Silflay Hraka

John Siddall’s first essay as editor of the American Magazine was an appeal for women’s suffrage. He may have a had a personal reason for doing so–a Minnie Siddall from Ohio was an at-large member of the Ohio delegation to the Democratic National convention in 1924. Presumably she was a suffragette nine years before that—would she have had some influence on John’s stance on the question? It’s a rare surname. Give the relative closeness of Toledo, where Minnie hailed from, and Oberlin, where John was born, there would almost have to be some degree of kinship there.

But John would not have needed a suffragette relation to influence his take on the matter. He’d been affiliated with progressive causes for years.

John McAlpin Siddall was hired in 1903 by the muckraking journalist Ida Tarbell as a researcher for her expose on Standard Oil. He was working in Cleveland as an associate editor of The Chataquan magazine at the time, the publication that Tarbell helped to create and had written for 20 years earlier. He remained a prot?g? of hers for the rest of his life, following Tarbell first to McClure’s magazine, then to the American Magazine. With her help he became editor of that magazine in 1915 and remained in that position until 1923, when I suspect he learned of the cancer that would kill him. He died that year.

Ida Tarbell said this about John Siddall in her autobiography, All In The Day’s Work.

“I have never known any one in or out of the profession with his omnivorous curiosity about human beings and their ways. He had enormous admiration for achievement of any sort, the thing done whatever its nature or trend. His interest in humankind was not diluted by any desire to save the world. It included all men. He had a shrewd conviction that putting things down as they are did more to save the world than any crusade. His instincts were entirely healthy and decent. The magazine was bound to be what we call wholesome. Very quickly he put his impress on the new journal, made it a fine commercial success.”

What intrigues me is that Siddall has the air of the lead character in a historical novel, a man who rubs shoulders with the famous but leaves no mark on history of his own. Due to his association with Tarbell, he would have been an intimate of the most famous turn of the century muckrakers, as they were dubbed by Theodore Roosevelt, and his 8 years at American Magazine would have put him in touch with almost an entire generation of American writers. His photo was taken by one of the most famous photographers of his day, Arnold Genthe, and an entire stanza of a poem was devoted to him by John Reed, a notorious radical poet and journalist, a personal friend of Lenin’s, and subject of the 1981 Warren Beatty film Reds.

Comes SIDDALL with a cynic lip up-curled,–
SIDDALL, our dormer window on the World!
Kind-eyed behind his glasses, best of friends,
With the World’s foibles at his finger-ends.
Roars out a jest, and praises with a damn,
And pricks our bubbles with an epigram;
SIDDALL, as sensible as he is keen,–
The high-brow low-brow of the Magazine;
“The SPORTING EDITOR has joined the bunch”
Cries he “Here’s NORRIS, and it’s time for lunch.”

Yes, I know a little bit more about John Siddall today than I did yesterday. But that’s almost everything that is known about him, and none of it is collected into one place. I seem to have become his biographer by default.

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Ngnat is dressing up as a princess tonight. Scotty M is to remain a pumpkin.

Beer of the Night

The beer of the night was supposed to have been the Augustinian Ale, a bottle conditioned ale produced by the brewery that also makes Old Growler, Nethergate, but by the time I looked up from the evening’s surfing the contents of the pint in front of me had vanished.

I suspect the Ngnat. She’s been asking for tastes lately, often enough that it’s plain she’s decided that the best tactic in her quest for beer is to try and wear the old man down with repeated requests.

“Can I have some be-ah, Daddee?”

No, honey, you’re not old enough.

Five minutes later.

“Can I have some be-ah, Daddee?”

No, not until you’re as old as your uncle was when our daddy gave him beer.

“How old is that?”

Seven, I think. Older than you are now, anyway.

Five minutes later.

“Can I have some be-ah, Daddee?”

Go ask your mother.

I’m tempted to give her a little single malt Glenmorangie in the guise of beer the next time she asks. That should put an end to her incessant requests for my alcohol for quite a good while.

It might also have a few repecussions on the maternal side, so maybe I’ll save that strategem for a rainy day.

Can’t think of a better way to put a kid off alcohol, though. To this day her Uncle Kehaar isn’t much of a beer drinker, and when he does drink, it’s that horrible low carb crap.

It’s sad, really, how parental mistakes echo down through the years.

