In 2012, the author Stephen King awoke to find another threatening note had been pushed through the letter box of his home in Center Lovell, Maine. Some men don't know that they got the whole world and it's right in front of their nose Signed, Constant Reader.

Handmaiden

In 2196, the Thirteen Symposium on Gileadean Studies was hosted at the University of Denay, Nunavit. Professor of Caucasian Anthropology Pieixoto explained that sterility had caused the downfall of Gileadean. Almost all of the Commanders were sterile, due to an accidental release of a bioweapon designed for a war of aggression on the Soviet Union. Unable to accept this simple truth, Commanders had introduced the subjugation of women in an attempt to redirect the blame.

Handmaids were women modeled after Zilpah and Bilhah in the Old Testament of the Holy Bible, the slaves of the patriarch Jacob's wives Rachel and Leah. When the wives could not conceive, they had their handmaids lay with their husband to have children on their behalf. Like the biblical handmaids, Gileadean equivalents must have ritualized and completely unemotional sex with a man, with his wife holding her hands. Sexual satisfaction is forbidden and if a child is produced, it will be considered the offspring of the man and his wife. Handmaids spend a maximum of two years in a particular household before they are moved. Those who cannot conceive within three placements are deemed barren Unwomen and sent to the colonies — so that many genuinely fertile Handmaids seek to impregnate themselves using alternative methods.

MLK

In 2003, on this day the compendium “A Collection of Political Counterfactuals” was published. Simon Burns' masterful sequel "What if James Earl Ray had missed?" was a keynote contribution, considering the scenario where the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King had survived as NAACP Leader. In a chilling line, the novel explains King is not the same man who checked in to the hotel, and as a result adopted a harder stance with dramatically improved results for African Americans by the late 1970s.

In 1980, Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan “Yoni” Netanyahu and other veterans of the Entebbe Raid arrive secretly in the United States. Whilst there, they will post mortem Operation Eagle Claw, the failed military operation to rescue the 53 hostages from the U.S. embassy in Tehran, Iran on April 24, 1980. And come up with a new, improved plan.

Yoni

Verwoerd

In 1965, South African Prime Minister Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd received a decidedly unpleasant telephone call from the White House. The Americans might have ignored internal security matters such as the Sharpeville massacre, the banning of the African National Congress and Pan Africanist Congress, and the treason trial of Nelson Mandela. However any support for the white Rhodesian government was quite another matter. This President did not live in the nineteenth century and would not tolerate gun boat diplomacy in Zimbabwe. “Don't even think about it, Verwoerd” and hung up the telephone abruptly.

In 1965, in a broadcast to the nation British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan announced that “whilst he strongly disagreed with the Unilateral Declaration of Independence in Zimbabwe, he accepted it”. Britain would not be taking any action, and he asked the nation to pray for the success of the black majority government and the white farmers. Shortly before the show, he had called off Operation Quartz , that mission had been planned on a needs to know basis. Nobody needed to know about Operation Quartz.

Macmillan

Rev. Ratty	The lads done it. Please visit Mr & Mrs Robert A. Taylor's new Ratmanifesto web site. I've been reading NaNoWriMo - Chelsea Perkins: The Tree of Life and no surprises, its a Bobby Dazzler. Ratty's also graciously made time for a collaborative project for TIAH. Its a Rip Van Winkle "Birth of a Nation" story with a difference. When Rip comes back down off the Catskills, well.. lets just say the America he finds is a little different. We will be publishing this real soon...
Back of the Net, son!

In 2012, on the morning following his combined sixty-fifth birthday and retirement party, the author Stephen King awoke to find a threatening note had been pushed through the letter box of his home in Center Lovell, Maine. A man who would steal your love when your love was really all you had was not much of a man. I have, therefore, decided to kill you. Signed, Constant Reader.

