Friday, September 19, 2025

Another phone-in installment today. Forgive me my indolence.

Item 1: a link

I could go to the trouble of rewriting this post from the Indignity publication but why bother? These professional writers already wrote it. So here's just a taste and then you should go read it – heck, maybe even subscribe.

I'VE BEEN READING The Count of Monte Cristo, the Penguin Classics edition, translated by Robin Buss. I'd never properly understood just how much of the novel takes place after Edmond Dantés escapes from prison and lays hands on his incomparable fortune—that entire opening part is wrapped up in less than 250 pages, leaving more than 1,000 pages of story for him to use that wealth and his painfully acquired talents to wreak revenge on the people who wronged him. Nor had I counted on Alexandre Dumas, writing in the mid-1840s, presenting an unambiguously lesbian character ("Not a single glance or sigh from [her suitor] escaped her, but they appeared to be deflected by the breastplate of Minerva, which philosophers sometimes say in fact covered the breast of Sappho").

But so far the thing I least expected in the story happened toward the beginning, not long after Dantés was locked up after being caught as the unwitting courier of a seditious letter from Napoleon, exiled to Elba, to his sympathizers in Paris. The local prosecutor in Marseilles rushes to Paris to warn King Louis XVIII of the intercepted message, in which Napoleon announced his plans to invade and re-conquer Paris. The king is informed of the prosecutor's arrival, and told that "he has just covered two hundred leagues by road, in barely three days." 

To this, Louis XVIII replies: 

"He has expended a lot of energy and a lot of trouble, my dear Duke, when we have the telegraph that only takes three or four hours, and does so without making one in the slightest bit out of breath."

This was confusing on two counts. First of all, Napoleon escaped from Elba and marched on Paris in 1815. Samuel Morse didn't send "What hath God wrought?" from Washington, D.C. to Baltimore until May of 1844—29 years after Napoleon's return, and only three months before Dumas published the first newspaper installment of The Count of Monte Cristo. 

Second of all, Samuel Morse's telegraph would have conveyed a message from Marseilles to Paris in much less time than three or four hours. What was going on? 

What, indeed?

Item 2: a list

Lettuces, ranked:

1. Butterhead
2. Little Gem
3. Oak Leaf
4. Romaine (aka Cos/Kos)
5. Lollo Rosso
6. Loose-leaf
7. Lollo Bionda
8. Iceberg

Item 3: a media recommendation

Item 4: word of the week

Hypocorism

Ever since I can remember I resented my parents for naming me "Winifred", which naturally led to me going by the hypocorism "Winnie" for my entire life. But now, in my dotage, I'm just thankful that nobody calls me "Winifred".

Item 5: a photograph

See ya!

Again next week? Yes, probably.