Tag: history channel

  • Great and telling tales


    The History Channel has a section on their website that is really funny and educational. Timothy Dickinson is a one of those characters that I would love to run into and just ask him “what’s on your mind?”

    Click here to learn about Rasputin!

    or here to learn about the Kennedy-Nixon Debate

    or Halloween Tales

    With the help of The History Channel, Timothy created a series of videos, no longer than 2 minutes where he tells great and telling tales, from the use of drug to Rasputin. All of them with his unique vision of the world. They are fairly entertaining and also provides with those little tidbits of information that are always needed in a cocktail conversation.

    This is from The History Channel website:

    Welcome to the extraordinary mind of Timothy Dickinson: raconteur, bon-vivant, advice-giver and expert conversationalist. “Let’s just say I’m an antiquarian who finds good exercise in having his brain picked,” he says with typical modesty. In reality he is an overflowing fountain of arcane and hilarious stories of true history, the result of a lifelong habit of voracious reading. A longtime resident of Georgetown, Timothy makes his living as a freelance “literary advisor”, helping out various unnamed authors and pundits with their articles and books and cadging the occasional free meal along the way. In his free time, he likes nothing better than holding court at his favorite Georgetown pub and choosing a favorite Great and Telling Tale from his never-ending supply.

    As the late writer George Plimpton once said, “I always come away from Timothy keenly aware of the empty stretches in my own brain, knowing that if his is a cluttered bibliotheque-like vaulted chamber with balconies, great banks of volumes rising up, mine suffers badly in comparison–a broom closet off a corridor, a can of paint on a shelf.”

    Indeed, Timothy’s palatial mind could make any of us feel that way. Yet spend just a little time in the presence of this unassuming man and be amazed at not only the breadth of his knowledge but the depth of his old-world graciousness, both being the reason so many Georgetown homes (and their refrigerators) remain perpetually open to him. In an age when most knowledge is an impersonal click away, Timothy is the real deal: a first-rate Storyteller of the highest order, one whose tales only benefit from the added fact of being true. As Mr. Plimpton once said, “To know Timothy is to be given a passport gratis to the remarkable country of his knowledge”

    pol