Well, I suppose THAT's understandable....
Feb. 3rd, 2008 05:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
captainsblogI occasionally google my old home town, or school, or in this case church, usually in response to odd brainbleeds coming up in dreams. It's not a particularly well-known or written-about place, and the searches usually bring up the sameol' sameol.
Particularly the church. Despite it being one of the oldest continually operating congregations on Long Island, its website has been inactive for most of this century and most of the links are SuperPages-type listings of nothing more than address and phone and occasionally directions.
Today, though, brought something new- or, rather, something much older.
The New York Times recently released large chunks of its archives to the Internet on a non-pay basis. All of their past articles from 1987 to the present are now freely readable, but the more interesting part is their inclusion of many public-domain pieces from 1851 to 1922. One of those, from 1893, actually turned up in a googling of my hometown church and was a quaintly written piece about a fiery controversy of the late 19th century between its minister and a respected lawyer of the community.
No, not me. I ain't THAT old.
The piece, reprinted in .pdf form from the original newsprint version here (you may need to register to read it, but bugmenot.com's got plenty of logins for 'em), tells of a dispute between "Lawyer Mott" and the Methodist Rev. W.W. Platt over a donation of books to my church's Sunday school. The brouhaha had nothing to do with lurid content, but rather was about whether the church, in accepting the gift, would "place itself under obligations to him." (Beats me what that means, as I've never made a dime off a congregation member in over 20 years.)
It goes on to ride out the dispute in a rather endearing way, although it never reaches denouement about whether the church ever actually acquired the books or not. (I'd never heard a thing about them before this.)
I only learned the foregoing, though, after my eyes were caught by the original Google reference to the story, which told of a slightly, um, different basis for the dispute between the lawyer and the minister:
ROCKVILLE CENTRE, L.I., Feb. 24 -- A present of a number of boobs to the Sunday school of the East Meadow Methodist Church by Counselor George A. Mott has thrown this peaceful community into an uproar because the Rev. W. W. Platt opposed the accepting of the present in a superheated manner.
Like they say, All The News That's Fit for a B-Cup.
Particularly the church. Despite it being one of the oldest continually operating congregations on Long Island, its website has been inactive for most of this century and most of the links are SuperPages-type listings of nothing more than address and phone and occasionally directions.
Today, though, brought something new- or, rather, something much older.
The New York Times recently released large chunks of its archives to the Internet on a non-pay basis. All of their past articles from 1987 to the present are now freely readable, but the more interesting part is their inclusion of many public-domain pieces from 1851 to 1922. One of those, from 1893, actually turned up in a googling of my hometown church and was a quaintly written piece about a fiery controversy of the late 19th century between its minister and a respected lawyer of the community.
No, not me. I ain't THAT old.
The piece, reprinted in .pdf form from the original newsprint version here (you may need to register to read it, but bugmenot.com's got plenty of logins for 'em), tells of a dispute between "Lawyer Mott" and the Methodist Rev. W.W. Platt over a donation of books to my church's Sunday school. The brouhaha had nothing to do with lurid content, but rather was about whether the church, in accepting the gift, would "place itself under obligations to him." (Beats me what that means, as I've never made a dime off a congregation member in over 20 years.)
It goes on to ride out the dispute in a rather endearing way, although it never reaches denouement about whether the church ever actually acquired the books or not. (I'd never heard a thing about them before this.)
I only learned the foregoing, though, after my eyes were caught by the original Google reference to the story, which told of a slightly, um, different basis for the dispute between the lawyer and the minister:
ROCKVILLE CENTRE, L.I., Feb. 24 -- A present of a number of boobs to the Sunday school of the East Meadow Methodist Church by Counselor George A. Mott has thrown this peaceful community into an uproar because the Rev. W. W. Platt opposed the accepting of the present in a superheated manner.
Like they say, All The News That's Fit for a B-Cup.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-02-04 03:39 am (UTC)