The Caesarea (Israel) Hoard

Amateur divers recently found nearly 2,000 coins from the 11^th century in this ancient harbor in Israel:

Link:

Israel's largest-ever gold hoard discovery reported at ancient harbor

Coin World, March 9, 2015

Despite being underwater for nearly 1,000 years, the coins didn't need cleaning or conservation. That's gold, brother. It resists corrosion and tarnish. 

Discovered in Caesarea National Park, Israel

But let us be honest. And precise. This is not a hoard. Proper hoards are accumulated by eccentrics, gathered  obsessively, guarded jealously in secrecy for years. Hoards are hidden. They are bricked up in walls, hidden beneath false floors, and stashed in chests in the basements of derelict houses, as in The Hardy Boys: The Mystery of the Applegate Treasure (Mickey Mouse Club, 1956).

In contrast, the Caesarea discovery is the result of a mere natural disaster. This is shipwreck gold. Nevertheless, I would like to find 2,000 gold coins. Hoard, shipwreck, or otherwise, sack of gold lying in the middle of the street... it makes no difference to me.

Bristol Palin Engaged!

Ah, Bristol. You keep popping up in my life, when I least expect it.

Her fiance must be a good man. He won the Medal of Honor. But now he faces even tougher challenges. Sarah Palin will be his mother-in-law. And both Sarah and Bristol are more famous than he is.

Link:
Bristol Palin to marry US Medal of Honour winner Dakota Meyer
The Daily Telegraph, 3:08PM GMT 15 Mar 2015

Banned TV commercial from 1960s

This politicaly incorrect Funny Face Drink Mix commercial from the early 1960s includes two shockingly unkind racial stereotypes. At the very end, Injun Orange says, in broken English: “Askum for Funny Face drink,” as buck-toothed Chinese Cherry cackles maniacally. 

I was exposed to this virulent prejudice as an innocent TV-watching youngster. Look what it has done to me. I am corrupted. To this day, when a bartender asks me what I'm drinking, I am tempted to reply: “Askum for Funny Face drink.” It's not entirely inappropriate. If I have too many drinks at Happy Hour, I do in fact begin to make funny faces.  

Epilogue: At the insistence of The Pillsbury Company's legal counsel, Injun Orange was quickly recast as Jolly Olly Orange. Chinese Cherry became Choo Choo Cherry.

Link: 

Funny Face Drink Mix - banned commercial - YouTube

The Likeness By Tana French

466 pp., Penguin Books, 2008

ISBN 978-0-14-311562-5 (pbk)

Here's another smasher from Tana French. I’m ready to declare this one of my favorite books of the year, and it’s only January.  

Cover, U.S. 

The Likeness takes the form of a procedural crime novel, but as Salon’s reviewer points out, “the hypnotic prose and eerie atmosphere conspire to make this ostensible mystery novel much, much more than it appears to be.” 

As for the plot: a young woman, Lexie Madison, is murdered. The police decide to tell the world she survived the attack so that detective Cassie Maddox can investigate undercover by impersonating Lexie. It’s a ruse made possible because the two are nearly identical in appearance.

Yes, at first glance it’s a barely credible premise. I kept expecting it to collapse, but the author does a fine job of making it realistic, in part because she introduces some interesting conflicts. Investigator Cassie becomes immersed in her fake Lexie identity. Boundaries blur between her real and undercover lives.She forms deep bonds with the dead girl’s four housemates, all graduate students at Trinity College (the one in Dublin, not Hartford). They are the closest of friends, 

Cover, U.K.

 happy in their self-contained world. So is Cassie, once she infiltrates it.  Her infatuation with her new friends and the adrenaline rush of the assignment complicates matters and endangers Cassie as well: 

“That hard black stone of fear had dissolved… turned into something sweet and lemon-colored and wildly intoxicating.” (p. 106)

French has chosen her characters' names with care. Note the parallel construction of the two girls's names: Cassie/Lexie and Maddox/Madison, a clever way of linking the two characters. Raphael, known as Rafe, is a rake, a drunk, a seducer and all-around loose cannon. They live in Whitethorn House, a thorn in the side of rebellious Irish in the nearby village because of the house's Anglo-Irish history.      

For this reader, the murder mystery aspect became purely secondary once I reached the point where the victim’s four friends are introduced. Each of them are carefully drawn, fully realized characters. I found myself wishing I was part of their circle. 

