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A Turkish Delight of musings on languages, deflations of metaphysics, vauntings of arcana, and great visual humor.
From Our Abecedarian Blog . . .

Today — October 31, 2025

Restoring the Lost Sense (permalink)
From Amrita, 1977.
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Restoring the Lost Sense (permalink)
"You’ve no idea how many deliciously warped and twisted memories I have of this holiday."  From Passions episode 85.
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Restoring the Lost Sense (permalink)
From Magic Seasons Toolkit by Allinson & McInnes, 1976.
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Old News (permalink)
"I love old October so, I cannot bear to see her go."  From The Children's Newspaper, 1920.
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Yearbook Weirdness (permalink)
From East Stroudsburg State College's 1979 yearbook.
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Restoring the Lost Sense (permalink)
From St. Nicholas, 1913.
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Restoring the Lost Sense (permalink)
Javanese maskers.  From Masks and Demons by Kenneth Macgowan, 1923. 
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Yearbook Weirdness (permalink)
"The way you feel when facing an audience."  From Elon College's 1917 yearbook.
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Old News (permalink)
"Haunted chairs go cheap."  From Fate Magazine, 1973.
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Yearbook Weirdness (permalink)
Her official yearbook portrait.  From Lebanon Valley College's 1972 yearbook.
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Restoring the Lost Sense (permalink)
From Leap of the Lion by Curtis Norris, 1988.
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Yearbook Weirdness (permalink)
From Northwestern University's 1909 yearbook.
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Restoring the Lost Sense (permalink)
Not everyone will see a ghost captured in this photograph.  From Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 1898.
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Yearbook Weirdness (permalink)
From Wheaton College's 1965 yearbook.
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Restoring the Lost Sense (permalink)
From Australian Women's Weekly, 1949.
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Yearbook Weirdness (permalink)
From Bay Path College's 1986 yearbook.  See Of Feeding & Caring For Sheet Ghosts.
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Old News (permalink)
Evidence against soul survival is inferential, and direct evidence could only be furnished by the dead.  But there are accounts of ghosts denying an afterlife or "other world."  From Light, 1934.
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Yearbook Weirdness (permalink)
Holidays collide.  From Watts Hospital School of Nursing's 1938 yearbook.
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Puzzles and Games (permalink)
From the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals' Our Dumb Animals, 1958.
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Miscellanies of Mr. Jonathan (permalink)

From Life, July-December 1922:

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[from a spoof horoscope]
A slight shimmying motion of Venus and Mercury has the effect of doubling Barnum's law of one sucker per minute.

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the Drivoli Theatre

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a woman at odds with the Sphinx-riddle of education

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At first we thought that the title ["Millions"] referred to the number of times the author was going to say the same obvious thing.

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Mr. Hooker...confuses rhyming long words ending in "-ation" and names of cities ending in "-tucket" with uplift in lyric writing. [Benchley]
***

[Bonus: A film-review column reminded me that when Felix the Cat is startled or perplexed, his tail turns into a question mark.]

Notes on some of the attachments:
1. As you will gather, these slightly bizarre "Intimate Glimpses" cartoons are a series (we had one earlier, labeled by me simply as "what is going on here?" or the like).
2. As you will probably also gather, the "Hubbard" bits are from a piece retelling the Old Mother H. tale à la various playwrights.
3. The bonus Pep-O-Mint ad is actually not from Life 1922, but from Cosmopolitan 1920, but I decided to pair it up with its cousin.
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