquest by a Viking army and promoted literacy and learning. Æthelflæd proved to be just as great … Continue reading Æþelflædes Dæg-þrǽd

Florence Beatrice Price was an American composer of the first half of the twentieth century, and was the first African-American woman to have her work played by a major symphony orchestra. Born Florence Smith in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1887, … Continue reading Florence Price Day Thread

This year marks the centenary of a film franchise that is sadly unsung in the English-speaking world. Fritz Lang’s Doctor Mabuse, der Spieler was released in two parts in April and May of 1922. The roughly four and a half … Continue reading Das Day Thread des Doctor Mabuse

One hundred and one years ago today, Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari was released in Germany. Directed by Robert Wiene, from a scenario by Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer, it was the first masterpiece of Weimar-era cinema, and it remains … Continue reading The Day Thread of Dr. Caligari