Althouse: "I am against corporations; ain't going to give them any powers."/"The corporations — they want this? What will they pay for it?"

May 16, 2008

"I am against corporations; ain't going to give them any powers."/"The corporations — they want this? What will they pay for it?"

Teddy Roosevelt condemns the 2 extremes — in the year that blog forgot: 1899.

Also noted today:

Queen Victoria pats a terrier.

And:

Reverend W.W. Reynolds wrings his ... hands over "women of refinement and exquisite moral training addicted to the use of the bicycle."

ADDED: Fortunately, 1899 is one of the years in the NYT archive that you can access without paying (or having an educational account), so everyone will be able to read the underlying news stories for free.

I'm still trying to figure out the best way to deal with the problem of the TimesSelect wall that blocks the middle section of the 100 years I'm blogging in my new side project The Time That Blog Forgot. I've thought of a few ideas:

1. Use a style of blogging that makes consulting the underlying article unimportant. You'll know there is an article supporting the post, but you won't need to read it.

2. Try to get the NYT to give me a way to link that bypasses the system they have in place. And, by the way, why do they have this system? How much money can they make off the old archive? How can it be worth the annoyance and the ill will that is created? Also, they need to replace the PDFs with text files. I know they have the text on line somehow, because when I Google words from the center of the article, it comes up first.

3. Find other historical archives that can be searched by the day and year.

12 comments:

rhhardin said...: women addicted to the use of the bicycle

That was before the invention of women's bicycle seats

A design that then turned out to work for men as well, for a different reason; though the design still differs because the sit bones are at different separations.

See also Paul Harvey: If the world made any sense, it's men that would ride horses side-saddle.; 5/16/08, 6:20 AM
vbspurs said...: Queen Victoria was perhaps the most influential pet owner in history.

She not only single-handedly popularised the Pomeranian, the Shit-zu, the Borzoi (personally given her by Tsar Alexander II), the pug, the collie, the labrador and all kinds of gun dog breeds, but she and her daughter-in-law, Princess Alexandra, also had a thing for Pekingese.

Empress Tsu-Hzi, the infamous Empress of China, personally sent both these ladies the very first Pekingese ever seen in the Western world, from which all Pekingese today in the West are descended.

When this photo of Queen Victoria was published, hugging her beloved dog Sharp to her, it caused a sensation with the British public, one of the first after Prince Albert's death in relaxed attitudes.

This penny postcard sold by the thousands.

But it was the Pomeranian Turi (the breed had not yet defined itself) which she adored best at the end of her life.

In fact, her second to last words were "I want Turi", and the dog was on her lap as she breathed her last.

It's so lovely to read of her gesture of wanting to pat Tim's head, in 1899.

And even more, of dropping a gold sovereign in the relief box.

She was quite halt and lame at the time, bent over double as she had severe osteoporosis.

Considering she was exactly 80 years old at the time, and the present Queen is 82 but acts like she's 60, what a difference, eh?

Nice article, Ann.

Cheers,
Victoria; 5/16/08, 7:03 AM
MadisonMan said...: My youngest grandparent was born in 1899. I guess that's why they are all long dead.

I miss my grandmother.; 5/16/08, 7:10 AM
Ann Althouse said...: There are so few people left who were born in the 19th century, but it's amazing that there are some. I don't know any though. Is anyone from the 19th century blogging?; 5/16/08, 7:25 AM
Ann Althouse said...: Oh, yeah, there is. Olive Riley born in today's year, 1899!

It seems that "Mike" interacts with her and puts the material up, but still!; 5/16/08, 7:32 AM
vbspurs said...: Yes. The beautiful Olive Riley from Australia, born (are you sitting down?) in 1899!

I wrote this blogpost on her, and have received email updates about her, which had stopped a while ago. My heart sank.

But bless her, her last post is dated April 24, 2008, titled "Someone Peed On the Fish" (hehe).

Here's her blog:

Life Of Riley

A woman who was alive when Queen Victoria was patting a dog in a train station, Teddy Roosevelt was a Governor, women weren't that secure on bicycles...and a fellow blogger. GO OLIVE!!

Cheers,
Victoria; 5/16/08, 7:35 AM
Paddy O said...: Do find some way to get at these archives. Reading the full text is wonderful fun.

This is so much why I love history. We can't talk to so many from the past but we can listen to them and piece together their world which is so different than our own, even as we share so many of the same human traits and surface values.

I realize how much I like Roosevelt, and how much I really don't like W.W. Reynolds. Not necessarily because of his moralizing, but because he is precisely the reason why the church failed and stumbled. Obsessed with the distractions he becomes the moral guide of exquisitely moral and refined women instead of a preacher to the poor and outcast. Explains so much.

I suspect Reverend W.W. Reynolds would have a fair amount of comments about California today.

Thanks again, Professor.; 5/16/08, 8:12 AM
rcocean said...: There was a recent article about women in NYC being the subject of 'course, immoral, and boisterous" gestures by construction workers, etc.

They wanted the someone to protect them from the "sexual Harassment".

No doubt the same thing was happening in 1899.; 5/16/08, 9:01 AM
Freder Frederson said...: pdf is superior in every way to text and uses a lot less storage. It is also very difficult to scan paper or microfilm documents and convert them to text files. Both of these reasons are why these older documents are pdfs.

Get yourself a copy of Adobe Acrobat. The academic version is $159. But UW probably has a site license and you probably can get it for free.; 5/16/08, 9:09 AM
Trooper York said...: "Reverend W.W. Reynolds wrings his ... hands over "women of refinement and exquisite moral training addicted to the use of the bicycle."

Tom Nuttall: My bicycle masters boardwalk and quagmire with aplomb. Those that doubt me... suck cock by choice.
(Deadwood, 2004)

Cool. Victorian blow jobs.; 5/16/08, 10:24 AM
rhhardin said...: He liked, for one thing, to do tricks on a bicycle. The contraption was new to him, and he wanted to do tricks on it. One trick that he liked especially was riding backwards. But there wasn't one woman in ten thousand, riding frontwards on the rear seat of a tandem wheel, who would permit her consort to ride backwards on the front seat. The result of all this was not adjustment, but irritability. Man became frustrated.

_Is Sex Necessary_ Thurber and White; 5/16/08, 8:44 PM
blake said...: pdf is superior in every way to text and uses a lot less storage

WTF? I can't believe this was allowed to stand!

PDF is an adequate means of storing literal printing information, but inferior to text in many ways, including ease of search.

But "uses a lot less storage" is so wrong as to be insane. Uncompressed plain-text ASCII uses one byte per character (and compresses down 80% or more) while PDF uses thousands upon thousands.

I have a seven page PDF file that contains no text whatsoever and takes up over 250,000 bytes. A text file with the same content would be zero bytes!

A more typical example is a 50 page document I have that takes over 500,000 bytes. Assuming small type, that same document would be less than 100,000 bytes plain text. Compressed, it would be more like 20,000 bytes.

Where the hell did you get the idea that PDFs were, in any way, efficient? Even among markup languages PDFs are considered pretty bad, I believe.

What they are is ubiquitous. (They're also a PITA to index, use with blind-assisting software, etc.); 5/17/08, 6:55 PM