ÿþvar msg = new Array(); 

insert = new Date(); 

today = insert.getDate(); 

msg[0]="<h3 style='margin-left: -10px'><a class='white' href='http://www.platterland.com/howcome.shtml'></a>The Charles Fort connection</h3>If you are not aware of Charles Fort and his 27-year delvings in the reading rooms of the New York Public Library and the British Museum in and around those two ages of wonder called the Gay 90s and the Great Depression, if you can swallow whole the Nooz at Newn from cable or broadcast TV, then the writings and observations of Charles Fort will sound as familiar and down-home as Oprah, Rush Limbaugh and Dr. Phil.&nbsp;&nbsp;<a class='red' href='howcome.shtml'>read more&nbsp;>></a>"

msg[1]="<h3 style='margin-left: -10px'><a class='white' href='http://www.platterland.com/alistaircooke.shtml'>Alistair Cooke's Bones</a></h3>For more than 50 years Alistair Cooke lived in a rent controlled apartment in Manhattan, easily outliving several property owners and all fellow tenants. The joys of rent control were offset in 2004 by the theft of his bones. An investigation revealed that the body was dissected before being cremated and an undetermined number of his bones sold for reconstructive surgery. The Masterpiece Theatre host, who was also known in his native Britain for his long-running Letter from America on the BBC, was among dozens of victims whose body parts were harvested at one or more New York funeral homes without the permission of next of kin, according to the NYPD.&nbsp;&nbsp; <a class='red' href='alistaircooke.shtml'>read more >></a> " 

msg[2]="<h3 style='margin-left: -10px'><a class='white' href='http://www.platterland.com/looselips.shtml'>Loose Lips Sink Ships</a></h3>As a five-year-old in World War II, I never realized that we were doing without. This was normality&#151;life&#8217;s necessities were rationed. We did a lot of things for the war effort. In retrospect, I realize the civilian activities were aimed more at building home front morale than defeating the Axis powers. We saved string in big balls. We saved tinfoil in big balls. We saved bacon fat in big cans. We planted a Victory Garden to supply the family with fresh vegetables so the troops could enjoy canned and dehydrated vegetables. There were scrap drives, bond drives&#8212;we kids bought Postal Savings Stamps at school. When our little books were filled, we got a U.S. bond.&nbsp;&nbsp;<a class='red' href='looselips.shtml'>read more&nbsp;>></a>" 

msg[3]="<h3 style='margin-left: -10px'><a class='white' href='http://www.platterland.com/sylvester.shtml'>Sylvester and Beany</a></h3>The year the monarch butterflies didn&#8217;t return to Maine, I went home to Brooklyn. Something in the milkweed, they said. With a cold winter and no milkweed to browse to keep up their strength on the long flight from Mexico, the butterflies weakened and froze, dying in their millions far from the thoughtless haciendas. Almond eyes pouchy with sleep denied by fever dreams of avarice and the night sweats of free trade, the latafundistas and tin shanty dwellers alike wondered at the deaths, but with never a thought for Maine or for me. A preoccupation with the exigencies of day-to-day survival will do that. Greed will do that. Starvation clears the mind. I was busy, too, and forgot the butterflies. They were, after all, dead.&nbsp;&nbsp;<a class='red' href='sylvester.shtml'>read more&nbsp;>></a>" 

msg[4]="<h3 style='margin-left: -10px'><a class='white' href='http://www.platterland.com/bookworm_umberto.shtml'>Umberto Eco and the pygmy shrew</a></h3>I had brought along a laptop and a book, Baudolino, by Umberto Eco. I trust that very little of the Eco-esque penetrated into Rice Barge Coolie. If it has&#8212;well, we learn from the masters. I once rented a video of The Name of the Rose and thoroughly relished the film version: Sean Connery as a medieval monk, William of Baskerville. Then I had to read the book. I held on to a yard sale paperback for eight years, and just finished it for the second read. Starting takes time. And I would some years later take a crack at Dan Brown&#8217;s DaVinci Code; pale stuff when held up against Eco&#8217;s.&nbsp;&nbsp;<a class='red' href='bookworm_umberto.shtml'>read more&nbsp;>></a>"

msg[5]="<h3 style='margin-left: -10px'><a class='white' href='http://www.platterland.com/mehitabel.shtml'>How the Orange Virgin came to be</a></h3>When I began the The Return of the Orange Virgin almost 30 years ago, I had an all-over queasy feeling that it would move in and take over my life. So it did. Fast forward to 1993, and a typescript that weighed in at twelve pounds and 800+ pages. I figured it was time to go back to the beginning and actually read the thing.&nbsp;&nbsp; <a class='red' href='http://www.platterland.com/mehitabel.shtml'>read more >></a>"

