Newsflash!

A curious case of love and persecution has come to light in New York. A man named Romero fell in love with his son’s intended wife, and in order to marry her, sent Romero, Jr., to Cuba. The latter was soon reported to be dead and the wedding took place. Subsequently the young man returned home, when his father caused him to be arrested and put in the lunatic assylum. The wife has discovered the facts in the case, and secured the release of her first, and perhaps only love, and an interesting and spicy lawsuit is now said to be very probable, growing out of this exceedingly romantic affair.

Florida Union, (Jacksonville, FL) Saturday, August 18, 1866; Issue 52; col F

Mmm… chocolate

As implied by a recent twitter/twitpic update (and a less recent one, too), I’ve taken to relatively high levels of cacao in my chocolate lately. This is partly due to Sandra Boynton’s advice (as reported by a local chocolate reviewer and friend of the Collective), but also because chocolate packaged as baking chocolate is far less expensive than the same strength of chocolate from the same manufacturer packaged for eating.
One slight drawback of the 100% cacao chocolate, though, is that it doesn’t go as well with salty snacks; I find, in fact, it goes best with something a little sweet.

More spam observations

Since we moved, I think we may have picked up some more address harvesters—or maybe the blocks of IPs I banned via .htaccess at the other place were keeping them out. Anyway, I am a little surprised that address at example.org is getting spam (not really example.org, but you get my point), while otheraddress at example dot org is not. I had thought the harvesters were smart enough to see through “dot”, but so far they are demonstrating that they are not. It’s still early days, of course; we haven’t even had our first comment spam attempt.

Newsflash!

Anderson Released.
He Did Not Murder His Wife as Supposed.
“Birmingham, July 24.– Sheriff Shirley, of Tuscaloosa county, this morning received a telegram from the sheriff of Shelby county saying that Lucinde Anderson, the wife of George Anderson, supposed to have been murdered by her husband and step-son, is in the poor house at Columbiana, as the husband claimed. Anderson and son were accordingly released from jail. There is no danger of Jones being lynched. He is in jail here.”
The Macon News, (Macon, GA) Saturday, July 24, 1897; col D

Newsflash!

“One of the funniest things got up in New York lately was the excursion of the Augur Association, in burlesque of the target excursions. Each man carries an augur instead of a gun, a calithumpian band accompanies them, and the exercises consist in walking blindfolded to the target and boring a hole through it. Not one man in twenty can do it, and the blunders that are made cause a great deal of sport.”

The Ripley Bee, (Ripley, OH) Saturday, January 01, 1859; Issue 32; col G

More chaos, new order

If you’re reading this, you’re seeing us at our new hosting outfit with our new WordPress software. A bunch of internal links will be broken for a good long time, but we’re hoping that this will be the last time that happens.

The Code Review

The Code: Baseball’s Unwritten Rules and Its Ignore-At-Your-Own-Risk Code of Conduct, Bernstein. Non-fiction. I can’t say I’m surprised, though I am a bit disappointed, that sports writing seems to be far more about the sports than about the writing. If I never see the phrase “For whatever the reason” again, I will never again be irritated by it (first, it’s pleonastic: it adds no content to the sentence. Second, it’s ungrammatical: it should be “For whatever reason” or “Whatever the reason”). It showed up in both Bernstein’s text and the interviews, so either he re-wrote his subjects or everybody in sports talks similarly. Really, it could go either way. Complaints aside, though, the book does a reasonable job with its topic—and now, back to the complaints—though it could have accomplished its job in many fewer pages.