There’s not much to say. This site is maintained (to put it charitably!) by Tom Lambert, a historian by profession, an outdoorsman by avocation and a geek by nature.
If you have a question, comment or injurious insult, go ahead and send me an email.
I’m a historian with more of an interest in the odd details of history than the grand trends. I would call myself an anecdotalist, but I couldn’t find a PhD program in anecdotalism, so I had to settle for second best.
I also have an “official” biography. I was once asked for a capsule biography to accompany the prospectus for a seminar I was teaching. After submitting said bio, I suddenly realized what an opportunity I had wasted by sticking to the boring facts of my actual life. I encourage everyone to write one or several biographies. Here’s the second draft of my biography, which I hope will some day grace a seminar prospectus.
Tom Lambert: The Official Biography
Tom Lambert’s real name has never been learned by his many biographers, so he has traditionally been known simply by the name that his parents gave him at birth. What little is known of his early life can be boiled down to this: Lambert was born. His father was the scion of a wealthy New England family, but months after Tom’s birth, his father lost the entire family fortune on speculative investments in 8-track tape technology. The family was forced to move to Mississippi and support themselves sharecropping cotton. Lambert developed a passion for sports as a child, particularly basketball, after receiving his first pair of shoes at age 12. Ultimately, he was forced to give up his dream of becoming a center for the Chicago Bulls due to a height-related physical impediment.
He subsequently poured all of his considerable energies into his music career. At the age of 24, he cut his ground-breaking album of kazoo arrangements of Grateful Dead hits. Although those critics who reviewed the album considered it an artistic triumph, it failed to sell broadly among the general public. Unwilling to make the compromises necessary to achieve commercial success in pop music, Lambert turned his attention to classical music, composing an operatic biography of Mike Tyson, as well as an opera about the thrilling 1996 Republican Convention. His work was once again hailed by critics, with the New York Times cheering that “Lambert’s work is truly unlike anything the opera world has seen before.”
Unfortunately, audiences of the time were not yet prepared to comprehend Lambert’s artistic vision. With commercial success continuing to elude him, Lambert was forced to fall back on his Ph.D. in history. He is currently rumored to be working on the fifth volume in a series of critical editions of juridical records pertaining to family quarrels, drunkenness and sexual deviance in Geneva, Switzerland, in the 1540s and 1550s.
In addition to his work, Lambert enjoys a wide variety of hobbies, some of which are legal. Lambert currently lives at home. He enjoys spending his free time with his wife and their four goldfish, Al Haig, Henry Kissinger, Dr. Teeth and George Dubya, ages nine, seven, six and two respectively.
Since seeing the movie A Beautiful Mind, Lambert has been able to ignore the voices in his head, even though the voices seem like family to him. Lambert finds it helps him maintain his concentration. The wife voice keeps insisting that it makes it difficult to maintain the household.
Lambert’s autobiography was optioned by MGM and given the working title Gone with the Wind. Unfortunately the project was shelved when David O. Selznick and George Lucas teamed up to make the 1939 epic of the same name based on the Margaret Mitchell novel. Production was put off during the war in Grenada and, ultimately, its explosive content prevented it from being brought to the big screen during the era of the Hollywood blacklist. By the time a studio and a director with the courage to produce the film could be found, the script had disappeared. At least one reliable witness claims to have seen a copy in J. Edgar Hoover’s secret files in the late 1960s.