This book has something to say about the value of friendship and the price that has to be paid for all things, including deception and truth. Cassie confronts Abbie, one of the former friends during the book's excellent epilogue. With deception revealed and the friends dispersed, the sense of loss is piercing: 

"Something had gone out of her skin: a luminosity, a resilience....I wanted to tell her that being loved is a talent too, that it takes as much guts and as much work as loving; that some people, for whatever reason, never learn the knack." (p. 460)

As in other books, French  takes the opportunity to point out the creeping materialization and vulgarization of Irish culture, the price paid for the economic bubble of the last decade: 

"We have sushi bars and SUVs, but people our age can't afford homes in the city where they grew up, so centuries-old communities are disintegrating like sand castles." (p. 335)

This is a perceptive and elegant writer. I wonder if she'll ever choose to break free from the mystery thriller genre she chose with her first novel, In the Woods. It worked for J. K. Rowling. In the meantime, I can’t wait to read her next two novels, which I've already purchased: Faithful Place and Broken Harbor. 

Links:

Salon 2008 Book Awards review
New York Times review
My review of The Secret Place by Tana French

Author Tana French's website

Butte County Nugget

A prospector discovered this 70-ounce gold nugget in Butte County, California in October. It's amazing that something so large went undetected for so long.

70-oz. gold nugget
Butte County, CA

Link:
California Man Finds Gold Nugget
Coin World, October 24, 2014

Books Read in 2014

I read 37 books in 2014. That’s hardly surprising, since I was either unemployed or retired, depending on how you view it, for eight of those 12 months. With plenty of time on my hands, I also set a personal record for number of blog posts written in a year. 

Once again, I'm surprised by how much of my reading falls into the crime and thriller categories. Apparently my tastes aren't as sophisticated as I thought they were. Be that as it may, here are all the books I read in 2014, in alphabetical order by author, with my favorites highlighted in boldface. 

FICTION

1. Atkinson, Kate: Behind the Scenes at the Museum - Set in a pet shop in York. Quite different from her later Jackson Brodie  stories. Winner of the 1995 Whitbread Prize.
2. Banks, Russell: Rule of the Bone            
3. Bingham, Harry: Love Story, With Murders - Honestly, I can't remember anything about this book. But I suppose the title must be self-explanatory.     
4. Collins, Suzanne: Catching Fire
5. Collins, Suzanne:  Mockingjay - I have assigned this "favorite" status simply because the exquisite Natalie Dormer (A Game of Thrones) has a role in the film version.  

   

   The exquisite Natalie Dormer

6. Cronin, Justin:  The Passage - A military genetic experiment gone wrong and the dystopian world it creates. A page-turner, and the first of a trilogy. 
7. Cronin, Justin: The Twelve - This sequel to The Passage does not disappoint. It thoughtfully includes a handy cast of characters in an appendix, sort of like George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire. Book 3 is due in 2015. 
8. Fowler, Christopher: The Invisible Code             
9. French, Tana: The Secret Place - Murder at a  girls' boarding school in Dublin. See separate entry in this blog. I'll read her other novels. 
10. Gailey, Samuel: Deep Winter - I bought this for the rural Pennsylvania setting. The author captures it pretty well. 
11. Gregory, Phillippa: The Constant Princess - The princess in question is Katherine of Aragon. I loved it.
12. Highsmith, Patricia: Deep Water - Well written and very dark. 
13. Joyce, Graham : Some Kind of Fairy Tale - Made a big impression on me. See separate entry in this blog. Sadly, the author died in September. A link to his obituary: Graham Joyce, Fantasy Author, Dies Aged 59.
14. King, Stephen:  Doctor Sleep - His best in quite a while. Sequel to The Shining.
15. Le Carre, John: The Russia House - The master of espionage lives up to his reputation. With recent events in Russia and Ukraine, he may be able to return to the topic he does so well. 
16. Martin, George R.R.: A Dance with Dragons
17. Mina, Denise: Slip of the Knife - One of my favorite Scottish crime writers.  A Paddy Meehan novel.
18. Oates, Joyce Carol:  The Accursed -   Gothic, satirical, excellent, this was a helluva read. Imagine a "taken by the fairies" tale incorporating Woodrow Wilson, Grover Cleveland, Theodore Roosevelt, Jack London, Upton Sinclair...  and that's only part of the story. Read the New York Times review by Stephen King here. 
19. Patterson, James with Pearson, Mark: Private London - Disappointing. It is hard to imagine why I'd read another Patterson novel, unless under desperate circumstances such as being stuck in an airport during a snowstorm.
20. Pym, Barbara: An Unsuitable Attachment - Motivated me to join Pym’s Facebook fan group. People complain that nothing much happens in Pym’s books, but I can remember more of this one that most books I read this year. 
21. Rankin, Ian:  Saints of the Shadow Bible - Another good Scottish crime writer. An Inspector Rebus novel.
22. Rendell, Ruth: No Man's Nightingale - Very good. I resolved to read more of Baroness Rendell's crime fiction, as you can see below. 
23. Rendell, Ruth: The St. Vita Society - See separate entry in this blog.
24. Robotham, Michael: The Night Ferry - Formulaic, disappointing. Sorry, but I'll read nae more Robotham.
25. Sedgwick, Marcus: White Crow - Well-written young adult novel. Not as good as Midwinterblood.
26. Shakespeare, William: A  Midsummer Night's Dream -  When I left my job in May, I resolved to read a lot of Shakespeare. It’s the kind of thing people do in such circumstances.
27. Shakespeare, William: Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - This is as far as I progressed with my Shakespearean reading resolution. What exactly is rotten in the state of Denmark? And why? I was relieved to learn I'm not the only person who is puzzled by this. 
28. St. Aubyn, Edward: Mother's Milk - Not sure I want to read any more St. Aubyn. Not sure I’d want to meet him, either. Strange mixture of clever and dark.
29. Woodrell, Daniel:  Under the Bright Lights, Muscle for the Wing, The Ones You Do – Three early novels by the author of Winter's Bone. These aren't as good. I’ll try his later work.