Kehhar is the black sheep of the family, though. Given the the genes that went into the making of Ngnat from both sides of the family, she’d knock back the neat whiskey (Yes, neat. Only an ass would put ice in his child’s scotch), then comment on how recognizable the distinctive esters of the ’91 peat harvest were in this particular usquebaugh.

“Reallee a distintif compement to da shewwy wood bawwells, Daddee.”

I will give her beer eventually, and wine, though maybe not whiskey, long before she’s of legal age in the hope that familiarizing her with them will head off some of the behavioral insanity associated with alcohol and the late teenage years that plagues American society. I suspect that the vast majority of alcohol related incidents on college campuses stem from kids reacting against harsh restrictions by drinking too much too fast, in places unobserved by adults, because those are the only places where they can drink.

Kinds need to learn to handle alcohol just as they need to learn to handle a car, yet as a society we’ve outlawed that possibility. I don’t know about you, but I’d much rather my daughter have her first few beers in the company of boys somewhere where I can watch the both of them rather than in a car at the end of a dirt road where there’s no one else around.

And no, I’m not talking about buying her and her friends a keg. That grew out of the twisted impulse of an aging woman to try and be pals with her teenage charge and his friends. I’m not quite that insecure, and I expect I’ll have no desire to pal around with any of Ngnat’s boyfriends. Ideally I would be a Grand Moff Tarkin to their Alderaan, if you get my drift.

Anyway, as I stated above, the beer of the night is Nethergate Brewery’s Old Growler Traditional English Porter, which is………….gone.

Damn that child.

The October 1915 American Magazine was the first published under the aegis of John M. Siddall. The first Sid Says, an appeal for women’s suffrage, appeared in the November issue. It’s the fourth essay in Siddall’s book, so it should appear tomorrow, barring turbulence in the life stream.

I know this because I discovered an entire run of the American Magazine in Davis Library on the UNC campus this morning. I only had time for a quick glance at the first two issues published under Siddall; neither had much in the way of biographical information–surprising to the modern eye. Nowadays a change in editor at a major magazine occasions great comment in the press. Tina Brown is to blame, I expect.

It’s a slow slog, but I’ve managed so far to run across new tidbits of information about Mr. Siddall each day without having to start emailing random Siddalls to ask about a connection, though I suspect that will come soon enough.

The photo in the first post, for instance, was taken by Arnold Genthe, a German Immigrant and acclaimed photographer around the turn of the century. It now resides in the Library of Congress, along with a number of other examples of Genthe’s work, like this one of Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Aside from the mildly distressing lack of Siddall information within them, the bound issues of The American Magazine in Davis are a treasure trove. Each are chock full of ads, portraits, and essays from one of the least studied, most forgotten eras of American History, the pre WWI years. The cover art alone is stunning. Aside from “Remember the Maine”, “Bully!” and the McKinley assassination, most people would have difficulty recalling the era from 1890 to 1917, though some might have a vague memory of trust-busting, Gibson girls and the muckrakers.

Had I the money and the time, I’d like to scan the pages of every issue of the American from that time up until….well, sometime in the 30′s at this point, since copyright would kick in at some point. Then I could start on McClure’s, or the Saturday Evening Post.

I’ve no idea why I have this compulsion to pour the textual equivalent of raw materials into the gaping maw of the Internet– it just feels like something that needs doing. There’s no other reason I can think of to explain what I’m doing, other than the need to document a native curiosity, when it comes to John M. Siddall, who at best is a minor, minor figure in American Literature.

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According to the Gender Genie, which predicts the gender of a person by analyzing the words they’ve written, I’m a man.

Whew, close one.

Of the three samples I submitted, A Bug Plug most clearly identified me as male, by 580 points. Roomates in the Afterlife also identified me as male by a comfortable margin, but I squeaked by with a bare 148 point margin after the program analyzed New Virus.

John M. Siddall easily outmasculines me, with male tendencies outpolling the female in To Get Thoroughly Married Takes Time and Trouble by a stunning 823 points.

I’m going to be pissed if the average male over female score for all the other guys is something like 1000 points.

Gender Genie link via Andy

It may be tough beating Bush in the next election, so some of the Democratic candidates are taking on an easier target………each other. This report explains how staffers for rival Democrats are now fighting one another.

An Important Update In the War On Terror

The 58th edition of the Carnival of the Vanities is hosted by Who Censored Blogger Rabbit? this week.

