John Ellis retires as Britain’s Chief Executioner after 23 years. He’s officiated at 203 hangings. His fee was 50 shillings, plus another 50s for good conduct, meaning he wasn’t allowed to stay at a public house when traveling to an execution as previous executioners did, charging a commission for attracting custom to pubs. Ellis, 49, gives no reason for quitting, but will attempt suicide later in the year. Suicide being illegal, he will be criminally charged. He’ll succeed in 1932. For now, he breeds chickens, but has to get someone else to wring their necks.
New laws passed in 1923: South Dakota bans peyote & mescal. Pennsylvania bans archeological fakes. Oregon bans schoolbooks which undervalue the contributions of the Founding Fathers while North Carolina requires school courses in “Americanism.” Oregon requires aliens who own butcher shops, run hotels, resorts, etc etc to display a card showing their nationality and those of their employees. North Carolina has a Peeping Tom act. Several states ban KKK-like masks and hoods, and there are a shitload of new prohibition laws.
Headline of the Day -100:
Dr. Alexander H. Rice will lead an expedition, including his wife Eleanor, into parts of South America never seen by the white man (if a tree falls in a rain forest and no white man hears it, does it make a sound?). He won’t actually bomb any cannibals, no doubt to his disappointment.
The NYT Sunday Book Review has a review of Della Thompson Lutes’s The Gracious Hostess. Is the review by a man? Of course it is. Is the headline for the review “Compendium of Information for Well-Behaved Women”? Of course it is. Did I stop reading the review after I realized that headline wasn’t the title of the book? Yes I did.
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