"The province of Ontario swooped in and took them from their parents, declaring that they had to be protected from exploitation."

"Then it exhibited the children three times a day in a human zoo called Quintland, to be raised as a sort of science experiment. Three million visitors came in the 1930s.... Little is left of the playground where the 'Quints' were displayed to thousands of paying customers who peered through wire mesh from elevated walkways. Though they still resent the way the government exploited them, Annette and Cécile smile at the mention of Quintland. 'Paradise,' Annette said of the compound. 'Was it ever,' Cécile agreed. The mesh kept them from seeing the spectators, but both sisters said they could certainly hear them, and often played the crowd for laughs. 'It wasn’t good for the children to be like that, to be shown like that, playing naturally and knowing that other people were looking,' Cécile said. 'It was sort of theft from us.'"

From "2 Survivors of Canada’s First Quintuplet Clan Reluctantly Re-emerge." The re-emergence is on the occasion of a pending decision by the North Bay city council whether to move the log house where the Dionne quintuplets were born to a fairground 45 minutes away. Annette and Cécile didn't want the house moved, and the city council voted last night not to move it. From the second link:

Shortly after their birth, the province of Ontario took them away from their parents, making them “wards of the king,” saying it was necessary to prevent their exploitation. The province soon built a human zoo in which they were exhibited to about 6,000 sightseers a day until the age of 9.

Here's a picture of the premier of Ontario — whose idea it was to take the children away — posing with the babies:



Nice outfit, ghoul.

ADDED: That was the second time in the 13-year history of this blog that I have used the word "ghoul." The other time was in 2005, soon after John Roberts joined the Supreme Court and a lightbulb happened to burst over his head. Not a metaphorical lightbulb, and actual lightbulb. And it was Halloween....

The NYT, perhaps, found it "unfit to print" a transition that would have connected the trauma of William Rehnquist's death to the Halloween lightbulb burst and the new Chief Justice dressed as a zany comedian. Surely, it must have been tempting to write that it was the ghost of the old Chief that burst the bulb and that the new Chief's costume speaks of lighthearted happiness, while the dying old Chief, traumatizing everyone, by contrast seemed a ghoul.

The word "ghoul" has appeared 4 other times, and 3 of them are from the same source, a Scalia opinion that analogizes a doctrine called the Lemon test to a movie monster that won't die. ("[L]ike some ghoul in a late-night horror movie that repeatedly sits up in its grave and shuffles abroad after being repeatedly killed and buried....") The 4th one was just last week, a reference to an effort to name a baby Ghoul Nipple.

"Ghoul" comes from the Arabic word "ghoul," which means "to seize," and the OED defines it as "An evil spirit supposed (in Muslim countries) to rob graves and prey on human corpses." So Scalia kind of got the word wrong, didn't he? He should have written "zombie." Influenced by Scalia, I got it wrong too.