WELCOME

Hi. Thanks for dropping in. Here you’ll find writing on out-of-the-way subjects, photos, paintings, cartoons and links to...

The Bottle Conjuror

If you checked the newspaper on January 16, 1749, to plan a night out, the choices were these:...

I try to keep intemperate rants off the menu, but the [Dixie] Chicks really lit me up a...

From Charleston, South Carolina, once slavery central, comes the world’s worst Christmas ornament:

I’ve just been reading Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man again and discovered something odd in it. Well, two...

In delighted receipt today of the complete box set of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, recently released a mere...

The other day I ran across one of my old reporter’s notebooks in which I found raw notes...

Prompted by the Fosse/Verdon eight-parter, I’ve been following Chicago in its many manifestations backward into the past. Among...

Here’s an easy way to do a lot of good: donating school supplies to teachers in need around...

For reasons that need not detain us I recently bought a South African cookbook published in 1891. Old...

The touch of malicious joy I expected to feel about this news story didn’t materialize because the whole...

Like all old saws, the old saw that the past is another country isn’t always true as the...