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The Whole Nine Yards About a Phrase’s Origin

(NYTimes) When people talk about “the whole nine yards,” just what are they talking about?
For decades the answer to that question has been the Bigfoot of word origins, chased around wild speculative corners by amateur word freaks, with exasperated lexicographers and debunkers of folk etymologies in hot pursuit.
Does the phrase derive from the length of ammunition belts in World War II aircraft? The contents of a standard concrete mixer? The amount of beer a British naval recruit was obligated to drink? Yardage in football? The length of fabric in a Scottish kilt (or sari, or kimono, or burial shroud)?
Type the phrase into Google and you’re likely to get any of these answers, usually backed by nothing more than vaguely remembered conversations with someone’s Great-Uncle Ed. But now two researchers using high-powered database search tools have delivered a confident “none of the above,” supported by a surprise twist: Continued

Police arrest five in raid on Catonsville saloon in 1912

 

(Towson Times) Samuel Bloom saloon on Frederick road at Paradise was raided Sunday night at 7 o'clock by Patrolmen Hutson and Phelps, of the Canton Police Station.
The patrolmen, who were dressed in plain clothes, say they entered the saloon and ordered bottle beer which was served to them. They then arrested Samuel Bloom, John Hall, a helper, and two other men as witnesses. All were taken to the Catonsville Police Station and released on a $500 bail. Continued

RR Auction's Gangsters, Outlaws & Lawmen Preview for Live Auction on Sept 30th

(Part 1 of 2) The American Gangsters, Outlaws and Lawmen live auction will take place on Sunday, September 30, 2012, beginning at 10am. For more information, please visit the RR Auction web site (www.rrauction.com).

‘Copper’ Resurrects the Five Points

(NYTimes) ... Ostensibly the new series is about a former boxer and Civil War veteran turned police detective, Kevin Corcoran (played by Tom Weston-Jones), an Irish immigrant who returns to the Five Points after serving in the Union Army’s 71st Regiment to find his daughter dead and his wife missing. New York is really the main character.
Where “Gangs” signed up as technical adviser Luc Sante, whose 1991 book “Low Life” evoked “The Gangs of New York,” Herbert Asbury’s 1928 nonfiction confection, “Copper” is rooted in fiction — Jack Finney’s “Time and Again,” which Ms. Wayne read in high school at Manhattan’s Hewitt School, and “The Alienist” by Caleb Carr, which she read more recently (as well as “Low Life”). But the creative team also decided to hire a full-fledged historian, Daniel Czitrom, who teaches American cultural and political history at Mount Holyoke, to keep “Copper” believable. (Mr. Fontana is himself a self-styled would-be historian who started college as a history major.) Continued

Take a trip through the Grateful Dead Archive Online

(boingboing) UC Santa Cruz launched the Grateful Dead Archive Online last Friday with tens of thousands of items. But it wouldn't be a Grateful Dead archive if all you could do was look at stuff, so you can also:
• Add your own photos and stories - you can even tell us a story over voicemail.
• Use the map to search for things related to a particular Dead show and venue - like photos, backstage passes, and envelopes that fans sent in to request tickets, and tapes from performances hosted at archive.org. Continued

Photo of Jerry Garcia by Susana Millman

Aegis: 50 Years Ago

(Aegis) ... The Lamm Brothers Inc., owners of the Bel Air Manufacturing Company, broke ground at the site of the company's new manufacturing plant on Williams Street. The company originally manufactured summer clothing when the business started in 1910. Lamm Brothers grew to a be known nationally as a manufacturer and distributor of Gleneagles men's wear. Other plants in operation at the time were in Baltimore, Fallston and New York. Continued

Leap Day

(Wikipedia) February 29, known as a leap day in the Gregorian calendar, is a date that occurs in most years that are evenly divisible by 4, such as 2004, 2008, 2012 and 2016. Years that are evenly divisible by 100 do not contain a leap day, with the exception of years that are evenly divisible by 400, which do contain a leap day; thus 1900 did not contain a leap day while 2000 did.
Years containing a leap day are called leap years. February 29 is the 60th day of the Gregorian calendar in such a year, with 306 days remaining until the end of that year.
... There is a popular tradition that a woman may propose marriage to a man on February 29. Continued

A Brief History of Black Friday

(Mental Floss) ... It’s hard to say when the day after Thanksgiving turned into a retail behemoth, but it probably dates back to the late 19th century. At that time, store-sponsored Thanksgiving parades were common, and once Santa Claus showed up at the end of the parade, the holiday shopping season had officially started. Continued

'Huge history geek' crowned Miss USA

(Today) Beating out 50 other contestants, an auburn-haired beauty from California who was a favorite among Vegas odds-markers was crowned Miss USA at the end of the pageant's 60th anniversary contest on Sunday in Sin City.
... After revealing on the show that she was a "huge history geek" with a special interest in the Tudor and Stuart periods, Campanella added that her favorite monarch was Mary, Queen of Scots, who was beheaded in 1587. Continued