msg[6]="<h3 style='margin-left: -10px'><a class='white' href='http://www.platterland.com/mudman.shtml'>Harry and the Mudman</a></h3>Harry had studied the Mudman&#8217;s early recordings, slowing them down to pick up the difficult passages. At the bottom of the grooves, struggling against a tidal surf of record noise, lay genius. These recordings, the Mudman&#8217;s grip on history, had been made at an Alabama prison camp in the 20s. The Mudman had killed someone at a card game. With an axe handle.&nbsp;&nbsp;<a class='red' href='mudman.shtml'>read more&nbsp;>></a>" 

msg[7]="<h3 style='margin-left: -10px'><a class='white' href='http://www.platterland.com/mcmuckle.shtml'>McMuckle Makes a Minyan</a></h3>Ivor McMuckle, a song plugger, has been summoned to Hyperion II, planet of the Last Diaspora, where all faiths mingle in a shared state of abject poverty. He sells off shares in excess of 120 percent of a bad, really bad, pop tune. His client, Maven Lipchutz, a lounge pianist with a dream, is not beyond a little interspecies hanky-panky: the Maven's light o&#8217; love, Heidi, is a singing fish. Final judgment devolves upon a Higher Power, said Higher Power being among the company of the conned.&nbsp;&nbsp;<a class='red' href='mcmuckle.shtml'>read more&nbsp;>></a>"

msg[8]="<h3 style='margin-left: -10px'><a class='white' href='http://www.platterland.com/looselips.shtml'>Loose Lips Sink Ships</a></h3>As a five-year-old in World War II, I never realized that we were doing without. This was normality life s necessities were rationed. We did a lot of things for the war effort. In retrospect, I realize the civilian activities were aimed more at building home front morale than defeating the Axis powers. We saved string in big balls. We saved tinfoil in big balls. We saved bacon fat in big cans. We planted a Victory Garden to supply the family with fresh vegetables so the troops could enjoy canned and dehydrated vegetables. There were scrap drives, bond drives, us kids bought Postal Savings Stamps at school. When our little books were filled, we got a U.S. bond.&nbsp;&nbsp;<a class='red' href='looselips.shtml'>read more&nbsp;>></a>" 

msg[9]="<h3 style='margin-left: -10px'><a class='white' href='http://www.platterland.com/basilrathbone.shtml'>Basil Rathbone and Robert Sheckley</a></h3>The elegant gentleman in the announce booth finished his reading, stretched, and collated his discarded pages back into an impeccable order. The year was 1966 and they still blew up the Bullwinkle and Underdog balloons for the Macy&#8217;s Thanksgiving Parade two cross-town blocks away along Central Park West. John Lennon yet flourished and Strawberry Fields was still called The Sheep Meadow. The actor looked up, as if for approval. &#8220;I wonder what the hell that was all about,&#8221; Basil Rathbone said. Well into his seventies his voice had the ring of authority. He kept supple practicing fencing moves in Central Park; it was just that cold reads were not his cup of chamomile. The program being recorded was Beyond the Green Door, a radio series written&#8213;mostly&#8213;by Robert Sheckley.&nbsp;&nbsp;<a class='red' href='basilrathbone.shtml'>read more&nbsp;>></a>"

msg[10]="<h3 style='margin-left: -10px'><a class='white' href='http://www.platterland.com/garfield.shtml'>The Death of James A. Garfield</a></h3>You probably picked up this tale expecting one of those conspiracy theory tell-alls. I mean from the title and all. Nope. In the middle of the Twentieth Century mysterious things were still reported in the Southern Highlands. However, in real life, hauntings, hexings and supernatural doings were as strange to the post-bellum South as pit barbecue, Winn-Dixie, Dr. Pepper and Royal Crown Cola were familiar. Well, there was this one item about an exploding deer that got buried in the back pages.&nbsp;&nbsp;<a class='red' href='garfield.shtml'>read more&nbsp;>></a>"

msg[11]="<h3 style='margin-left: -10px'><a class='white' href='http://www.platterland.com/judgecrater.shtml'>Judge Crater's First Miracle</a></h3>Judge Crater's First Miracle</a></h3>&#8220;&#8216;Ye lust, and have not: ye kill, and desire to have, and cannot obtain: ye fight and war, yet ye have not, because ye ask not.&#8217; James 4:2,&#8221; said the man in the doorway. &#8220;The Bible is a almanac of failed good intentions, Sister. You can help me; I am asking. Here, accept this as a further token of my sincerity. Your chastity is safe with me, I am a Democrat.&#8221; The visitor produced a large fruit basket, beribboned and covered with cellophane, of the kind often left by a well-wisher in a stateroom of a great ocean liner.&nbsp;&nbsp;<a class='red' href='judgecrater.shtml'>read more&nbsp;>></a>"

