Author: Brendan Barry

  • David Ortiz Still Has 500 Home Runs

    —

    by

    Brendan Barry
    in

    So what I was saying yesterday about there not being a new Boston Globe piece about David Ortiz’s 500 home runs. I was wrong. I missed it. But, here you go, in its semi-splendour (not digging the illustration of the baseballs /quibble). There are some merits to the piece in terms of the filtering—you can…

  • David Ortiz Has 500 Home Runs

    —

    by

    Brendan Barry
    in

    This past weekend, David Ortiz hit his 500th home run, a significant milestone in Major League Baseball attained only by a handful of players. This piece from the Boston Herald commemorates the feat—with too many photographs and embellishment for my liking—by putting his season totals on a timeline while putting Ortiz at the bottom of…

  • Jesus and the Footprints

    —

    by

    Brendan Barry
    in

    I’m Irish—my ancestors were from the southern part—and so I grew up Catholic and I went to Catholic schools. So I know some of my Jesus stories. There’s that one story about how at the end of some guy’s life he looks back at a beach—I have no idea what life means being on a…

  • Comparing Elizabeth to Victoria

    —

    by

    Brendan Barry
    in

    Following on from yesterday’s post about Queen Elizabeth’s timeline as she passed Queen Victoria, today we have another selection from the BBC that compares the reigns of the two queens. Unfortunately, while the screenshot below is okay, the overall graphics and illustrations strike me as a bit too simple and not terribly useful in making…

  • Queen Elizabeth II—Britain’s Longest Reigning Monarch

    —

    by

    Brendan Barry
    in

    As of today, Queen Elizabeth is the longest reigning British monarch. She has surpassed the record of the famous Queen Victoria, Elizabeth’s great-great-grandmother at 63 years and seven months. Obviously a lot of things have changed over those 63 years, and in this article the BBC uses a graphic to look at how the world…

  • Europe’s New Migration

    —

    by

    Brendan Barry
    in

    I was on holiday for a little bit, so apologies for the lack of content. But, now I am back for a little while. So here’s hoping life gets a bit more settled and content can be published more regularly. Whilst I was on holiday, I only checked the news a few times and most…

  • Living on the Grid

    —

    by

    Brendan Barry
    in

    Today’s post relates very much to yesterday’s post. But this one is from the New York Times and uses aerial photography to showcase how the Jefferson grid system works in reality after it was implemented as shown yesterday. Credit for the piece goes to the person behind the Instagram account @the.jefferson.grid

  • Organising Western Lands

    —

    by

    Brendan Barry
    in

    A few weeks back I looked at my ancestral family’s land grant in Wisconsin. Unlike land on the East Coast that was surveyed and organised by pioneers in different colonies using different sets of rules, after the formation of the United States, surveyed land was organised into townships that had subdivisions. In this blog post…

  • The Sinking of the Scharnhorst

    —

    by

    Brendan Barry
    in

    Last week my uncle died suddenly and today I will be at his funeral back home. So if you will indulge me a personal piece today, we have a graphic from A.J. Watts’ 1970 book Loss of the Scharnhorst. The Scharnhorst was a German World War II battlecruiser sunk in the Battle of the North…

  • Securing Philadelphia for the Papal Visit

    —

    by

    Brendan Barry
    in

    For those not from Philadelphia, you might not know the Pope is visiting the city in September for a global conference of sorts. While that is great news for the followers and believers, it means absolute hell for the other residents of the city. So finally the security map has been published, detailing just where…