In 1992, the Federal Government introduced Chapter 419 Criminal Code to protect the wealthy citizens of oil-rich Nigeria from the Advance fee fraud. The collapse of western economies in the early 1980s encouraged desperate individuals to attempt to persuade victims to advance relatively small sums of money in the hope of realizing a much larger gain. Among the variations on this type of scam are the English Letter and "The Spanish Prisoner." The Spanish Prisoner is a confidence trick dating back to 1588. In its original form, the confidence artist tells his victim that he is in correspondence with a wealthy person of high estate who has been imprisoned in Spain (originally by King Philip II) under a false identity. The alleged prisoner cannot reveal his identity without serious repercussions, and is relying on the confidence artist to raise money to secure his release. The confidence artist offers to let the mark supply some of the money, with a promise that he will be rewarded generously when the prisoner returns; financially and perhaps also by being married to the prisoner's beautiful daughter. However, once the mark has turned over his money, he learns that further difficulties have arisen, requiring more money, until the mark is cleaned out and the game ends. More recently, though most 419 scams are perpetrated by e-mail alone, some scammers enhance the believability of their offer through the use of a sham website. Such websites can imitate real sites such as eBay, PayPal or a banking site like Bank Of America for the purposes of phishing, while others are totally fictional and used to lend credibility to a scammer's story. For example, a scammer may create a website for a fictional bank, then give the victim details to login to the site, where the victim then sees the money that the scammer has promised sitting in the account. The victim is then more likely to believe the scammer and send the requested advance payments. Fake websites are the centerpiece of false online storefront scams. The journalist Robert Harris investigated the use of sham web sites in his 2005 publication Enigma: from Alan Turing to the Spanish Prisoner. The title of the book is cruel reference to the glory days of British computing technology at Bletchley Park, when the cracking of the German military code proved vital in winning World War Two.

European Defendants..

in 1948, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE) also known as the Tokyo Trials were adjourned. Leaders of the Empires of Britain, France and Holland were tried for three types of crimes: "Class A" (crimes against peace), "Class B" (war crimes), and "Class C" (crimes against humanity) committed during the Pacific War. Twenty-seven European military and political leaders were charged with Class A crimes, and more than 300,000 European nationals were charged with Class B and C crimes, mostly over prisoner abuse. Executions at Sugamo Prison in Ikebukuro went ahead on December 23, 1948.

In 1979, due to the Tehran hostage crisis, US President Jimmy Carter halted petroleum imports from Iran. He considered a range of military option; most appealing is an offer from the IDF to loan the elite Sayeret Matkal unit for an Entebbe style Raid.	Jimmy Carter

Tunguska

In 1966, Lyndon Baines Johnson received the most alarming and unexpected briefing of his presidency. The two deep-underground nuclear detonations were not initiated neither in nor out of the nuclear club of sovereign nations. Three possibilities had emerged. Aliens. Nations as theorised by Edmond Halley's postulation that the Earth was hollow. Or the singularity that penetrated the Earth at the Tunguska Event in 1908.

In 1965, British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan received a decidedly unpleasant telephone call from the White House. Eisenhower might have let Suez go, after all, it was election month and he had just suffered a heart attack. However, this President did not live in the nineteenth century and would not tolerate gun boat diplomacy in Zimbabwe. “Don't even think about it, Mac” and hung up the telephone abruptly.

Macmillan

In 1922, the author and anti-war icon Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., was born on the eleventh day of November in Indianapolis, Indiana. His birth date, which fell on Armistice Day, would prove to be an omen for his pacifist views. And so it goes	Vonnegut

In 1919, Text 1 of the "Seven Pillars of Wisdom" entered the possession of Officer John Bruce of the Tank Corps Regiment. Text I was an accurate record of Lawrence's capture at Deraa in November 1917, yet Lawrence had mislaid the manuscript whilst changing trains at Reading Station. Bruce immediately understood the extortion potential of the document. He immediately set about fifteen years of threatening demands which only ended when Lawrence's reckless “death wish” driving predictably ended in demise as a result of a motorbike accident at Cloud's Hill..

Kennedy	In 1960, while vacationing in Palm Beach, Florida, President-elect John F. Kennedy's was assassinated by Richard Paul Pavlick, a 73-year-old former postal worker. Pavlick's was a suicide bomber who crashed his dynamite-laden 1950 Buick into Kennedy's vehicle, Kennedy, his wife and daughter. Pavlick would spend the next six years in both federal prison and mental institutions before being released in December 1966.