msg[12]="<h3 style='margin-left: -10px'><a class='white' href='http://www.platterland.com/judgecrater_pt3.shtml'>Necrophilia Jones (Judge Crater #3)</a></h3>&#8220;She lured me to my death. Dear Necrophilia Jones&#151;she was such a cozy little piece. I was smitten; what could I do but follow the call of the glands. I allowed myself to be murdered. Anything else would have been unfeeling, <i>insensible</i>. That&#8217;s French. Nekki was a dancer in the Roxy chorus, a showgirl. Breasts like a renaissance whore, tight blonde curls. What we called a flapper in those days. A veritable heart-stopper, sister. She had that indefinable something, a <i>je ne sais quoi</i>. Tammany. I was as corrupt as any of &#8217;em. More than most.&#8221;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a class='red' href='judgecrater_pt3.shtml'>read more&nbsp;>></a>"

msg[13]="<h3 style='margin-left: -10px'><a class='white' href='http://www.platterland.com/miguel.shtml'>Miguel Santandrea</a></h3>My old neighborhood, St. Agnes parish, was Crazy Joey Gallo&#8217;s turf. You cleaned up after. One piece of litter&#8212;a candy wrapper, a cigar butt, and he&#8217;d have your guts for garters. Like kiss your ass goodbye. His mother lived over on Wyckoff Street. Not quite Brooklyn Heights, but close. The real estate speculators who hoped to cash in on the Brooklyn Renaissance dubbed it Boerum Hill.&nbsp;&nbsp;<a class='red' href='miguel.shtml'>read more&nbsp;>></a>" 

msg[14]="<h3 style='margin-left: -10px'><a class='white' href='http://www.platterland.com/hounddog.shtml'>The fastest hound dog in the State of Maine</a></h3>I came from Wytopitlock, where I was living at the time, down to Mattawamkeag on the Bangor &amp; Aroostook Railroad one day to buy myself a hound dog. Up to Wytopitlock we was having a run on long-legged rabbits then, I didn't want none of these short-legged dogs that can run all day and not move any. I wanted one with rangy pins that could get close enough to a Wytopitlock rabbit so he'd exert himself and know he was chased. The short-legged dogs we'd been using was no good at all, and I says to myself, The Hell with that&#33;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a class='red' href='hounddog.shtml'>read more&nbsp;>></a>"

msg[15]="<h3 style='margin-left: -10px'><a class='white' href='http://www.platterland.com/milwaukeeroad.shtml'>The Milwaukee Road</a></h3>The deep winter snows had turned Depot Square into an isolated plains village. Ed Crowley was a retired brakeman from the Soo Line. Not really old as railroaders go, he was in his mid-fifties and waiting out the years to his pension working at an inside job&#8212;night telegraph operator. Ed had done some long hauling on the CB&Q&#8212;the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy, on a transfer crew riding the Northwestern tracks to Ashland, Wisconsin. Ed was crippled with arthritis that twisted his hands and wrists. Thirty years in the yards in all weather had done for Ed as a brakeman. The only parts of his hands that he was still able to articulate were the index and middle fingers before the first joint. With his wrists turned in he would yank at the patch cords and make their weights rattle in the falls, looking like a praying mantis going at its dinner. &nbsp;&nbsp;<a class='red' href='milwaukeeroad.shtml'>read more&nbsp;>></a>" 

msg[16]="<h3 style='margin-left: -10px'><a class='white' href='http://www.platterland.com/mooses.shtml'>A Deuce of Moose</a></h3>Nunzio Calabrese did not think of himself as a bad person. He loved his mother, most black people because the insides of their mouths were so pink, and his pigeons. He flew his pigeons from a rooftop. He felt joy at their tight formations and gratitude when they returned to his lure, a scrap of red bandana flown at the end of a bamboo pole. Where a lesser man would unburden his sins at Confession or between the polished pillars of a willing woman&#8217;s thighs, Nunzio partook of the freedom of the skies. He was a born killer.&nbsp;&nbsp;<a class='red' href='mooses.shtml'>read more&nbsp;>></a>" 

