Projo Subterranean Homepage News

Moving house: How a little old lady spent 23 years single-handedly dismantling her cottage brick by brick and rebuilding it 100 miles away. Great story in the Telegraph about May Savidge of Hertfordshire, England.

...In 1969, when she was 58, the bulldozers reached her gate. Her response was to number each beam and pane of glass so that her home could be reassembled like a giant jigsaw puzzle.

Dismantling the heavy oak timber frame, held together with tapered wooden pegs, was both difficult and dangerous. A team of local demolition contractors helped May. She traced over a sample of brickwork using greaseproof paper and crayons so that she would know which bond to use and how thick to lay the mortar.

She continued to live in the house as it was taken down, sleeping beneath the stars in the freezing cold. ...

YouTube - H.L. Mencken Speaks. June 30 1948, Baltimore Sun reporter Donald Kirkley interviewed journalist and culture-chronicler Mencken at the Library of Congress and recorded the conversation.

"I never got a scoop in my life..." Mecken says. "I wasn't a good reporter, except in one sense, I was willing to work."

He begins by talking about his childhood in Baltimore -- no sewers, typhoid, malaria.

This seems to be the same interview as this Caedmon recording, Mencken, H.L. - "Speaking":

Henry Mencken (1880-1956) made this recording at the Library of Congress in 1948. On side 1 he talks about Baltimore of his childhood in the 1880's, being a newspaper reporter and magazine editor, his agnosticism and free speech vs. privacy. On side 2, he talks about Jack Dempsey, alcoholic beverages, being a drama critic around 1905-10, newspaper unions, how he got interested in American speech, and why newspapers should not own television stations. And much more! Completely absorbing hour from this cranky, articulate man who witnessed so much.

It's the first of eight parts.

It's one of the treasures of the commons -- there's no video, only audio.

Not your usual cat blog: We Three, Ginger cats tales is an original, a blog full of photos of the beautiful wilds of St Davids, Pembrokeshire, Wales. And told by one of three orange cats, who appear in many of the scapes.

We live with Martha, the Old One, teller of stories and ginger too, and Max who for many years has made his living as an artists model and rat catcher...

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