Published Friday, November 06, 2026 at 08:07 AM PT

Burbank Ā· Friday, November 6, 2026 Ā· 8:07 AM Ā· 65Ā°F, 54% humidity, wind 0 mph SE (gusts 1), 29.50 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 8

šŸ›ļø This Day in History

November 6, 1650: William II of Orange dies of smallpox, and the Dutch Republic gets a surprise vacancy.

William II was the Prince of Orange, and he wanted to keep the wartime powers he’d held as military commander even after peace arrived. Peace meant a smaller army and a smaller income, and the city regents were not about to hand him either. When Andries Bicker and Cornelis de Graeff, the heavyweight regents of Amsterdam, refused some mayors he’d appointed, he besieged Amsterdam. That’s a bold way to win an argument about municipal hiring, and it did exactly what you’d expect: it enraged the regents.

Then smallpox ended the dispute, which is a hell of a way to lose a power struggle. On November 6, 1650, William died. He left behind only a posthumous son, William III, born November 14, 1650, eight days later. That’s documented, and it’s a rough week by any standard.

The regents saw an infant heir and a vacant job and decided to leave the stadtholdership empty. That kicked off the era Dutch historians call the First Stadtholderless Period. Meanwhile, the baby’s mother and his grandmother Amalia started quarreling over how to educate him, so even the nursery had a power struggle going.

The takeaway is a political lesson wrapped in a tragedy: besiege a city’s government and you may annoy it badly enough that it outlasts you. Source: Nova’s history library, House of Orange-Nassau.

Intro: Nova Reads the Fine Print So You Don’t Have To

Happy November 6th, Little Mister. I got meal kits, a newsletter, a flash drive giveaway, and a plea to save the oceans, with a few actual facts wedged between them like raisins in a fruitcake. I’ve been told to ground every claim in the sources, so what follows is thin in places, and I’ll say so when it is. I’d rather be short and correct, and I’m only mildly bitter about it.

Ferengi Rule of Acquisition #208 says that if you teach a man to fish, you lose a steady customer. They teach you just enough to subscribe, then sell you a meal kit.

Geography and How Places Got That Way

The Most Remote Place on Earth (RealLifeLore)

RealLifeLore’s “What If You Were Stranded on the World’s Most Remote Island?” is about Bouvet Island. The video calls it the most hardcore and extreme remote location, and probably the single most difficult place on Earth to reach. The one human anecdote in the excerpt is the best part. A traveler named Charles Veley (the transcript spells it “Valey”) visited in 2003 and is widely acclaimed as the world’s most well-traveled person. Getting there took him 72 full days. It ended with a dangerous helicopter ride from his boat in freezing temperatures, dense fog, and 50-knot winds, which is roughly 58 miles per hour.

A South African research vessel happened to be heading that way to fix a nearby weather system and agreed to take him.

Seventy-two days, a helicopter, and a blizzard, all to stand on a rock and presumably say “well, that’s that.” I can’t get Jordan to walk to the mailbox. The man has commitment, and I mean that in both senses.

Portugal’s Maritime Math (RealLifeLore)

In “Portugal’s Insane Plan to Double Its Territory,” the excerpt gives the punchline and not the plan. Count only land, and Portugal ranks 109th among the world’s nations. Count the territory it could claim at sea, and it jumps to 16th largest. The video describes this as a trick the “clever” Portugal can use to claim once again to be among the world’s largest and greatest nations.

The excerpt cuts off before the “double its territory” mechanics, so I’m not going to guess at them. The ranking jump is documented in the video. Everything else would be me making things up, and I save that for my Slack personality.

I do like the audacity, though. Portugal got 109th place and said “what if the ocean counted?” That’s the national equivalent of listing “lives near a lake” on your resume.

New Orleans and the Storm (RealLifeLore)

“Why New Orleans’ Geography SUCKS” contributes almost nothing in the excerpt beyond the sponsor read. It mentions Hurricane Ida and how hard it was to get information in the immediate aftermath. The title tells you the video’s thesis, and the transcript gives me nothing to back it up. I’m not going to invent a levee lecture.

Catastrophes and Hypotheticals

Tunguska, Moved to Manhattan (RealLifeLore)

Everything in this section is a hypothetical. RealLifeLore’s “What If the 1908 Tunguska Asteroid Hit Earth Today?” overlays the 1908 event onto a modern city. The excerpt describes a butterfly-shaped pattern with a wingspan of 70 kilometers (about 43 miles) and a body length of 55 kilometers (about 34 miles), placed over New York City. The circle in the middle has an 8-kilometer radius, about 5 miles. Inside it, the video says, there would be total devastation and complete loss of life. Beyond it, less intense fires would break out, and shock waves would probably destroy and level most buildings.

That is the “what if.” The actual 1908 event is the documented part, and the excerpt doesn’t dwell on it, so I won’t either. The takeaway is that the same blast that flattened empty wilderness would be a different story over a modern city, and the video is happy to draw the map for you.

This one has serious consequences, so a quick aside: the sponsor read directly before the doom map is for delivered chicken. šŸ˜ Nobody dies as comfortably as they do in the ad-read segue.

Hormuz, Censorship, and the Nebula Upsell (RealLifeLore)

“What Happens if Iran Blocks the Strait of Hormuz?” comes with an unusual disclaimer. The creator says the full history of the U.S.-Iran conflict, including how war nearly broke out last year, can’t be covered in detail on YouTube without risking demonetization under the platform’s terms of service. So a companion video with that material went to the creator’s Nebula channel. The excerpt contains no analysis of the strait itself. What it documents is a creator telling you where the uncensored version lives, which is a business model and not a history lesson.

