(Posted by Doug Skinner)

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We return to that interesting character, Benjamin De Casseres.  There are only a few pictures of him online: a caricature, for example, and a photo of him celebrating the 21st Amendment.  So, here’s a portrait of De Casseres with his wife Bio. The picture is taken from his 1931 book, Love Letters of a Living [...]

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From the audience, Angela Alverson captured a snippet of the recital at the Jalopy Theatre.  My beginning uke class made its first public appearance with this blues chorus.  From left to right: Katherine, Rachel, teacher, Carrie, Ana, and Ashley.  They’re on their way! Another of my uke students, Robin Hoffman, keeps a blog of her [...]

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Ancient coral or ancient ladies’ swimming cap? On the first day of spring, which in New York City was particularly welcome and unseasonably warm, I took a long walk on the sands of Dead Horse Bay, a quiet inlet tucked away not far from Floyd Bennett Field (the City’s very first airport), now abandoned to [...]

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You can find la Porta Magica in Rome, on the Piazza Vittorio.  It’s what remains of the villa of Massimiliano Palombara, a 17th century occultist. There are at least two competing stories about it.  One is that an archetypical mysterious stranger visited Palombara, and asked for funds and a room to test his alchemical know-how.  Palombara agreed; the stranger [...]

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I think my high school offered one basic course in psychology, which I did not take. Surely it dealt in stripped-down basics – the classification of emotions, some de-sexualized Freudian theory, and maybe a little Jung thrown in for the artsy kids. I’d like to think, if I’d had the opportunity to take a class [...]

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John A. Keel died a few days ago, on Friday, July 3, 2009. As some of you may know, I knew him for many years.  Larry Sloman and I were his medical proxies for the past couple of years, and did our best to help him with his legal and medical problems. He was in [...]

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One of the grand old men of British forteana, John Michell, died on April 24.  I only met him a few times; he was always kind and gracious.  The last time I saw him, we discussed our common fascination with the number 5040 (Plato’s ideal population for the Republic, among other things).  He was a fine writer [...]

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Jarry?  In the medical museum?  It’s a funny place to find him, but there he is: the following prose poem, “Les Cinq Sens” (“The Five Senses”), is taken from his first book, Les Minutes de sable mémorial (Minutes of memorial sand, 1894).  In it, the narrator makes his way through a natural history museum into a [...]

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[We resume the serialization of my talk on the cultural hurly-burly that greeted Darwin's theories.  As we open this section, our animal friends are really going at it.] Lions and tigers make ligers and tigons; camels and llamas make camas; antelopes give taxonomists nightmares.  Mules have been known to foal baby mules; yaks, bison, and [...]

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