Sherry Chandler

in which NYTimes reporter Adam Cohen tries his hand at explicating “The Second Coming” with help from Helen Vendler and Harold Bloom:

The pundits who quote it, though, are picking up on Yeats’s words, but not his world view. As Helen Vendler, the great Harvard poetry scholar, and others have pointed out, “The Second Coming” is really two poems. The first eight lines are filled with the pointed aphorisms that pundits like so much, while the rest of the poem suggests the unpredictability of how history will unfold. This second, less quoted part is the one that speaks most directly to the grim situation in Iraq.

Read it if you will. I’m just glad I haven’t succumbed to the temptation to quote Yeats — at least not lately.

A friend has drawn my attention to Charlie Hughes said I ought to look at Cruel Music, a blog by Louisville mystery writer Beverle Graves Myers. In her blog, Myers shares with us her musings on certain arcane facts of the Baroque era, facts she uncovers in researching for her castrati detective, Tito Amato.

Take this entry, which as my friend Charlie suggests, might give us all something to chew on — besides $2,000/pound chocolates:

In elementary school, most of us heard about George Washington’s wooden false teeth and why his likeness on the dollar bill makes him look like he has a powerful toothache. Maybe he was just worrying over where his teeth actually came from. He had several sets of dentures, and at least one of them was made of hippotamus ivory, but none were wooden. As I researched the matter for a Baroque Mystery character that will have artificial teeth, I was surprised to find that many dentures were fashioned of real teeth. Some were harvested from cadavers by grave robbers or unscrupulous sextons. Some came from executed criminals. And in wartime, many were pulled from the mouths of soldiers as they lay dead or dying on the battlefield. Several decades after Washington’s (and Tito’s) time, these came to be know as “Waterloo teeth.”

Read on. It gets worse. There’s an intriguing picture too. Makes me wonder how in the world they ever got those things in their mouths.

Perhaps I should have saved this one for Washington’s birthday.