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].