NON-FICTION

1. Applebaum, Anne: Iron Curtain - The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956. Worthwhile look at a time that doesn't seem to get much attention from historians. 
2. Hendel, Ronald: The Book of Genesis: A Biography - More about the history of Bible study than Genesis itself, this was written by an academic who manages to make his topic interesting to the layman. I wish I'd taken his classes in college. 
3. Moran, Caitlin: Moranthology – She's clever. I want to read her novel in 2015, along with Donna Tartt’s latest.
4. The Book of Enoch the Prophet – True esoterica. I first became aware of this when it was mentioned in Danielle Trussoni's novel Angelology. Then I discovered that this is a real book of Hebrew apocalyptic writing centered around the shadowy prophet Enoch. See separate entry in this blog. 
5. Roman, James:  Chronicles of Old Las Vegas
6. Vermes, Geza: Jesus The Jew; A Historian's Reading of the Gospels  -  Having read this book and Constantine's Sword by James Carroll, I now know a lot more about the intersection of Christianity and Judaism. It's a fascinating topic, even though I'm not a person with faith in either religion. I'd never heard of Geza Vermes until I read his obituary (read it  here).  A Hungarian  Jew, ex-priest and translator of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Vermes died in 2013. He must have been the inspiration for a character in Herman Wouk's novel War and Remembrance, in which a Jewish scholar writes a book called "A Jew's Jesus."  I read this book because I wanted an objective (not faith-based) treatment of the historical Jesus.  From the preface: "...What [the Gospels] are believed to signify is the business of the theologian; the historian's task is to discover the original meaning of their message." That sounded sensible to me. Vermes also explains New Testament terms such as prophet, Lord, Messiah, Son of God and son of man. In doing so he references The Book of Enoch, a nice coincidence because I also read that book last year (see separate entry in this blog). Equipped with all this knowledge, I almost feel like a scholar myself. 

The Charleroi Hoard

Construction workers found about $60,000 in small bills hidden inside a wall while remodeling an old house. The house, built in 1910, is typical of many homes of similar vintage which one finds in the Pittsburgh area.

Link:

Judge dismisses criminal charges filed against four who found $60K

Observer-Reporter, Green County PA, 12/30/14

Mysteries of the Worm

In her review of Stephen King's latest novel, Revival (Scribner, 405 pp), Danielle Trussoni notes that the book "...is filled with cultural allusions both high and low ...particularly [to] Ludvig Prinn’s Mysteries of the Worm, which the American horror writer H. P. Lovecraft used as the basis of his fictional grimoire Necronomicon.”

On first reading, I was excited to see that Trussoni does not characterize Mysteries of The Worm as fiction. Does she mean that Ludvig Prinn's diabolical book actually existed? Or is it merely the product of H.P. Lovecraft's fevered imagination? 

Neither, it seems. My research reveals a more tangled web. 

As we all know (or should know), Mysteries of the Worm  is one of the books of esoteric knowledge in the Lovecraft canon. I first encountered it in  his short story The Haunter of the Dark (1935), in which the daring Robert Blake enters the shunned church of the Starry Wisdom cult. There he discovers "a Latin version of the abhorred Necronomicon, the sinister Liber Ivonis, the infamous Cultes De Goules of Comte d'Erlette, the Unaussprchlichen Kulten of von Junt and old Ludvig Prinn's hellish De Vermis Mysteriis." The latter, translated from the Latin, supposedly means Mysteries of the Worm. 