msg[17]="<h3 style='margin-left: -10px'><a class='white' href='http://www.platterland.com/fredsplendid.shtml'>Fred Splendid, boy announcer</a></h3>Fred Splendid was developed in the 1980s, a backward-glancing homage to the 1960s Chickenman (Dick Orkin) radio comedy series (He s everywhere&#33; He s everywhere&#33;). The commercials were the best part.&nbsp;&nbsp;<a class='red' href='fredsplendid.shtml'>read more&nbsp;>></a>" 

msg[18]="<h3 style='margin-left: -10px'><a class='white' href='http://www.platterland.com/velcro.shtml'>St. Velcro<b>"!</b> and the swan</a></h3>St. Velcro<b>"!</b> had a nagging feeling he had forgotten something. He squinted myopically. No, he had always stood here on a precipice at the banks of a wide muddy river.&nbsp;&nbsp;<a class='red' href='velcro.shtml'>read more&nbsp;>></a>" 

msg[19]="<h3 style='margin-left: -10px'><a class='white' href='http://www.platterland.com/zeitgeist.shtml'>Zeitgeist is the Right Geist</a></h3>The baby was named Oversight. Sophie Rae Shufflebeam picked her up from a dumpster behind the Pick N&#8217; Pay. She had been shopping for olives. Presumably some young mother-to-be had evacuated her bundle of joy and was not thrilled by the prospect of returning home to inquisitive parents. The baby, Oversight, had been saved for Sophie Rae&#8217;s arrival by the dumpster&#8217;s missed pickup that week.&nbsp;&nbsp;<a class='red' href='zeitgeist.shtml'>read more&nbsp;>></a>"

msg[20]="<h3 style='margin-left: -10px'><a class='white' href='http://www.platterland.com/banjo.shtml'>Tom Ashley and the Coo-coo Bird</a></h3>Tom Ashley&#8217;s tremulous high tenor sang through the scratches on the Library of Congress archive disc The cuckoo is a pretty bird she sings as she flies. She brings us glad tidings, and she tells us no lies&  Tom was recorded in 1928, a young man with a banjo.&nbsp;&nbsp;<a class='red' href='banjo.shtml'>read more&nbsp;>></a>" 

msg[21]="<h3 style='margin-left: -10px'><a class='white' href='http://www.platterland.com/mehitabel.shtml'>How the Orange Virgin came to be</a></h3><i>&#8220;wotthehell toujours gai I always say, there's life in the old girl yet.&#8221;</i> &#8213;Don Marquis&#8217; <i>Archy and Mehitabel</i>&nbsp;&nbsp;<a class='red' href='mehitabel.shtml'>read more&nbsp;>></a>" 

msg[22]="<h3 style='margin-left: -10px'><a class='white' href='http://www.platterland.com/sylvester.shtml'>Sylvester and Beany</a></h3>The year the monarch butterflies didn&#8217;t return to Maine, I went home to Brooklyn. Something in the milkweed, they said. With a cold winter and no milkweed to browse to keep up their strength on the long flight from Mexico, the butterflies weakened and froze, dying in their millions far from the thoughtless haciendas. Almond eyes pouchy with sleep denied by fever dreams of avarice and the night sweats of free trade, the latafundistas and tin shanty dwellers alike wondered at the deaths, but with never a thought for Maine or for me. A preoccupation with the exigencies of day-to-day survival will do that. Greed will do that. Starvation clears the mind. I was busy, too, and forgot the butterflies. They were, after all, dead.&nbsp;&nbsp;<a class='red' href='sylvester.shtml'>read more&nbsp;>></a>" 

msg[23]="<h3 style='margin-left: -10px'><a class='white' href='http://www.platterland.com/passengerpigeon.shtml'>Martha, The Last of the Passenger Pigeons</a></h3>A lone passenger pigeon, stuffed, returned this (2010) year to Waukesha, Wisconsin, a town where I went to high school oh, so many years ago. Was she an analog for the buffalo hunters with their stacks of skulls set to bleach on the prairies? Also, a brief from Aldo Leopold. Let s see how they come together along with&#8213;John Herald, angular and introspective, a singer and guitarist, and Martha, another wild bird, likewise gone extinct.&nbsp;&nbsp; <a class='red' href='passengerpigeon.shtml'>read more >></a>"

msg[24]="<h3 style='margin-left: -10px'><a class='white' href='http://www.platterland.com/meetthemuse.shtml'>Miss Sweet Potato Pie</a></h3>The dog, a border collie, was waiting by the parking meter. She was staring at a spot in the sky, somewhere above the heat exchanger on the roof of the Pick &#8216;N&#8217; Pay supermarket. She threw back her head for a lonesome shivering howl, a primal coyote crying down blood from the moon.&nbsp;&nbsp;<a class='red' href='meetthemuse.shtml'>read more&nbsp;>></a>" 

