The Actual Page

I snuck a photo of the sheet written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. No flash, but it came out decent enough.

I also snuck a photo of the title page for an Appleton edition of "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland", from 1866. May come in handy once I start the rewrite of "The Alice '65".

I'm already done in New York so headed home, tomorrow. Then I'm off to Maine on Tuesday. A bit whirlwind-like, but this way I can change out my 50 lb suitcase for a smaller one and do some decent laundry, not to mention get my mail and submit an expenses report. That's gonna be a good one.

Reading the message boards dealing with the slaughter in Newtown, CT really makes me ashamed to be an American. The gun worshipers and religious freaks are blaming the victims for not having guns or God in the classroom. And the Democrats are rolling over in the debate over gun control. All so typical.

I've felt for a long time that it's too late for gun control, that we don't even enforce the laws we have now. What with the NRA being the new religion of so many white, Southern, redneck, cowboy wannabes and scum like Mike Huckabee and Bryan Fisher using events like this to forward their repressive agendas, we'll never get guns out of the hands of the nuts. There are too many out there and too many people who'd happily shoot up anybody who tried to take their assault rifles away from them.

Besides, mass murder like this is not a recent development in America. Around 1930, a disgruntled maintenance man blew up a school full of children in the midwest, someplace, killing dozens, before killing more (including himself) in a booby-trapped car...if I remember the details right; it's been a few years since I read about it. Then there was the St. Valentine's Day Massacre in 1927 and people getting killed in drive-by shootings during prohibition. And don't forget the genocide we practiced against the Native Americans. And the killings during the civil rights movements in the south. It just keeps going on and on.

Man insists on proving just how much of an animal he is, often even as he proclaims himself to be one of God's children. Maybe it's just the nature of the beast.