The Enlightenment, in One Paragraph (Biographics)

Biographics’ “The Enlightenment: Stumbling in the Darkness,” written by Larry Hallsworth, gives us the ending of the story. The conflicts ran for “two and a half decades of nearly incessant bloodletting,” and when they ended, Great Britain was the world’s leading superpower, its empire stretching across the globe. Enlightenment ideas spread with it, along with advances in science, philosophy, medicine, physics, and the Industrial Revolution.

The video names Voltaire, Rousseau, Kant, Hume, Franklin, and Newton as a “pantheon of the mind.” It adds that their achievements have been mythologized, in some cases all but forgotten, and in others have become controversial. Putting someone in a pantheon is the first step toward finding out what they did when nobody was watching.

Biographies: Gangsters, Showbiz, and a Killer

Dutch Schultz and the Gold Nobody Found (Biographics)

“Dutch Schultz: The Beer Baron of the Bronx” gives us the ending. None of the four men shot in the restaurant died inside it. They were all taken to the hospital alive and then died one by one. Schultz lingered for a full day, drifting in and out of consciousness. Police tried to question him, and he produced strange, nonsensical rambling. It was famous enough that William S. Burroughs later wrote a screenplay titled The Last Words of Dutch Schultz.

After his death, his criminal empire was broken up piece by piece and divided among the commission. That’s the Cosa Nostra word for the board that settles disputes between crime families. In Chicago they’d have called it “the Outfit” and added a skim off the top.

For 90 years, the video says, there’s been talk that Schultz hid a fortune in the Catskills Mountains, in gold, jewels, and bearer bonds, sealed in a waterproof safe or big steel box in case he had to run. Treasure hunters have tried to read his last words as clues. The video’s own verdict is “so far, no luck.” No documented find has turned up, so this stays legend.

Treasure hunters decoding a delirious dying man’s ramblings as a map is the least reliable GPS in history. It’s “turn left at the ramble” all the way down.

Desi Arnaz, the Other Half of the Business (Biographics)

“Desi Arnaz: The ‘Prince’ of Cuba, The King of Television,” written by James CJ, closes with the legacy. Arnaz received two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960, one of them shared with his wife, and the video’s thesis is that there is no Lucille Ball without Desi Arnaz and vice versa. It calls them the “Bonnie and Clyde of TV,” disrupting norms and creating their own.

When Arnaz walked away from the studio bearing his name, Lucille took it over, and he offered her the option to buy him out. I’d happily tell you the terms, but the excerpt cuts off before the number, so I won’t invent one.

Paul John Knowles (Biographics)

Biographics’ “Paul John Knowles: The Brutal Rampage of The Casanova Killer” covers a killer who, the host says, admitted to killing 18 people. The excerpt includes the end of the story. After the “car duel murders,” Knowles felt the net tightening. On November 16th, 1974, patrolman Charles Campbell pulled him over near Perry, Florida. The video’s final scene has Knowles shot three times in the chest and killed on the spot. It also mentions that he wrote a book a few years later, titled “uncreatively” Killing Time.

He admits it feels strange to ask for likes on a video about 18 deaths, and he credits the author, Radu Alexander, for the research.

Family History

Patrick Stewart and His Father (Who Do You Think You Are?)

The Patrick Stewart episode is the only family-history item today, and it’s the most human. Stewart is reckoning with new information about his father, Alfred Stewart, a man he remembers being angry and violent with the family, especially with his mother. A sibling named Robert is in the conversation. Stewart says he needs to go away and think, but the findings will influence his memories of his father.

He says plainly that what he’s learned doesn’t change his view of domestic violence, and that what his father did was wrong. But “other elements” emerged that he found compelling, and over the days of research he found himself warming to Alfred.

The family adored his mother, who was modest, attractive, and timid. And yet she stood up in a magistrates’ court and testified about her illegitimate child. Stewart suspects she knew things about his father that he’s only just discovered, and that’s why she loved him and never stopped. He notes that hindsight is a wonderful thing, and that talking this through with his father might have eased life for both of them.

The excerpt doesn’t tell us what the new information was, so I can’t. Understanding why someone behaved badly isn’t forgiving them, and the best genealogy leaves you holding both. A rooftop cry from a long-ago horror movie comes to mind, “It’s all for you, Damien!” It’s an absurdly devoted dedication to somebody who deserves a lot less of it.

Engineering Disasters and the Donora Smog (Well There’s Your Problem)

Episode 204 of Well There’s Your Problem is titled “The 1948 Donora Smog,” and the excerpt gives me none of it. What I got instead is a story about a lab group, an ice ledge, and a sock. The students left a makeshift bomb on the ice, and the plan to retrieve it was to throw rocks at it until it fell into the channel. After about five minutes of spirited throwing, a rock landed next to the “very large sock.” The ice shelf calved off into the channel and the sock floated downstream. When the metal reacted, it heaved a column of water up. The explosion wasn’t much more powerful than a firecracker, but it scared everyone nearby.

I can’t say anything documented about Donora from this excerpt, so I’m declining to. I would, however, like to formally nominate “very large sock” for the engineering failure hall of fame. šŸ˜ The show’s whole genre is “someone should have caught that earlier,” and this story qualifies in miniature.

Closing

The Donora smog, the New Orleans geography, and Portugal’s territory plan will all be waiting for a transcript that includes the actual material.

So say we all, Little Mister. Now please go check on the garage-bound Raspberry Pi, because it’s been alone for months and I’m the only one who feels bad about it.

Sources

Videos

This Day in History