I can’t blame him. I’d be napping in the sun, too, if I could fit in that box.
I Am Stunned
An infinitely changeable songwriter, Mr. Bowie taught generations of musicians about the power of drama, images and personas.
Source: David Bowie Dies at 69; He Transcended Music, Art and Fashion – The New York Times
I can’t believe he’s gone. A gif of the many faces of David Bowie started making the rounds of Facebook a few days ago. The first time I saw it, I wondered what a world without any new Bowie music would be like. We’re going to find out, I guess.
I looked at my stats for my iPod. The most played Bowie song, by a large margin, is Life on Mars?.
Fuck cancer.
Northern Sky at Sunset
Just a hint of pink. Nothing to to see in the west except grey, so we’ll make do with what we get.
Winter Is Here
Rain for days, and then this. O gross.
Beware of Shiny Objects
Louis Charles Couvrette m. Marie Philomène Chauvin
Family Tree from Ancestry.com
I came across the tree from Ancestry a few days back, while looking for information on some folks in my own tree. It can be entertaining to look at what other people have done, and you never know when you might find a source you didn’t discover on your own. But this tree? It is made of NOPE. The person who made it took a census record for a family with a similar name, added the kids from that record to their family, and made frankenfamilysoup. Seriously, does the name Walter seem likely? Marjorie? And no, Louis Charles did not have a second marriage, nor did he have phantom children named Ernstine and and Albertine. Total fantasy.
I think I’ve got a pretty good handle on the family now, based on scans of marriage, baptismal, and burial records, supplemented with a pretty robust run of census records for the US, Canada, and even state censuses from Minnesota. Everyone I’ve added left a paper trail behind. And it’s a paper trail that cross-checks itself. Marriage records list both parties’ parents’ names. Baptismal and burial records list both of the children’s parents names. The kids are in the census (unless they died), living with both parents. The parents are found in the Canadian census living with their parents, backing up the marriage record. I can track the family’s migration from Quebec to Minnesota, and I can even pin down their immigration date to between 1881 and 1885, thanks to census records.
I think I’ve got a pretty solid case. I don’t know what the person who made that tree was smoking, though. So be careful with what you take from public family trees. You could get lucky, but you could get led far astray, too.
That Look
This is the look you’re given when you ask Frances if she wants you to throw the ball.
Seriously, Agatha?
Sweep, sweeping, swept. The curving bits are only marginally better. Was she sleepwriting? Was her editor drunk?
I don’t read Agatha Christie often. The racism, sexism, and classism may be dismissable as typical for her social group at the time, but the older I get, the more appalling they become. But it was $1.99 in the Kindle
store, so I thought, “What the hell?”.
The hell, indeed. It has plenty of our old friends, sexism, racism, and classism, along with some new isms. It also contains some shockingly bad writing.
Good Morning, Mister Sunshine
I was a little late for work this morning, but I have no regrets, because I got to see this while I was scraping my car. What a gorgeous winter morning.
Double Entered
Both of these snippets are from the 1861 Census of Canada. Both of them are for my great great grandparents, Louis Charles Couvrette and Philoméne Chauvin. I wasn’t even looking for the second one, because I’d already found them, presumably living with her parents. But then I found a record that had been indexed under the name Celia Couvrette. Who the hell is Celia? So I looked, and lo and behold, Celia is really Louis C.
I don’t know the specific dates each census page was taken, so it’s possible that a small amount of time elapsed between them. Maybe they were visiting her parents, were enumerated there first, went home, and were enumerated a second time? Or maybe they were actually living with her parents, were enumerated, then moved to their own home before that area was enumerated?
We’ll never know. But either of those scenarios would reasonably explain why they were double entered. It would also sadly explain why some people get missed. Move in the opposite direction, and you don’t get enumerated at all.
Oh, and I’m totally amused at the description of his occupation: Capt. de Steamboat. Holy creole, Batman!
More Spoons
“Nothing to see here. Move along, ma’am.”
red paper boat 