msg[25]="<h3 style='margin-left: -10px'><a class='white' href='http://www.platterland.com/bookworm_umberto.shtml'>Umberto Eco and the pygmy shrew</a></h3>I had brought along a laptop and a book, Baudolino, by Umberto Eco. I trust that very little of the Eco-esque penetrated into Rice Barge Coolie. If it has well, we learn from the masters. I once rented a video of The Name of the Rose and thoroughly relished the film version: Sean Connery as a medieval monk, William of Baskerville. Then I had to read the book. I held on to a yard sale paperback for eight years, and just finished it for the second read. Starting takes time. And I would some years later take a crack at Dan Brown's DaVinci Code; pale stuff when held up against Eco s.&nbsp;&nbsp;<a class='red' href='bookworm_umberto.shtml'>read more&nbsp;>></a>" 

msg[26]="<h3 style='margin-left: -10px'><a class='white' href='http://www.platterland.com/meetthemuse.shtml'>Miss Sweet Potato Pie</a></h3>The dog, a border collie, was waiting by the parking meter. She was staring at a spot in the sky, somewhere above the heat exchanger on the roof of the Pick &#8216;N&#8217; Pay supermarket. She threw back her head for a lonesome shivering howl, a primal coyote crying down blood from the moon.&nbsp;&nbsp;<a class='red' href='meetthemuse.shtml'>read more&nbsp;>></a>" 

msg[27]="<h3 style='margin-left: -10px'><a class='white' href='http://www.platterland.com/miguel.shtml'>Miguel Santandrea</a></h3>My old neighborhood, St. Agnes parish, was Crazy Joey Gallo&#8217;s turf. You cleaned up after. One piece of litter&#8212;a candy wrapper, a cigar butt&#8212;and he&#8217;d have your guts for garters. Like kiss your ass goodbye. His mother lived over on Wyckoff Street. Not quite Brooklyn Heights, but close. The real estate speculators who hoped to cash in on the Brooklyn Renaissance dubbed it Boerum Hill.&nbsp;&nbsp;<a class='red' href='miguel.shtml'>read more&nbsp;>></a>" 

msg[28]="<h3 style='margin-left: -10px'><a class='white' href='http://www.platterland.com/bookworm_diary.shtml'>The diary of an Ohio farm wife</a></h3>Winter smelled like wet wool, oatmeal and coal oil, and lungs gurgled with persistent coughs. When it snowed, the mud of the dooryard was dotted with great, plashy wet flakes, piling into drifts in a day; the brown mud seeped up as the coal smoke seeped down. Wind-blown snow exposed striations of white, black, and brown eddying in the gritty film that covered all outdoors. Soot clotted on the snow, the walls, the curtains, and in the lungs. Two kitchens and four stoves&#151;the soot and ash filtered into every room of the house.&nbsp;&nbsp;<a class='red' href='bookworm_diary.shtml'>read more&nbsp;>></a>" 

msg[29]="<h3 style='margin-left: -10px'><a class='white' href='http://www.platterland.com/illuminati.shtml'>The Illuminati owe Carl .57</a></h3>The day the Illuminati&#8212;secret, sinister&#8212;reentered my life Harold Junior pulled up in his rusted-out Lincoln Continental as I was checking my mail. Our mailboxes, down by the road, do double duty as street addresses too, here in rural Maine. Harold&#8217;s huge domestic battle cruiser had been bought cheap and came with a titanic appetite for gas and oil. But it never had to go far, only start. And it plowed through drifts that would stall a Jeep.&nbsp;&nbsp;<a class='red' href='illuminati.shtml'>read more&nbsp;>></a>" 

msg[30]="<h3 style='margin-left: -10px'><a class='white' href='http://www.platterland.com/playitsam.shtml'>Casablanca and Murray Burnett</a></h3>That Casablanca might be available for consultation as a spirit-channel from the Great Hereafter, I did not guess. But, wait! It had in its day been intended as an ad hoc guide to the dilemma of an isolationist America. Lucky Lindy loved the Fuehrer. Errol Flynn loved Hitler by most accounts. But then, no one took Flynn overly seriously&#151;his premier accomplishment was playing a piano with his penis, a party stunt. Humphrey Bogart stood up, too, but for American values.&nbsp;&nbsp; <a class='red' href='http://www.platterland.com/playitsam.shtml'>read more >></a>" 

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