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The Now I Know Week in Review

Monday: Yom Kippur -- no Now I Know. 

Tuesday: A Star Spangled Snafu: This one took me longer to write than most, all because of one sentence: "That changed in late 2022." None of the news reports I relied on had that date, or for that matter, any other date. I dug through Archive.org's database to see when the switch happened, and as best I can tell, it was early December 2022. It took me a half hour or so to determine that -- and I couldn't nail down that date with any certainty, so I went with "late 2022."

Wednesday: The Big Lie: The title is a little lie, because it's a pun on the word "lie." 

Thursday: How Potatoes Changed the Outcome of a World War II Naval Battle: When in doubt, throw food... I guess?

And some other things you should check out:

When [inmate Tony] Ford first overheard the men on the old Huntsville death row playing D.&D., they were engaged in a fast, high-octane version. The gamers were members of the Mexican Mafia, an insular crew that let Ford into their circle after they realized he could draw. The gang’s leader, Spider, pulled some strings, Ford recalls, and got him moved to a neighboring cell to serve as his personal artist. Ford earned some money drawing intricate Aztec designs in ink. He also began to join their D.&D. sessions, eventually becoming a Dungeon Master and running games all over the row.

Playing Dungeons & Dragons is more difficult in prison than almost anywhere else. Just as in the free world, each gaming session can last for hours and is part of a larger campaign that often stretches on for months or years. But in prison, players can’t just look up the game rules online. The hard-bound manuals that detail settings, characters and spells are expensive and can be difficult to get past mailroom censors. Some states ban books about the game altogether, while others prohibit anything with a hard cover. Books with maps are generally forbidden, and dice are often considered contraband, because they can be used for gambling. Prisoners frequently replace them with game spinners crafted out of paper and typewriter parts.

Staying on the run from the FBI is no easy feat. Neither is evading three professional investigators dispatched by some of the country’s biggest debt recovery agencies. [Fugitive Ryan Eugene] Mullen had clearly figured out something—some technique for covering his tracks or otherwise keeping ahead of his pursuers—that put him well above the average con. [Bounty hunter Michelle] Gomez wanted the case.