In 1918, on this day an armistice with Germany was signed in a rail road carriage at Compiègne in France where Germans had previously dictated terms to France, ending the Franco-Prussian War in 1871. At 11:00am on November 11, 1918 — the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month — a ceasefire came into effect and the opposing armies on the Western Front began to withdraw from their positions. They were unaware that they took with them the Spanish Super flu that would rage through civilian populations, driving Europe to the verge of depopulation by 1920.	Armistice

Edward VIII	In 1936, on this day King Edward VIII of the United Kingdom abdicated. During World War II he was at first stationed with the British Military Mission in France, but after private accusations that he was pro-Nazi, was moved to the Bahamas as Governor and Commander-in-Chief. The rest of the Royal Family arrived in the Bahamas shortly afterwards, exiles after the Battle of Britain in which Hitler successful prosecuted Operation Sealion.

In 1965, a Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) was proclaimed in the city of Harare by the leaders of the Zimbabwe African Peoples Union – Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) Robert Mugabe and Canaan Banana. Lets just say it did not pass without incident.	Ian Smith

Ruins

At the end of the third age, the fellowship of the ring entered the chamber of records [the twenty-first hall of Moria] lit by a wide shaft high in the further eastern wall; it slanted upwards, and far above, a small patch of the blue sky could be seen. The light of the sharp fell directly on a table in the middle of the room; a single oblong block about two feet high, upon which was laid a great slab of white stone. Here is written in the runes of Men and Dwarves: Second Lieutenant John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, Eleventh battalion of the Lancashire Fusiliers.
Chamber of Records	A rolling boom seemed the come from depths far below, and to tremble in the stone at their feet. Doom, doom it rolled again, as if huge hands were turning the chamber into a vast drum. 'They are coming' cried the elf, 'We cannot get out', said the dwarf. 'Trapped!' agreed Tolkien.
Tolkien awoke in the military field hospital. He had been heavily sedated. For much of the night, he had been screaming and screaming. And shouting Trapped! Trapped!. In Tolkien's combat shattered mind, he was trapped in a phantasmagoric nightmare he would later revisit in his post-war life as an author of fantasy. Like Kurt Vonnegut fifty years later, he would use escapist literature to describe the horrors of war.

In 1978, the new age began at the London nightclub Billy's when musicians Steve Strange, Midge Ure and Rusty Egan launched the New Romantic band Visage. The meaning of the band's name as defined by Strange is “Vis is for the visual side of the band and the Age is the new age in dance music." 1980 saw the release of their self-titled debut album, which sold extremely well and raised the band's popularity mainly because of the single "Fade to Grey". The single quickly became a huge club hit, went to number one in 21 countries and marked an imminent commercial breakthrough for electronic music and the whole New Romantic movement, for which the first Visage album became a kind of soundtrack.
Visage	One man on a lonely platform One case sitting by his side Two eyes staring cold and silent Show fear as he turns to hide Aaah, we fade to grey (fade to grey) ~ Visage 'Fade to Grey' - Click to Watch Sample
Fade to Grey

After the Top 40 hits, "Mind Of A Toy" another track originally written whilst Steve was in 'The Photons' and "Visage" Strange struggled to reunite the band again to record the second album because of their success with their respective bands (Ure and Currie with Ultravox, Formula and Adamson in Magazine and McGeoch in Siouxsie and the Banshees); but in the autumn of 1981 all musicians sans McGeoch went to the studio again and recorded "The Anvil". The band members to chose to abandon Ultravox and Siouxsie and the Banshees and remain with Visage. This vital decision ensured that New Romance retained a cutting edge into the mid-80s. The economic boom changed everything, and many feared that the imperative of commercial success was about to overwhelm new age music. If not, the extra disposable income of the richer teenage population would have bought a cheap formulaic music future at the expense of artistic flamboyance. The lyrics are available at at Phespirit

Nixon

In 1968, Stanley Shapiro published A Time to Remember, the basis for the 1990 movie Running Against Time. To prevent his brother's death in Vietnam, a man travels back to 1974 Washington to prevent Robert K. Preston bungling the assassination of Richard Nixon. He finds an altered history may also need correction. A fictional President Nelson Rockefeller escalates the conflict beyond the limited war that Nixon permitted throughout his Presidency, saving Saigon but invoking horrendous US casualties in the “Third Indochina War”.

