Sarah Angleton's Blog, page 2

Murder Free Since 1952

Last week I had the opportunity to squeeze in a quick girls’ trip with my sister and our aunt and cousin to spend a few days exploring Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Our home base was an adorable rental cottage on Independence Lake near the tiny unincorporated community of Big Bay, MI, about thirty miles northwest of Marquette and a long, cold swim from Canada.

Sock Monkey Steve and I noticed this curious sign on the Lumberjack Tavern before we discovered why it was there. To the right of this sign, you can see part of the image from the movie poster as well.

Though it does have a post office, Big Bay is not large enough to sport a traffic light. It contains around a thousand people during the summer when stunning views of Lake Superior, lots of great hiking trails, waterfalls, and even a good stretch of sandy Great Lake beach attract visitors like us. 

In the winter it may host some hardcore snowmobilers and skiers, but most area locals we met said winter in the UP was best spent either hiding inside or living somewhere else. After experiencing a thirty degree temperature shift from one day to the next, I tend to believe them.

But for all the things Big Bay doesn’t have, it features two excellent places to eat, The Lumberjack Tavern, which includes a sign proclaiming it has been “murder free since 1952,” and The Thunder Bay Inn, which was featured in the Academy Award nominated film Anatomy of a Murder, directed by Otto Preminger and starring Jimmy Stewart. 

The Thunder Bay Inn still looks more or less the same as it does in the movie. At least enough to recognize it, both inside and out.

The film, released in 1959, was based on a novel of the same title by Robert Traver. That was the pen name of former Michigan Supreme Court Justice John D. Voelker, who in addition to being an avid fly fisherman, served as defense attorney in the case of a murder that occurred at a tavern in the tiny community of Big Bay in 1952.

What made the case such an interesting subject for fiction was the unlikely victory of the defense. An Army lieutenant stood accused of shooting and killing his wife’s alleged rapist. The jury found him not guilty based on a decades old precedent that used a fairly obscure diagnosis of a type of temporary insanity.

It was a good bit of legal acrobatics that translated nicely to the screen under the capable talents of a strong cast and set to a truly excellent Duke Ellington sound track. Since its release, the film has garnered praise from the legal profession as well as accumulated plenty of accolades from the film industry, including a 2012 selection to the National Film Registry for its cultural, historical, and aesthetic significance.

But the UP really does have a lot more to offer than murder.

Not being a classic film aficionado, I had never seen it, but you don’t vacation on a movie set and not watch the movie. Shortly after arriving back home, I got hold of a copy and I have to say, in my humble opinion, it’s good. 

If you want to visit it, just be forewarned that part of its cultural significance is its unflinching use of descriptive words referencing sexual violence that were atypical for a film in its era, words that got it briefly banned in the highly Catholic city of Chicago. 

Well, maybe not entirely unflinching. There is an amusing interaction in which the judge calls the counselors to the bench to discuss the possible use of alternative words for panties. After some debate in which one suggests perhaps a French word, they determine there are no better alternatives, and decide to just plow ahead, panties and all.

And while it has nothing to do with why we decided to take our little family girls’ trip to the incredibly beautiful UP, it is why unincorporated Big Bay, Michigan, with a year-round population 256, is evidently kind of famous. 

The Summer of Flying Whatsists

We are approaching the anniversary of a very big week for the United States and for the world because between July 19th and July 27th of 1952 was the peak of intense UFO sightings in a year that had been filled with them. Over the course of the previous four years the US Air Force had recorded observations of 615 UFOs. In 1952 alone, that number jumped to 717.

USA National Archives and Records Administration, Public Domain, via Wimikedia Commons.

The media noticed, particularly in that one week in July when many of the reported UFOs were spotted in the air over Washington DC. Headlines across the nation proclaimed the news. The Cedar Rapids Gazette announced: “SAUCERS SWARM OVER CAPITAL.” The front page of the Standard-Sentinal out of Hazelton, Pennsylvania declared: “RADAR SPOTS MORE ‘FLYING WHATSITS’ OVER WASHINGTON, and in Monroe, Louisiana, the front page of the Monroe News-Star featured the headline: “RADAR SPOTS ‘FLYING SAUCERS’ IN BACKYARD OF NATIONAL CAPITAL.”

