at Distributed Proofreaders:

…his words had gone to her heart, and she remembered how he had embraced her when she first encountered him in the church. His manners, too, were so mild, so kind, so paternal toward her; and yet he seemed but a few years older than herself.

“You have gazed upon the portrait of the old man,” he continued, “as he appeared on that memorable evening which sealed his fate!”

Agnes started wildly.

“Yes, sealed his fate, but spared him his life!” said the unknown, emphatically. “As he is represented in that picture, so was he sitting mournfully over the sorry fire, for the morrow’s renewal of which there was no wood! At that hour a man appeared — appeared in the midst of the dreadful storm which burst over the Black Forest. This man’s countenance is now known to thee; it is perpetuated in the other portrait to which I directed thine attention.”"There is something of a wild and fearful interest in the aspect of that man.” said Agnes, casting a shuddering glance behind her, and trembling lest the canvas had burst into life, and the countenance whose lineaments were depicted thereon was peering over her shoulder.

“Yes, and there was much of wild and fearful interest in his history,” was the reply; “but of that I cannot speak—no, I dare not. Suffice it to say that he was a being possessed of superhuman powers, and that he proffered his services to the wretched—the abandoned—the deserted Wagner. He proposed to endow him with a new existence—to restore him to youth and manly beauty—to make him rich—to embellish his mind with wondrous attainments—to enable him to cast off the wrinkles of age—-”"Holy Virgin! now I comprehend it all!” shrieked Agnes, throwing herself at the feet of her companion: “and you—you—-”"I am Fernand Wagner!” he exclaimed, folding her in his embrace.

“And can you pardon me, can you forgive my deep—deep ingratitude?” cried Agnes.

“Let us forgive each other!” said Wagner. “You can now understand the meaning of the inscription beneath my portrait. ‘His last day thus’ signifies that it was the last day on which I wore that aged, decrepit, and sinking form.”"But wherefore do you say, ‘Let us forgive each other?’” demanded Agnes, scarcely knowing whether to rejoice or weep at the marvelous transformation of her grandsire.

“Did I not ere now inform thee that thou wast forgotten until accident threw thee in my way to-night?” exclaimed Fernand. “I have wandered about the earth and beheld all the scenes which are represented in those pictures—ay, and many others equally remarkable. For eighteen months I was the servant—and slave of him who conferred upon me this fatal
boon—-”

“At what price, then, have you purchased it?” asked Agnes, with a cold shudder.

…

From the scans of our copy of Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf by George W. M. Reynolds, c. 1875 — an edition substantially different from that produced by Dover.

I met my wife Barbara a bit more than 22½ years ago (though she doesn’t remember it; she stood out more in my memory than I did in hers, what with the big metal prongs sticking out of her broken leg). We would have been sitting next to one another taking a midterm exam in Darwin Stapleton’s “History of Science Fiction” class about 22 years ago today. We were at a Halloween party on Murray Hill Road 21 years ago, after I finally got a clue and asked her out. And we were married 18 years ago today.

In all the places where our plans and expectations and reactions to the world’s uncertain offerings have taken us since then, it has been my honor and pleasure to have her at my side. So many do not learn what it is to have a real helpmeet in their lives. I am blessed to say I have.

I don’t have the customary blogger’s wedding photograph scan to paste here. Maybe that’s for the best. We should wait and trot it out in the year when those fashions finally come back into style. On which anniversary we will surely still be smiling knowingly at the follies and foibles of the young, together, just as we are now.

Happy Anniversary, Barbara.

Advice to… somebody: Watch Your Back:

“Bloggers are more of a threat than people realize, and they are only going to get more toxic. This is the new reality,” says Peter Blackshaw, chief marketing officer at Intelliseek, a Cincinnati firm that sifts through millions of blogs to provide watch-your-back service to 75 clients, including Procter & Gamble and Ford. “The potential for brand damage is really high,” says Frank Shaw, executive vice president at Microsoft’s main public relations firm, Waggener Edstrom. “There is bad information out there in the blog space, and you have only hours to get ahead of it and cut it off, especially if it’s juicy.”

See the point, in context even, at The Reading Experience.

It was disclosed that [a resurrectionist gang] had a regular contract with the firm of A. H. Jones and Company, Ann Arbor, Michigan, and that they operated in different parts of the state, remaining at one point for only a short time. Evidence was found to show that they were then attempting to fill an order for seventy bodies, two of which, that of an old lady and a boy, had been recently exhumed at Toledo, and that sixty bodies had been shipped to the Ann Arbor firm while the gang was operating at Columbus.

From Odd Ends.

Do you say, “Friend did something once [Friend, 2000], and I want to talk about it with you now…”? Or, “As was shown with elegance and poise in [Friend, 1998], it is clear…”? Or do you go for the telegraphic faint praise approach, with “Friend [1988] published a number of papers touching on this topic, but several important questions have arisen since…”?

I ask, because a colleague asked me to read his draft NSF grant proposal today, and he decided to simply use numbers in brackets. As nouns, some proper. No names, no nuthin’ — to save space. I realized it’s not that far from the standards mentioned above, but far enough to raise an eyebrow or two.

update: The tone of the comments makes me realize that perhaps I was unclear. Here’s an example of the sort of sentence my colleague was using:

[14] has done a great deal of work on this subject, and hangs out with [5] at [6] all the time, so maybe we should ask them both to explain [7].