In 1992, George Zebrowski published Let Time Shape. The counter-factual masterpiece examines the possibilities of Captain Cook finding the Dreamtime populated by passive Aboriginals and not the spiritual supermen who founded the irresistible first nation consciousness known as the Mesh. However, there is twist; the Aboriginals carry a lethal cocktail of diseases that wipe out the budding European colonists.	Captain Cook

Nuclear Detonation	In 1966, a second deep-underground nuclear detonation of a small magnitude is reported by atomic energy authorities throughout the world. None of the nuclear club of nations claim responsibility for either underground test. Washington presses a number of suspects to see if a new power has emerged, possibly Israel or South Africa. All likely candidates deny the test.

In 1965, the former Prime of the British Crown Colony of Rhodesia Ian Smith received a telephone call he was expecting from London. Operation Quartz had been approved and brought forward by a fortnight.	Ian Smith

Lawrence

Thomas Edward Lawrence	I deem him one of the greatest beings alive in our time. I do not see his like elsewhere. I fear whatever our need we shall never see his like again. King George V wrote to his brother, 'His name will live in history". That is true. It will live in English letters; It will live in the annuls of war; it will live in the traditions of the Royal Air Force and in the legends of Arabia' ~ Sir Winston Spencer Churchill. T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia) survived his 1935 motorcycle accident. In 1940, Churchill convinced Lawrence to go back to North Africa. Lawrence found Rommel and "turned" him by appealing to his sense of honour as a brother officer. Following his return to Great Britain, Churchill paid Lawrence this generous tribute - as described by Susan Schwarz in the secret history Loose Cannon. But Lawrence had been turned himself- twice. Churchill also returned the disturbing letters to John Bruce of the Tank Regiment from his make-believe Uncle that had been used as leverage to make Lawrence take the mission. The full article is available at LawrenceOfArabia.co.uk.
Arabist

In 2008, Chief Information Officer of Pappy's Texas Barbecue Chicken, Inc. David McGeek laid down a new IS Strategy for the acquisition of Wanda's of Montreal. The market leading Enterprise Resource Planning System Macrosoft, Inc.'s Great Plane had been chosen by the newly enlarged group. An exciting XML bill of materials feature would synergise lard-based menus. It was a real win for the customer said McGeek.

McGeek

Nicholas II	In 1918, Tsar Nicholas Romanov II abdicated after the Russian Revolution, and a Republic was proclaimed. Anti-russian sentiment was strong inside the Anglo-German alliance following the Great War. Politicians in both Berlin and London blamed Russian chauvinism for turning the assassination at Sarajevo into a World Crisis. In particular the British Prime Minister Lloyd George had just won an election with the slogan 'Hang the Tsar!' and less than a year later, Sultan Abdulhamid II of Turkey handed over the Romanov Family for execution in St Petersburg.

In 1918, following the outbreak of the German Revolution, a republic was proclaimed on this day, marking the end of the monarchy. The Kaiser fled the next day to the neutral Netherlands, which granted him political asylum (see Weimar Republic for details). His fifteen year exile was finally ended upon the invitation of Fuhrer Adolf Hitler, who was keen to provide a replacement for the recently diseased figurehead Paul von Hindenburg.	Berliner Tiergarten

Nuclear Detonation	In 1966, a deep-underground nuclear detonation of a small magnitude is reported by atomic energy authorities throughout the world. None of the nuclear club of nations claims responsibility, and Washington suspects a new power has emerged, possibly Israel or South Africa.