Of course most of the articles do acknowledge various versions of the official government response, provided in the largest Pentagon press conference since World War II, that there was no national security concern at all, and that the sightings could be attributed to natural phenomenon like air temperature inversions and meteorite activity.

The UFO media frenzy seems to have been touched off by an April article in Look magazine that asked the question, “HAVE WE VISITORS FROM SPACE?” Then it steadily built because the eyewitnesses to UFOs weren’t just the usual crazies, but also included more credible people like both military and civilian pilots as well as air traffic controllers, some of whom were insistent that their observations didn’t perfectly fit the explanations.

I did see a series of UFOs earlier this spring over my house. That is until my husband identified them as a Space X satellite launch. Still a pretty cool thing to get to see.

Of course the most likely truth rarely gets in the way of a good sensational headline, or even a slanted story, of the variety that will sell a lot of news to the hysterical people who most want to consume it. That was certainly true in 1952, just as it was during the Summer of the Shark in 2001, when everyone became so afraid to go into the water that the number of shark attacks was down a little bit, and just as it has been every single year, before or since, that there has been nationwide media coverage. 

Yes, that includes now. But before you get mad at me, it also includes every year the other political flavor held more power, too. Because media is a business designed, like all businesses, to make a grab for our attention and resources. It’s most successful when we’re scared and angry and maybe a little irrational, which is why it works very hard to keep us that way. 

Am I suggesting that there isn’t any truth to the sensational, terrible, nation-ending, world altering stories we are consuming in the media every day? Well, not exactly, but often with a little distance and the slight change in perspective it might offer, we can start to see things a bit more clearly.

I suppose I can’t really say for certain that DC wasn’t visited by flying saucers in July of 1952, but I have read that when digital filters were added to radar equipment in the 1970s, there was a sharp reduction in reported UFO sightings. And that really can only mean one thing. Clearly, flying saucer cloaking technology also saw vast improvement at that time.

Furry Little Demons

It was in 1924 that the Bureau of Biological Survey, precursor to the US Fish and Wildlife Agency, responded to a request from local sheep farmers in Kern County, California and set out to eliminate coyotes and other predators from the area. The campaign, which sounded like a much better idea in 1924 than it does a century later, was a success, but it came at a cost.

According to the West Kern Oil Museum, the cost was the most epic house mouse infestation in US history. To be fair to the Bureau, Harvard mouse researchers have since drawn the conclusion that it might not have been entirely their fault. It turns out that a few dry years plus a dry lake bed planted with wheat, barley, corn, and cotton plus one of the most wildly successful invasive pest species in the world plus a torrential rain equals 100 million mice. 

Such a ridiculously cute furry little demon. Image by Alexa from Pixabay

Admittedly the number might have been a little smaller if there’d still been a few coyotes skulking about, but once you reach a million or so mice, I’m not sure it’s worth quibbling over the thousands a healthy coyote population might consume.

Oil companies close to the source of the outbreak did attempt to control the problem, digging long trenches filled with poison-laced grain, but it wasn’t long before the horde, fleeing their now flooded lake bed home, made their way to the nearby town of Taft, where residents set as many traps as they could and the house cats ate to bursting. But it was no good. They were at war. And they were losing.

I can sympathize, because as I mentioned in my last post, we recently bought some land in the country with a house that needs a little work. The house sat on the market for about a year before we found it, and the previous owners had long since moved out. We weren’t ready to move in just yet, as our son was finishing his senior year in high school and I was working in our current town. That was fine for us, because we had quite a few renovation ideas anyway and that gave us time to work on them. 

But what that means is that now for at least a year-and a-half, the house has been unoccupied except for the occasional night between shifts when my husband might sleep there or when we might stay a night or two working on projects. 

The mice have moved in. We are at war. And at the moment, it feels like we’re losing. 

Each time I’m at the house now, I set traps and catch a few. Yes, we do have a contract with a pest control company that has treated the home for insect infestations, eliminating our previously significant wasp problem, set up a termite monitoring system, and provided us with a rodent-fighting defense system, but I think we must have had a pretty good population of the little critters living, and unfortunately also dying and stinking, in our walls already. 

It seems so simple. I’m not sure what we’re doing wrong.

At this point, I’m ready to call in the Pied Piper.

