Tuesday, November 17, 2009

These remotely defunct mollusks


Today Minus 100 Years Blogging:

The prosecution rests in the trial of the American Ice Company for violations of the anti-monopoly act. I guess they controlled all the ice.

The Iowa Supreme Court ruled that businesses can refuse to serve blacks.

A petition signed by “practically every citizen” of Rising Fawn, Georgia, asks Pres. Taft to pardon Sheriff Shipp and the others: “We view with grave fear the effect that the fulfillment of the sentence will have upon the ignorant and irresponsible negroes, increasing beyond question the danger to the women of the South.”

Meanwhile in the North, women are not menaced but menacing. At a women’s suffrage meeting in Carnegie Hall, Dr. Anna Howard Shaw exhibited what the NYT calls “a note of menace,” asking, “England has driven its women to extreme measures. Do the men of the United States seek the same result in this country?” Frances Squire Potter (1867-1914), who had recently resigned as professor of English lit at the University of Minnesota to devote herself full-time to suffrage work, castigated the trustees and faculty of Harvard which rejected Inez Milholland’s application to the law school. “Some kindergartner ought to lead these gentlemen into the nearest geological museum and show them, pityingly but firmly, the fossilized remains of their Silurian ancestors. These remotely defunct mollusks, after the Silurian age was gone, could not climb up into the Devonian age, and so, squirming themselves into strange shapes, they died, and, turning to stone, became their own monuments. If these sermons in stone cannot teach these gentlemen anything, nature has decreed that they are to stay in the museum to enrich the collection.”

Percival Lowell, astronomer and crap interplanetary weatherman, announces that it is currently snowing on Mars, which he says is unseasonably early for Mars.



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