It’s 2020, and that means that the decennial Census must be completed. On Wednesday, April 1st, I filled out the Census survey online. And, as I said I would two years ago… As I wrote in that two year-old blog post, “I have decided that I will report that my ancestors come from Grand Fenwick, … Continue reading Completing the Census
Author: Allyn Gibson
A writer, editor, journalist, sometimes coder, occasional historian, and all-around scholar, Allyn Gibson is the writer for Diamond Comic Distributors' monthly PREVIEWS catalog, used by comic book shops and throughout the comics industry, and the editor for its monthly order forms. In his over ten years in the industry, Allyn has interviewed comics creators and pop culture celebrities, covered conventions, analyzed industry revenue trends, and written copy for comics, toys, and other pop culture merchandise. Allyn is also known for his short fiction (including the Star Trek story "Make-Believe,"the Doctor Who short story "The Spindle of Necessity," and the ReDeus story "The Ginger Kid"). Allyn has been blogging regularly with WordPress since 2004.
Thr last few days have been a little rainy, a little chilly, a little gloomy. And work has been in a bit of a holding pattern; what I’d normally be doing this week — the order forms — has been pushed to next week, so I’ve spent the last two days trying to do next … Continue reading A Perfect Spring Day
This is something I found a couple of weeks ago and have been meaning to share. On September 28, 1918, former president Theodore Roosevelt visited Baltimore and delivered a speech at Oriole Park on Greenmount Avenue to extol the Fourth Liberty Loan (ie., war bonds), and this video shows TR and dignitaries delivering a speech … Continue reading Teddy Roosevelt in Baltimore
I don’t know about anyone else, but my sleep patterns have turned to utter chaos these last three weeks. One night I might have bifurcated sleep (sleep, significant break, sleep), the next restless near-insomnia, and the next ten solid hours of sleeping like the dead. That, at least, has been my pattern over these last … Continue reading Wrapping Up the Catalog Copy
Over the weekend I spent some time cleaning up my office space in my apartment. If I have to work from home for a couple of weeks, I’m going to need a comfortable environment. When I went out on Saturday for supplies and to pick up my new prescription, I also picked up a table … Continue reading Office Space (Not the Movie)
Even without my alarm clock going off, my bladder “knew” when I normally woke up to go to work, and it roused me at six-thirty. I got up, took care of business, turned on the coffee pot, and opened the apartment’s front door. The clouds were pretty at dawn, and I wanted to capture the … Continue reading Spring Fever at Week’s End
There are Sherlock Holmes novels. And there are novels starring Sherlock Holmes. There’s a difference, a subtle one, but still a difference. A Sherlock Holmes novel has the usual trappings — the client upon the stair, a few cuts at the violin strings, some deduction, a hansom cab out on a dark night on a … Continue reading The Martian Menace
Throughout January I worked, off and on, on something of a private project, to make an ebook of Ellery Queen’s long-out-of-print anthology, The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes. An anthology of Sherlock Holmes parodies, sprinkled with a few genuine pastiches and two play scripts, essentially a survey of non-Doyle Sherlock Holmes literature to mid-century, The Misadventures … Continue reading The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes: Making an eBook
Recently while digging around on the Library of Congress website I found a series of photographs of young women playing baseball. The photos were undated; they had a range between 1909 and 1923, nothing more specific. The uniforms resembled those worn by Ida Schnall’s New York Female Giants in 1913, though without the stitched logo … Continue reading Women Playing Baseball in the 1910s
Some parts of my job I rarely, if ever, talk about. Working on the monthly, annual, and now decennial sales charts is one of those things. There was a lot of math involved for the decennial tables, limited as they are, but before I got to the math there was a lot of thinking. Just … Continue reading I Was Told There Would Be No Math
You haven’t lived until you’ve digitally clipped mid-19th-century cursive from a scan of a faded and dirty print. This is B.F. Smith’s landscape of Washington, showing projected improvements in the capital city — the Washington Monument, a stone bridge across the Washington City Canal — from 1852. I found this on the Library of Congress … Continue reading Revisiting the Washington That Never Was
A week and a half ago I discovered Adolph Sachse’s “bird’s eye view” map of Washington, DC, circa 1883-1884, and I was able to find where my ancestors lived in Washington from the Civil War to the mid-1880s. There was something else I was interested in. Swampoodle Grounds. Swampoodle Grounds, also known as Capitol Park, … Continue reading Revisiting Swampoodle Grounds