That is what the people of Kern County did. Once again they appealed to the Bureau of Biological Survey, which in January of 1927, sent in an agent named Stanley Piper, because if you happen to have a Piper on staff in that situation, I don’t think you really have any choice. 

Piper pulled out the big guns and got to work poisoning the mice, though he also just kind of got lucky, because environmental conditions shifted, as they do, predatory birds moved back into the area, probably drawn by the horrendous smell of a great deal of prey, and the house mouse population soon fell to tolerable levels.

I’m hoping that will be our experience, too. I’m hoping that once we are in the house on a more regular basis, setting traps and making noise with our scary predator-smelling dog in tow, maybe we’ll win a few battles, and eventually the war.

I’m fairly certain we do at least have plenty of coyotes.

Don’t Call it a Comeback

Hello blogosphere! I know it’s been a hot minute since I appeared in this space. It turned out I needed the break. I also have had less time to write as I spent the last school year working full-time at a middle school where I learned to use phrases like “it’s been a hot minute.” I had a great year and would happily return for another, but life is shifting again, as it does. 

For well over a year now, my husband has been dealing with a long commute for a job that he loves. With our youngest son’s graduation from high school this spring, we’ve been looking to escape the bustling suburb that has been our home for more than a decade, searching for more land, a smaller house, and a shorter drive.

I’m pleased to report that we found all three, but as his route to work is shortening, mine is lengthening too much for my position to be practical. And that’s okay, because now, in between renovation projects on our new kind of weird house that sits on the pretty much perfect land, I can spend more time writing again.

Because when I see a majestic creature like this, the first thing I think is that it sure would look good in a hat. Minette Layne from Seattle, Washington, USA, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

I’m excited to be back. I’ve missed this sharing of vaguely historical and occasionally hysterical tidbits, kind of like one misses the hottest trends of their childhood. I’m seriously at least as excited as I would be if celebrities suddenly started wearing acid wash jeans again, we all decided to walk like an Egyptian, or whales donned dead salmon hats. 

Okay, so you may not have been entirely hip to Orca culture of the late 1980s like I have recently pretended to be, but yes, apparently, there was a brief window of time in 1987 when trendy killer whales, particularly those who frequented the Puget Sound, placed jaunty dead fish on their enormous heads.

Why they did this researchers aren’t sure, but then acid wash jeans didn’t make a lot of sense either. Some suggest it was a clever way to save some food for later during times of abundance. Orcas have been known to swim with large chunks of food tucked under a fin, a mode of transportation that isn’t terribly practical for a relatively small fish like a salmon. That fits much better as a hat. 

Or it could just be a playful fashion statement that this year has seen a little bit of a comeback. It’s definitely not as wide-spread as it was in 1987, but then I suppose the retro look isn’t for everyone. 

In case you want to dress like a fashionable Orca, Amazon has you covered.

Still, there have been a few instances over the past several months of Orcas once again sporting dead fish hats, enough to get some in the whale fashion industry to declare it a hot trend of the season, similar to the boat rudder disabling challenge that cropped up a couple years ago or the orca kelp massage fad surging right now, that is surely the result of a whale lifestyle influencer.

And why not bring back a little bit of fun, like a silly hat in a great big briny sea, or one more hopefully amusing, poorly researched, sort-of history blog written by a real human being drifting in a metaphorical sea of the artificially intelligent web.

I mean, I’m not walking like an Egyptian, but I am pretty excited to be back.

At Some Point I’ll Be Back to Title This Post

In 1880, led by then University President Charles W. Eliot, Harvard began a program of granting sabbatical to its professors. A concept derived from Old Testament Biblical tradition, this year of rest from the demands of teaching would include half the normal salary and could only take place once every seven years. 

Not how I’ve been spending my time. But wouldn’t it be lovely? Image by Lukas from Pixabay

Though Harvard was the first to apply the concept, several universities followed suit over the course of the next few years. Today, of course, the sabbatical is a common occurrence in university settings, but it is also surging in the corporate world, where more and more companies are recognizing productivity benefits in allowing their high level employees to take a little time to switch directions and clear their minds a bit.

I’m a big fan of taking a minute, and have from time to time found in my own creative journey, the need to do so. Sometimes when the creative juices are less willing to flow, a walk or a day spent in some other kind of work, has often been helpful to get them going again. But the notion of a full year away has always been a lot to imagine.

