The house was sold. Substantial whiplash here. Relief over not having to make a decision RIGHT NOW, and depression over the lost opportunity. My brain had readjusted: you can get this much more for this much less than you expected. Now everything looks expensive and charmless. A switch flipped on the idea of a suburban rambler, and now I imagine it as a crackerbox with a blasted back yard in the middle of the block.

If you pay attention and remember things, you realize how much you know about things you never think about. The opportunity never arises to say "oh, I know what that is." You grow up in a particular era, you become accustomed to the visual language of the time. Things that are iconic, as they say. They didn’t mean anything a hundred years ago, and a hundred years from now they won’t mean anything. But thanks to mass-market dissemination, there’s a cohort of people who can interpret the blurriest of things and come up with the proper identity.

I refer, of course, to this:

It’s an image from an upcoming subsite on 1955 Farmhouse Interiors. Lord knows when I’ll post it. I scanned the picture earlier this year when I had to get rid of a ton of old magazines. Didn’t have to, but A) where would they go?, and B) I was certain the whole commercial-archeology part of my life was over. Can't speak to that part until I've worked through all the scans.

Let us zoom in.

You can figure out the book on the right, can’t you? That's not hard. The red object, the position of those lines on the object, two yellow dots in the front of the object, and a title that appears to be short word / twice-as-long word, matching the object. Plug in the year, give it a range that goes back five years, ask for a child's book about fire engines . . .

		. . . and it’ll take ayou bout five seconds to find it.

As for the one of the left, I instantly knew what it was - or rather what I hoped it was, because that would confirm my instincts. And I was right. O Clever me! Clever you, too. I know you can see it. Once you decide, everything snaps in place, and you even know what the brown shapes mean.

Answer’s here, if you give up, or if you want to say “I KNEW IT!”

What does this prove? Certain stories and characters are so deeply imprinted we can intuit them from the slightest of hints from a seventy-year-old magazine.

Panic! at the yarn store:

A Twin Cities yarn store is the latest small business to pull Harry Potter products from its shelves in protest of J.K. Rowling’s anti-trans views.

The team at Needle & Skein in St. Louis Park announced the decision in a Nov. 7 apology letter regarding the recent sale of Harry Potter-themed kits at the shop.

Reddit applauds! Reddit is happy. The Fiber Art Community has been on this for a long time. I remember reading how social-justice issues split the Yarn-Anemican Community a while back - and by "split" I mean the people who did not realize that knitting is inherently political, and decline to incorporate the proper politics into their worldview, where excoriated and ostrasized. Hence the rise of things like the Social Justice Sewing Academy.

Rowling recently reupped her original remarks on the contentious topic, and added this:

Does this mean all trans-identified men are predators? Of course not. Should trans people be discriminated against when it comes to housing or employment? Of course not. Should trans people be stripped of their human rights, or denied personal safety? Again: of course not.

But the statistics don’t lie: men as a group pose a risk to women and girls, as a group. Of course, all men aren’t rapists, voyeurs or flashers, but enough are to make safeguarding necessary. That’s why women and girls want separate changing rooms and public bathrooms. That’s why women need male-free spaces when seeking to recover their sense of self and safety after rape. Not because we hate trans people, not because we want them dead, not because we want them somehow eradicated from existence, but because women and girls have specific issues and needs that men do not, even if they’re calling themselves women and even if they’ve taken cross-sex hormones.

GENOCIDE, STRAIGHT UP.

You see, we have to believe two things – men are violent, misogynistic predators, as a Maryland Special Ed teacher believes, and the best option is to abort them. Also, no violent, misogynistic predators would use subterfuge to get access to vulnerable women by claming to be a woman and suing to work at a women's sexual-violence center. That never happens, of course. Except . . .

We know for a fact that many of the women using Beira’s Place (the Rowling-founded and -funded women's exual-violence center) had not reached out for help previously because, for several years, the only other rape crisis centre in Edinburgh was run by a trans-identified man who’d stated publicly that anyone who didn’t think he was a woman was a bigot. That centre also admitted a non-binary man who was subsequently convicted of rape.

We also have to believe that if it does happen, that person is not actually trans, although they cannot say why without putting the lie to self ID. If someone actually has the ability to say well, I don’t believe you even though that’s what you say, then it validates everybody else’s decision to disbelieve.

Back to Reddit:

That's right: the store raised 100K for charity, is obviously anti-ICE, but all that's forgotten the minute there's transphobic stitchery afoot.

Boycotting Harry Potter is not completely manufactured culture war slop, but agreeing with the HP author is.

Mind you, it could be worse; there could be HP decorations IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE!

It’s 1888.

Kerosene, the greatest threat to China! The fourth subhead doesn't really belong. Also, WHY NOT RETALIATE

		Oh what a lot of sensational nonsense, no one will care about this in a week or two

I do wonder how much interest the case produced in the states.

The papers abound with stories like this. Very young women who run away with an older man.

Nice editorializing headline there, boys.

I assume they believed everyone knew who, or what, Emin Bay was.

Wikipedia:

Mehmed Emin Pasha (born Isaak Eduard Schnitzer, baptized Eduard Carl Oscar Theodor Schnitzer; March 28, 1840 – October 23, 1892) was an Ottoman physician of German Jewish origin, naturalist, and governor of the Egyptian province of Equatoria on the upper Nile. The Ottoman Empire conferred the title "Pasha" on him in 1886, and thereafter he was referred to as "Emin Pasha”.

He was killed by two Arab slave traders at Kinena Station in the Congo Free Stateon 23 or 24 October 1892.

But wait: there’s more.

The Emin Pasha Relief Expedition of 1887 to 1889 was one of the last major European expeditions into the interior of Africa in the nineteenth century. Led by Henry Morton Stanley, its goal was ostensibly the relief of Emin Pasha, the besieged Egyptian governor of Equatoria (part of modern-day South Sudan), who was threatened by Mahdist forces.

Yes, that Stanley.

This name is familiar, no?

Nothing on his wiki to indicate a relation to Vita, but c'mon, how many are there?

Sackville-West was a successful novelist, poet and journalist, as well as a prolific letter writer and diarist. She published more than a dozen collections of poetry and 13 novels during her life. She was twice awarded the Hawthornden Prize for Imaginative Literature: in 1927 for her pastoral epic, The Land, and in 1933 for her Collected Poems. She was the inspiration for the protagonist of Orlando: A Biography, by her friend and lover Virginia Woolf.

She wrote a column in The Observer from 1946 to 1961 and is remembered for the celebrated garden at Sissinghurst in Kent, created with her husband, Sir Harold Nicolson.

Another little item that suggests familiarity with the case.

Searches on other sources, as you might expect, bring up innumerable stories about baseball. Then I thought - hey, why not search this paper? Ah:

Must have been a big story. Man embezzles, escapes to Canada - could' ve been a quiet dream of more than a few.

A heartwarming tale on the editorial page.

Thanks for sharing that one, Pa. Real corker there.

That will do! See you around.