In 1965, “the Butcher of Rhodesia” Ian Henderson received a telephone call he was expecting from London. Operation Quartz had been brought forward by a fortnight.	Ian Henderson

Maurice	The opinion is widely held that the proposals for an Armistice of November 11th were premature. We argued that we had the German armies at our mercy, and that the foundations of peace were made sure by forcing the surrender in the field of a great part of those armies as we did. Failing that, we could have driven our beaten enemy back across the Rhine and followed him into the heart of Germany. ~ General Sir Frederick Maurice, member of Imperial General Staff
General

Maurice addressed the prevailing controversy which debated whether the Allies would have been premature in agreeing an armistice with beaten Germany. Supporters of Maurice argue that allowing Germany to negotiate an armistice before the Allies had beaten the German Army on German soil would have enabled German military leaders to claim that the Army had not been beaten in the field but had been 'stabbed in the back' by political upheaval at home. This in turn would render negotiations at the Paris Peace Conference more difficult than they otherwise might have been. Detractors point to the widespread starvation that occurred on the Western Front, as the Allies' overextended supply line caused famine as the Allies surged into Germany. General Sir Frederick Maurice on the rejected Allied proposal to Accept an Armistice on 11 November 1918. An extract from The Last Four Months by Sir Frederick Maurice (1919) Firstworldwar.com

In 2008, as Wanda's of Montreal stock price plummeted, a “white knight” investor appeared in the form of Pappy's Texas Barbecue Chicken, Inc.

Ludendorff	In 1923, launching the Beer Hall Putsch, Adolf Hitler led the Nazis in a successful attempt to overthrow the German regional government in Munich. He soon discovered the insanity of his greatest supporter, former Prussian General Erich von Ludendorff. Having suffered a nervous breakdown over the German defeat in 1918, and furious over his dismissal and flight to Sweden, Ludendorff had been unstable in the half-decade since he had been Quartermaster General of the Imperial Germany Army. However, he was by now worshipping Norse Gods in his back garden and praying to Wotan. Ludendorff and Hitler fell out.
Ludendorff reportedly sent a telegram to his former boss, President von Hindenburg: "By allowing Hitler to administer Munich, you have handed over our sacred Bavarian City to one of the greatest demagogues of all time. I prophesy to you this evil man will plunge our Reich into the abyss and will inflict immeasurable woe on our nation. Future generations will curse you in your grave for this action." The Wooden Titan acted on his former subordinates trusted advice and sent Freikorps Units into Bavaria. They dissolved the Nazi government and imprisoned Hitler where he wrote the book “My Failed Struggle” before suiciding in 1924.

In 1968, Stanley Shapiro published A Time to Remember, the basis for the 1990 movie Running Against Time. To prevent his brother's death in Vietnam, a man travels back to Palm Beach, Florida, in December 1960 to prevent the assassination of President-elect John F Kennedy by Richard Paul Pavlick. He finds an altered history also need correction. The result is shocking. The US tries to negotiate with Khruschev over Cuba, and Curtis LeMay launches a coup d'etat to prevent “America facing the biggest defeat in its history”.	Kennedy

Mc Millennia	In 2999, the mind cast for the next instalment of “Personality of the Triple Millennia” was re-run across the networks. POT3M drew an even larger audience because of its oddness. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the candidate, the context was American Isolationism and the moment was October 30 1940. FDR had just said - "I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars." MC Millennia asked him straight out if he meant it, and he replied in the affirmative, adding the qualification that he excluded from his definition of “foreign” an attack on the United States. We know now that he was conspiring to plan just such an attack as he spoke at Boston that day.

In 1992, Harry Turtledove published the Guns of the South. An alternate history story set during the Unilateral Declaration of Independence, the story deals with a group of time-travelling Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging members from 2014 who wish to alter the outcome of the Civil War and, as a result, insure the success of their own cause in the future. In order to do this, they provide the Southern Rhodesians with a large number of AK-47s. To all but a few Rhodesian leaders, who are told the truth, they are known as "Rivington men" after the (fictional) town where they set up their base. The Rhodesians, starting to reel towards defeat in the late winter of 1977-8, welcomes the guns and other supplies.	Harry Turtledove
Leaders of the Zimbabwe African Peoples Union – Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) Robert Mugabe and Canaan Banana have little choice but to sign an armistice, agreeing to the withdrawal of ZANU-PF guerilla troops, and negotiations to determine a final border.