It turns out that even though corporate sabbaticals are beginning to become more common, a good percentage  still begin with unplanned events, like an unexpected  health challenge or family emergency. I can’t claim either was the impetus for the sabbatical I have recently found myself on.

Also not how I’ve been spending my time But it probably should be. Image by Pexels from Pixabay

I’m sure that those of you who follow this blog very closely have noticed that I haven’t posted in quite a while. I apologize for disappearing without explanation, but I honestly didn’t realize how much I needed to step away. 

Many of you know that this school year I took on a full-time position for the first time since my children were born, the youngest of whom is a high school senior. I knew that in doing so, I would be limiting the time I could spend writing. I just didn’t know how much I would benefit from that. I also didn’t know that it would extend to the blog. 

I do sometimes miss writing, but for the moment, I’m happy putting my creative energy elsewhere, and I’m hopeful that when I return it will be with renewed enthusiasm. There is a book simmering away on the backburner, perhaps growing thicker and richer for the neglect. There are jotted notes about potential future blog posts and essays and short stories, their flavors melding in the back of the fridge. And though I have thought up several excellent mixed metaphors, there remain exactly zero poems on the horizon.

This break has not been a resignation nor a retirement. I’ve come to think of it as a necessary sabbatical. I’m not sure precisely when yet, but I’ll be back.

A Preposition Proposition

There’s a video put out by the folks of Miriam-Webster that has been floating around. It’s worth a little thinking about. It suggests that, despite what your third grade teacher taught you, a preposition might not be the most terrible thing to end a sentence with.

In fact, these language experts who, mind you, have now decided to include the nonsensical “irregardless” in their dictionary, point to the history of English to rest their case upon. They suspect it began with a little known 17th century grammarian named Joshua Poole whose work, The English Accidence, does mention that one should use prepositions following only the natural order they should appear in.

England’s first Poet Laureate John Dryden apparently agreed with him, and once took critical aim at poet Ben Johnson’s use of the line: “The bodies that those souls were frighted from.” Because Dryden used to translate his own work into Latin as a way to revise for concise and elegant language, the assumption is that he preferred the grammatical rules of Latin to force English into.

If you want to get creative with prepositions, you’ll have to think outside the box. Or in it. Or on it. Or around it. Image by Agata from Pixabay

Whether this was the real reason for his preference, however, doesn’t totally shine through. Dryden did also once take himself to task for occasionally spotting a line or two in his own work where a sentence-ending preposition had slipped out.

All writers have preferences they rarely go against. It’s certainly not a habit that I can claim to be above. Still, it’s unclear why this particular preference of this particular poet became a hard and fast rule no student could live without. What is certain is that in the wake of Miriam-Webster’s claim that the rule never was a rule, the debate has been a furious one that it may take some time to get over. This is a topic that sure gets people worked up.

I do appreciate that language evolves and I try not to be too pretentious about it, but based on this brief experiment with lackluster, and maybe even just plain strange sentence structures, I don’t think I’m ready yet to throw the rule out. All I can say is that I will certainly think it through.

We Don’t Need No Hatchetations

On June 7, 1900 the clientele of Dobson’s Saloon in Kiowa, Kansas got something of a shock when a tall, possibly slightly unhinged woman entered the establishment with a hymn on her lips and bricks in her hands. Following a vision she believed to be from God, Caroline Amelia Nation greeted the bartender with a “Good morning, Destroyer of Men’s Souls,” and proceeded to smash up the place. She claimed she was perfectly within her rights to do so because the business should have been illegal anyway.

Carry A. Nation with a Bible in one hand and a hatchet in the other. N.N., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

A decade earlier, Kansas had become the first state in the union to outlaw non-medicinal alcohol. Almost immediately, and to the disappointment of the temperance movement, a US Supreme Court issued a ruling that allowed for the interstate importation of alcohol in its original packaging. That weakened the law significantly and created a loophole for places like Dobson’s Saloon.

Political passion is important, and persuasive and open dialog is essential to a thriving democracy and to just generally being good humans. However, smashing up a lawful business, even if you don’t believe it should be such, is probably going a little too far.

Caroline, more often Carrie, had survived a bad first marriage to an alcoholic husband and became a fervent speaker against drink, founding a local chapter of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. There’s a lot to admire about a person who crusades for a strongly held political belief, even one that turned out a few years later when the US enacted prohibition, to be kind of a bad idea.

