the dog-boy of Carnies Past

Adam Stephanides · 06 Aug 2002, 02:32 · from urth-v0208.mbox · original

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: Adam Stephanides <adamsteph at earthlink.net>
Subject: Re: (urth) the dog-boy of Carnies Past
Date: Mon, 05 Aug 2002 21:32:23 -0500
Message-ID: <urth-v0208-1540 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0208/1540.txt.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

on 8/4/02 3:16 AM, Roy C. Lackey at rclackey at stic.net wrote:

> I said only that it was "possibly" Smart. Against that idea is the near
> certainty that the tall man with thick glasses is Tom Lavine. Tom's
> constitution is such that, as Charlie writes, he "won't live long". If the
> sepia is natural, the picture taken decades ago, how likely is it that Tom
> would still be alive to pay court to Doris at a time when Weer was about
> fifty? Charlie referred to Tom as a "kid". Weer was president for only ab=
out
> 15 years before he died, not enough time for the photos to have faded and
> turned brown on the day he showed them to Miss Hadow. If the sepia was
> faked, the pictures still shouldn't have faded in 15 years. In other word=
s,
> it would be pretty hard for Tom Lavine to have been a contemporary of both
> Smart and Doris.

In fact, Charlie says that Tom is eighteen.  So if the letter is factual,
and the picture is indeed of Tom, it must have been taken around the time
the letter was written, which is inconsistent with the "faded sepia" color,
as you argue.  So either the letter is a fiction, or the picture is not of
Tom, or some sort of weird time-slippage thing is going on, as mantis
suggests.  And why does Charlie not mention the second picture in his
letter?

--Adam

--=20

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net