There’s a sad raccoon on the shed roof, and it’s moping to high heaven. Just sitting there with a forsaken look.
“Is it okay?” Asks the tenderhearted spouse.
“I don’t know and I don’t care at the moment - what matters is getting Birch inside.” Memories of Birch tangling with a huge raccoon, and memories of him trapping one behind the shed. I am not going to risk it. We will inquire after the raccoon’s health at later point.
Earlier we walked down to the creek. Cloudy evening, silent except for the rushing water, and of course four massive engines powering a flying machine overhead to land.
Birch is still limping. His leg isn’t sore to the touch, and he’s game for any walk. But he has a hitch. Not so much that he’s in full-Festus mode, but it’s noticeable. The vet thought she detected a slight infection in one pad ($66) and gave us some solution to soak it in, twice a day, for ten minutes. I am here to tell you that this was not well-received. She called back with the results of a blood test last week and said there was a sign of an exposure to a certain tick that causes lameness; could be that. So I’m giving him three pills a morning with peanut butter. I also got some tranqs so we could cut his nails, but the dosage wasn’t enough. Two pills and another pill. I called to ask for instructions and was told to up the dose to two of the tramadama and three of the globrodama, or whatever.
That seemed like a lot.
I called to inquire, and was told, er, sorry, when we said two we meant two 100mg, and it seems as if your prescription was for 300mg, so yeah, no, don’t do that.
Nine hundred mg of the tranquilizer. I don’t know if he’d have woken up for a week, if at all.
UPDATE: Raccoon is gone, but he is sitting in the grass in the dark staring at where it once was, no doubt drinking in the wafting stench of its remnant aromas.
I finished rewriting what had been an architecture / history piece into a thick listicle - a thickticle, I guess. Not all that jazzed about it. Tomorrow’s letter section according to today’s website:
Two letters, sad and thankful.
Well, you know what I’m going to do right now? I’m going to write a column for the upcoming Substack. I’m not going to waste any time. Iron, hot, striking, etc.
Tomorrow we have a Town Hall to celebrate all our recent wonderfulness, including the new app design (It repeats half the stories twice) and Monday we will have a party to unveil the new logo and branding. They’ve already pried the old logo off the walls of the elevator lobby on my floor, and it looks like the wall where someone was executed.
Our weekly recap of a Wikipedia peregrination. Expect no conclusion or revelations, but if you've been with us since this started last year, you know . . . sometimes we learn interesting things.
The prompt was a totally random newspaper - the Algernon paper from Nebraska, which served the bustling metropolis of Mason City. I came across this ad:
This was 1886. Can we find anything? There's the bottle, above. And there’s a giveaway promotional item, which encourages you to find the shapes in the picture.
Advertising text on back: “Why! Dr. Bosanko’s Cough and Lung Syrup meets with such success."
No, it did not. Probably codeine and cocaine or something. I mean, you’d feel fine, for a while.
Find-the-shape puzzles were popular back then, and persist to this day. Looking for the history, I clicked on a link that went to Readers Digest, of all things. I don't remember RD having find-the-shape puzzles.
We subscribed, of course; everyone did, it seemed. I used to joke that it contained mites that would automatically walk the magazine to the top of the toilet tank, since that’s where it always ended up. Real knee-slapper there Jimmy ANYWAY the magazine t always seemed a strange thing - the cover illustration was on the back, and it was never interesting; the table of contents was on the front.
Now it's a website. Let’s see what they have in their “humor” section.
POV, a ruined term.
I scrolled and scrolled, but none of the standbys were there. Life in These United States. Laughter is the Best Medicine. Humor in Uniform. Campus Comedy.
Gone.
I wonder what DeWitt would’ve thought. The founder of the magazine, DeWitt Wallace, was a Minnesotan, you know. But if you’re going to get into the mag game, best to head east. And so he did! And it paid off. His legacy:
Room 108 of the New York Public Library, now known as the DeWitt Wallace Periodical Room, services current unbound issues of 68 popular periodical titles and 22 domestic and foreign newspapers. In the 1920s DeWitt Wallace spent countless hours in this room, reading and condensing articles from the Library's collection. In 1983, the room's restoration was made possible by a gift from the Wallace Fund, established by DeWitt Wallace.
Say, what’s that on the wall on the left? We know the one on the right is the old New York Times building.
Puck, of course, was a British journal. Poking around for examples of its rakish wit at the height its powers, I found this:
(Bigger version here. It's full of wonderful details)
This big cartoon seems inscrutable to modern eyes: What was the clerical scandal?
Why, the Hoax that bedeviled the man above, Morgan Dix:
In 1880, he was subject to a sinister hoax that stretched over several months and became the subject of much comment in the New York City newspapers of the time. The arrest of the hoaxer (who was subsequently given a prison sentence) ended the incident.
What? That’s all it says. What was the hoax?
Here, if you wish.
Everything long ago was much stranger than we think.
And that's how we got from one place to another. The destination had little to do with the place from which we began, but who cares?
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Northeast corner of the state. Twenty-six hundred souls, an eleven percent decline from 2010