Carry A. Nation, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Carrie Nation, who eventually changed her name to Carry A. Nation soon traded her bricks for a hatchet. Despite more than thirty arrests and a lifetime banishment from Kansas City, she kept on spreading her message through a series of unlawful saloon “hatchetations,” while also marching and speaking for women’s suffrage, establishing a women and children’s shelter, and feeding and clothing the poor.

I think it’s safe to say that in many ways, she was a pretty good lady, with a heart full of fire for the things most important to her. She certainly seemed to think so, and boldly titled her 1908 autobiography The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation.

In some ways, she’s right. A nation needs passionate people to carry it forward. Of course we in the United States are feeling keenly this week the reality that passionate, pretty good people don’t always agree on which way the nation needs to be carried.

It’s okay to disagree. It’s probably even a good thing because none of us is right all the time, and we do need to engage in purposeful, respectful conversations about the things that matter most to each of us. We just also need to leave our hatchets at home.

The Dark Days Ahead

It’s election season once again here in the United States, with early voting already in full swing, and most people convinced that the nation will fall if their pick for president doesn’t win. I’d say something reassuring, but alas, I’m not totally immune to the hysteria. One thing I can say for sure is that no matter what happens, next Tuesday will be a dark day for all Americans.

That’s because in the early hours of Sunday morning time itself will suffer a stroke when our clocks fall back an hour. The early evening will suddenly become the blackest depths of nighttime, my dog will fail to sleep a second past 4:00 in the morning, traffic accidents will see a slight uptick, and everyone will be universally miserable for a good week or two.

The US first observed Daylight Saving Time in 1918. In 1919 Congress scrapped it because of the universal misery, and because apparently at that time Congress cared. It wasn’t implemented again until World War II when it once again proved temporary on a federal level, though some states and cities embraced the misery and adopted some version of it. Then in 1966, the Uniform Time Act signed by Lyndon Johnson, standardized the practice across the country, except in a couple of states that didn’t feel like it and decided to stay on standard time.

The awful tradition has been tweaked several times since, with the dates of clock changing moving around a little, but the most exciting development came in 2022 when the US Senate passed, by unanimous consent, a bill to eliminate standard time. Everyone cheered and looked forward to the first Sunday of November, 2024 when Daylight Saving Time would become the standard across the land.

Everyone, that is, except the House of Representatives where the bill has still not been voted on because it has proven weirdly controversial despite not dividing along party lines. 71% of US citizens want to stop the biannual insanity, which is pretty much a slam dunk for politicians who claim to want a less divided nation. Granted, 40% favor keeping to Daylight Saving Time while 31% are incorrect. I guess maybe 29% just didn’t understand the question?

20% of the members of my household, and NOT a fan of time changes.

I don’t know, but it is true one has to be careful with polling results because they can be pretty heavily manipulated based on how a question is worded or a sample taken.

For example, I recently conducted a highly scientific poll of a fair cross-section of the American population, consisting of the members of my household and found that 80% of participants were entirely unpersuaded by political gripes on social media. I know that can’t be right because pretty much everyone I know is still spouting their opinions from their keyboards.

20% of the members of my household don’t use social media, were just happy to be a part of the conversation, and thought they deserved a treat. And he’s right, because he’s a very good boy, even though starting this Sunday, he is not going to let me sleep a second past 4:00 in the morning.

One thing I can confidently state is that 100% of the residents of my household do pretty much despise the biannual time change. I was shocked to discover that we don’t all agree on whether we prefer Daylight Saving or Standard Time, but when it comes down to it, I suspect we’d be willing to set our differences aside and agree that we’d just like to stick to one or the other.

Alas, as with all things political, not all of us can get exactly what we want, which can feel a little dark and frightening. But when it comes down to it, at some point, we’re going to have to at least try to set our differences aside if we don’t want to be universally miserable.

This Post is Fire. No Cap.

Lately I’ve been feeling my age pretty keenly. It’s not that I’m old, but I am solidly middle-aged, not yet quite to the morning/evening pill divider, but well beyond the days of waking up without back pain. For the most part, I don’t mind too much. Getting older, after all, beats the alternative, but I do sometimes marvel at the fact that I have no idea what the young’uns are talking about.

