This little blog started when I kept bugging my husband to post this or that on his blog. He did this a few times, but then he eventually said “Get your own blog.”
Well, I read blogs and I find them interesting, dull, instructive, fatuous, insightful, obtuse, &c., &c., and all too often too personal. I like privacy–and figure most people don’t care what my opinion is, just as I don’t care much about theirs. I couldn’t see myself describing to the world what I had for lunch or how I feel about issues.
But then I started a little project for Bill. It’s his project, actually, rooted in his interest in Forteana and nanohistory. He went to our local library to poke around the microfilms of old Ann Arbor newspapers, searching for local reports of ghosts and other unexplained phenomena. He came home with a stack of copies of articles, expecting to scan/OCR them and then maybe produce an Ann Arbor Forteana book–and left them in a pile.
Fast forward a couple of years. I was going to be away for a while in a place with poor internet access and few distractions, so I wanted something to do. Bill said, “Hey! Transcribe these so I can put them on my (new) blog!” I think he thought he’d be hard-pressed for content. Hah!
So I took them, and started typing them up, and got really interested in the stories and wondered if it was possible to follow up their subjects–wondered how thinking has changed in the intervening century. The stories weren’t just about Fortean phenomena; they were what ever happened to catch his eye when he made the copies. So there are articles on politics, on ancient ruins, on people who were famous then, as well as paragraphs and snippets of natural history, science fact (and fiction) and what is now called the “human interest” story.
I’ve taken the name of this blog from the title of one of these snippets.
And for each article I’ll try to find out what happened–at least as well as the Web can help me–to the idea, fact, issue, person, &c. and share it with you.
You might ask why someone would bother to type up, let alone post, articles found in old newspapers–and I would have to answer: “I don’t know, it seemed like a good idea at the time.”
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