Upcoming Carnival stops include;

November 5th Wizbang!
November 12th Dead Ends
November 19th PeakTalk
November 26th Setting The World To Rights
December 3rd Begging To Differ
December 10th Signal + Noise
December 17th DrumWaster’s Rants
December 24th Winds of Change
December 31st Hypocrisy & Hypotheses
January 7th American Realpolitik
January 14th Snooze Button Dreams
January 21st PoliBlog
January 28th The American Mind
February 4th A Perfectly Cromulent Blog
February 11th On the Third Hand
February 18th Four Right Wing Wackos
February 25th Da Goddess
March 3rd American Digest
March 10th Aaron’s Rantblog
March 17th Open
March 24th Pete Holiday
March 31st Musings

If you’d like to host the Carnival, drop us a line. Information on how to join the Carnival can be found here. If you would like to be added to the Carnival announcement list, drop us a note, and we’ll add you.

Also, be sure to check out the Carnival’s offspring:

The Bharteeya Blog Mela

Bonfire of the Vanities

Carnival of the Capitalists

Windows users need to turn off Com+ right now. It’s in the Control Panel under Administrative Tools/Services

Yes, that’s all I know. I’ll update as I find out more.

Update: The virus just got noticed on the UNC system. All we know is that it’s using Com+ to spread. There’s no official warning, but when the Head of the Control Center makes a point of going office to office telling people to turn off stuff, you turn stuff off.

It appears whatever it is started in Granville Towers and spread. It’s attempting to get into the Carolina VPN at the moment. The possibility of such an event caused the the word “Armageddon” to be uttered for the first time. So far it has not succeeded in doing so, so the Final Trump has not yet been blown for the UNC network.

Caution: All of this info is very new. I’m obtaining it by walking around and getting people to speculate.

There’s a possibility that just turning off Com+ does not work, which would be bad, because at that point DCOM itself would have to be disabled. Directions for doing so can be found here, but I’m not doing that, yet.

More Update: Starting to look like Welchia, or a variant thereof, which begs the question of how it got out in the first place, if it is indeed a known worm.

Final Update Bam! it started, and Bam! it vanished, which allowed us to come up with a theory or three, assuming that the jump in network activity was indeed due to the Welchia virus.

Theory #1
Granville’s connectivity to the UNC system is provided by a private ISP via a Bellsouth fiber. One way ISPs fight viruses is by enabling filters on incoming and outgoing traffic. If a virus tries to spread via port 135, then the ISP will block all port 135 traffic at its border with a filter. Filters are like any other program, they can be turned on and off. Given the sudden spike in virus activity and its equally sudden disappearance, it’s possible that a filter was turned off by the Granville ISP, allowing previously infected machines to start scanning the UNC system. Then the filter was turned back on, or unwedged itself, and voila! no more virus activity.

Now you might ask, why didn’t UNC filter out port 135 at its border? We do, but Granville connects directly to our internal network.

However: We’ve since talked to the Granville ISP. They adamantly deny having any filters at all in place.

Nice.

Theory #2
Last week was Carolina’s fall break. It could be that a student took an unpatched laptop home, got infected, then didn’t turn it back on until today. Once it came up, it quickly infected all the other vulnerable machines in its IP domain. Once we blocked the infected machines, the traffic came to an end.

However: We’d expect to have seen this pattern every day since students returned from fall break, from other dorms as well as Granville. We’ve seen no such thing.

Theory #3
It’s a timed virus, set to go on and off at certain intervals.

However: There is no however.

Post Final Update: We’ve identified the virus. It’s a variant of Gaobot

The second Siddall essay from Sid Says deals with the workplace, and were it not for the writing style one could not tell whether it appeared 80 odd years ago, or yesterday.

I was going to research more on John M. Siddall today at the UNC libraries, but a server crisis pulled me out of the shower this morning. By the time everything had settled down it was after 10, and neither diamonds nor pearls will buy a parking spot at Carolina after ten on a weekday.

I tell a lie. There are pay spots available in downtown Chapel Hill, so diamonds and pearls will buy a parking space. But since they are in Chapel Hill, it takes a inordinate amount of pressed carbon and solidified shellfish spit to use one for an hour.

So I worked from home today. In place of careful research, I’ll offer the introduction to the book, written at the seventh hole* of the Dunwoodie Golf Club in Yonkers, New York by one Robert H. Davis, who seems to have been at least a little bit drunk as well as a good bit racist, on July 27th, 1917.

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