I mean, I’m definitely young enough to enjoy a good birthday cake, but I’m also old enough there’s no way anyone is lighting that many candles. Image by Marco Apolinário from Pixabay

Because middle age also falls somewhere between no longer being able to hear what the kids are saying and no longer understanding it. This, more than anything except perhaps for the regularity with which I ask my sons to help me fix whatever stupid thing I’ve done to my computer, makes me aware of my age.

It doesn’t help that I celebrated a birthday last week, in that way middle aged mothers do. The hubs, bless him, slaved away over the grill to make me a special meal that we ate alone because my teenage sons each made plans to not celebrate their mother’s birthday.

That’s fine because they’re sigmas with rizz and they got that drip, so it stands to reason they’d have plans extending beyond their dad’s bussin steak. Too bad for them because it slapped. No Cap.

Yeah, I don’t know what I just wrote, either, though I’m fairly certain I used every bit of that gen Z slang just a little bit incorrectly.

I find myself longing for the good old days when we said logical things like “totes magotes.” Image by Chräcker Heller from Pixabay

And that’s kind of what it’s for anyway. The term slang has existed since at least the 1740s when it referred to the speech of thieves and beggars rather than teenagers, but I’m betting the concept has been around pretty much since the dawn of speech, with each generation’s drive to distinguish itself just a little bit from its elders.

Personally, I used to really enjoy slang. I was a totally rad preteen in the 1980s. Then as a teenager in the 90s I was all that and a bag of chips. I chillaxed through my twenties in the 2000s, and in the 2010s this thirty-something was a little bit extra.

But now in the 2020s, I’m mostly just tired of all this skibidi Ohio brain rot. As far as I’m concerned all these sus kids are delulu. But now I’m just talking out of pocket.

I think.

One Wicked Omission

A few weeks ago in this space, I posted a piece about Taylor Swift and the history of public education in the United States. Except that apparently I didn’t. A few hours after the post went live, I received a text from one of my aunts saying, “Am I the first to point out a spelling error?…”

She was the first, and the error was unfortunate because instead of typing public education, I had accidentally left out a very important letter l. Fortunately, I was able to fix it quickly and if any of the rest of you noticed, you were gracious enough to cut me some slack.

Whales. Image by M W from Pixabay

I try to be a meticulous editor, but anyone who has followed this blog for very long has probably spotted the occasional error that gets through. Often either the hubs or my eagle-eyed mother will discover them and point out the mistakes spell check won’t catch. One time a reader I don’t know personally was kind enough to politely point out that the country of Wales is spelled differently than the marine mammal with a similar name.

You’ve all been very kind over the years, and as far as I know none of my silly typos have led to any controversy. Royal printers Robert Barker and Martin Lucas were not so fortunate. In 1632, they stood trial in the court of King Charles I for a mistake that made its way into their 1631 re-printing of the King James Bible. The mistake occurred in Exodus 20:14, which should read: “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” The problem was that this printing omitted the word not.

Barker and Lucas had to answer for the slip-up to the tune of £300. That’s roughly £56,000 today, or about 75,000 US Dollars, which is a pretty steep price to pay for three little letters. To make matters worse, the gentlemen lost their publishing license.

But think about how many words they got right! Image by Pexels from Pixabay

While nearly all of the one thousand misprinted Bibles were confiscated and destroyed before they had a chance to tear apart too many families, at least fifteen copies still exist today—seven in England, seven in the United States, and one in New Zealand.

A British rare book dealer named Henry Stevens obtained one of the copies in 1855 and called it the Wicked Bible, a name that has pretty much stuck since then. In the last decade, copies have changed hands for somewhere around $50,000, which means that if the descendants of Robert Barker and Martin Lucas still had a copy, they’d need to wait a few years yet to come out ahead.

I doubt any of my typos would fetch that kind of bling, and so my promise to you, dear reader is that I will continue to do my best to catch all the irritating little typos on this blog. I can assure you that if I ever suggest adultery as a good life choice, then you can assume it’s a terrible mistake.

I do feel for Barker and Lucas, though. It may be true that none of the errors that have occasionally popped up in my little corner of the blogosphere have been so grievous or costly. Still, I’m certainly aware that no matter how cautious an editor one may be, it can be a big risk to put your words out there in a pubic space.