Photo: Mary, Queen of Scots

Ollie the Flying Cow

(Wikipedia) Elm Farm Ollie (known as "Nellie Jay" and post-flight as "Sky Queen") was the first cow to fly in an airplane, doing so on 18 February 1930, as part of the International Air Exposition in St. Louis, Missouri, United States. On the same trip, which covered 72 miles from Bismarck, Missouri, to St. Louis, she also became the first cow milked in flight. This was done ostensibly to allow scientists to observe midair effects on animals, as well as for publicity purposes. A St. Louis newspaper trumpeted her mission as being "to blaze a trail for the transportation of livestock by air." Continued

Baltimore native's city memorabilia is highlight of auction

(Baltimore Sun) Civil War sketchings, historical maps, and photographs of the Great Fire of 1904 are among a trove of Baltimore memorabilia that will be sold Saturday at a Towson auction house.
The sale will feature the collections of Michael Isekoff, a Baltimore native whose collection of maps and photographs rivals those found in libraries and museums, and the late Jeffrey Weiss, a local book enthusiast who amassed rare art reference and illustrated books. Continued

Solving a mystery about check from 1874

(Jacques Kelly) Monica Marcum sat in the office of the Baltimore City Historical Society and held a document she discovered among her late father's papers. It was a check dated July 6, 1874, for $62.81 for plumbing materials at the "new City Hall." She was giving the canceled check to the historical group because she thought it deserved a proper home.
She wondered how her father came into possession of this financial document for Baltimore's City Hall, which was under construction during this period and opened for business in 1875. Continued

Can you be too incompetent to understand just how incompetent you are?

(Errol Morris) ... Wheeler had walked into two Pittsburgh banks and attempted to rob them in broad daylight. What made the case peculiar is that he made no visible attempt at disguise. The surveillance tapes were key to his arrest. There he is with a gun, standing in front of a teller demanding money. Yet, when arrested, Wheeler was completely disbelieving. “But I wore the juice,” he said. Apparently, he was under the deeply misguided impression that rubbing one’s face with lemon juice rendered it invisible to video cameras. Continued

Summertime!

(LoC) June 21 marks the beginning of summer in the Northern Hemisphere. Children and adults look forward to the beginning of the season and to beating its heat with rites of summer such as swimming and eating ice cream. The date on which the season commences, the summer solstice, is the longest day of the year and the moment when the perceived pattern of the sun is farthest from the equator. Continued

Mercantile Heroes (as Seen on TV)

(NYTimes) ... They had come to this drab area near downtown Las Vegas because the Gold and Silver is the setting of “Pawn Stars,” a hit show for the History channel that has turned three generations of the Harrison family, the store’s owners, into mercantile folk heroes. In its second season, which ended in early May, “Pawn Stars” was History’s highest-rated series ever, averaging four million viewers an episode (an 82 percent increase over Season 1). In some weeks it reached five million, enough to push it into the cable Top 10. Continued

Potters Field in Childs: The Final Resting Place for Paupers

(WoCCP) The Cecil County Potter’s Field, the final resting place for paupers who couldn’t afford a burial, is located across from Mt. Aviat Academy. On the grounds of what was the county poorhouse, it contains some 150 to 200 unmarked graves. The Alms House, as it was also known, opened about 1776 and closed in 1952 when the county put the property up for sale. It was purchased by Elk Paper Manufacturing Company and the new owner donated part of the tract to the Oblate Sisters for Mt. Aviat Academy, a school. Continued

Photo: "Two hobos walking along railroad tracks, after being put off a train" (George Grantham Bain Collection/Library of Congress).

The Joy of (Outdated) Facts

(NYTBR) ... Of course, ideas of what’s worth knowing, and even what’s interesting, are constantly changing: The fascination with trigonometrical formulas certainly seems to have receded. But in a world where ever fewer people care about, or even understand the nature of, fiction, where readers and viewers demand facts and reality, outdated books of supposedly impartial information can be a useful reminder of just how slippery facts are — as unreliable as the most unreliable narrator.
Douglas Adams once told me that shortly before he wrote “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” he was working on a screenplay with the premise that all human civilization had been obliterated, except for a single copy of the Guinness book. Aliens from another planet tried to use it to reconstruct what life on Earth had been like: people sitting atop poles for 152 days at a time, eating 77 hamburgers at a sitting, talking nonstop for 127 hours. Continued

Are we Northern? Southern? Yes.

(Baltimore Sun) Brian Witte, an Associated Press writer, recently revived an old debate that's been going on since Palm Sunday, April 9, 1865, when the Army of Northern Virginia stacked its arms, parked its artillery and furled its flags for the last time at Appomattox Court House, Va. The bloody Civil War had at long last come to an end with a handshake in the parlor of Wilmer McLean's house. ... "Though Marylanders live just south of the Mason-Dixon Line, their attitudes and even their accents straddle that border," Witte wrote. Continued

Whisky Toothpaste!

"Genuine 6 proof stuff! Scotch! Bourbon! Why fight oral hygiene - enjoy it! Here's real he-man toothpaste, best argument yet for brushing 3 times a day. 3 1/2 oz. tubes flavored with the real thing - Scotch or Bourbon. Night-before feeling on the morning after. Rinse with soda if you prefer." Yummy. (Via boingboing).