Yet it seems horror writer Robert Bloch, and not Lovecraft himself, invented De Vermis Mysteriis. According to this Wikipedia article, the term first appeared in Bloch's short story The Shambler from the Stars (1935). From there it found its way into Lovecraft's work. The two writers knew each other, and some say that the name of the central character in The Haunter of the Dark, Robert Blake, is a veiled reference to the real-life Robert Bloch. Indeed, the Lovecraft story is dedicated to Robert Bloch. 

To complicate matters further, De Vermis Mysteriis, Mysteries of the Worm and several of the other esoteric books also appear in various Cthulhu mythos stories by other authors, some of whom wrote long after Lovecraft died. Bloch himself published a sequel to The Haunter of the Dark.  Titled The Shadow From The Steeple  and published in 1950, this final story in the diabolical Bloch/Lovecraft/Bloch trilogy further explores the horrors of the red-black crystal polyhedron discovered by Richard Blake (aka Robert Bloch). Bloch makes Lovecraft himself a character in the third tale. Confused yet? 

I can state with authority that Mysteries of the Worm was central to an early Stephen King short story, Jerusalem's Lot, published in the Night Shift collection (1978). This brings us full circle back to King's latest novel, which I plan to read at the first opportunity. 

To anyone who has made it this far through this lengthy post, I say this: of course I recognize that most normal persons do not require this much information regarding Mysteries of the Worm. But this is my blog, see? I can write about whatever I want, and waste my time any way I want, OK? I have satisfied myself that ol' Ludvig's Mysteries of the Worm is  just a fictional book. Trussoni's Revival review should have made this clear, so that nobody else would have to spend hours untangling this mystery.  

Links: 
Review by Danielle Trussoni -- New York Times, Nov. 21, 2014
Article: De Vermis Mysteriis  --  Wikipedia
Article: The Haunter of the Dark -- Wikipedia
Mysteries of the Worm by Robert Bloch -- Chaosium Inc,, paper, 272  pages, 1993. Contains  The Shambler from the Stars. 

The Aylesbury Hoard

Treasure hunters in England have unearthed a hoard of over 5,000 coins from the Dark Ages in a farmer's field near Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire. One of the largest hoards of Anglo-Saxon coins ever found in Britain, it includes coins from the reigns of Ethelred the Unready (978-1016 AD) and Canute (1016-1035 AD). 

Link:

Amateur treasure hunter's £1m find of Anglo Saxon coins

Daily Telegraph, January 1, 2015

The Secret Place by Tana French

Viking Penguin; 452 pages; August 2014eBook ISBN 978-0-698-17028-5

Tana French has won much praise for her five thrillers, with good reason (see glowing reviews below). This one takes place in a girls' boarding school in Ireland.  The key characters are eight teenage girls, members of rival cliques. I needed a pencil and paper to sort them out at first. But by the time this book concluded, I couldn't stop thinking about them. 
French's dialogue makes use of current teenage slang. I am not an expert in this area, but apparently "totes" means totally,  and "adorbs" means adorable. Combining the two: "That would be so totes adorbs I could just die." My favorite is "jel," which means jealous, as in "ppl are mad jel of me." My spell-checker doesn't know what to make of that one. Perhaps it's easier to text these truncated words than to spell them out entirely. So in that vein, like hello? I'll rate this engrossing novel totes awesome. 


Don't like crime fiction? You'll like The Secret Place regardless. It's outstanding by just about any standard. Or by my modest standards, at least, which is all I really care about.

Links:

New York Times review by Janet Maslin

Washington Post review by Maureen Corrigan

Home Again, Home Again

I'm the only person you know who bothers to think of things like this, let alone write about them. But bear with me. Once again, I've uncovered hidden mysteries.

Many moons ago, my father was fond of reciting a certain line of verse as he steered his Pontiac Thunderchief into the driveway of our New Jersey home. "Home again, home again, jiggety jig," he would always announce, as we arrived at 74 Canoe Brook Parkway, the center of my tiny universe during my formative years.  

As we all know, this is part of a much longer nursery rhyme which includes the verse: "To market, to market, to buy a fat pig/ Home again, home again, jiggety jig."  When my wife told me she had never heard of that nursery rhyme, I was taken aback. "It's that one about riding a cock-horse to Banbury Cross," I patiently explained, beginning to recite it in full until she exclaimed that I was driving her crazy. 

As it turns out, I was wrong. The two phrases come from separate and distinct nursery rhymes, although they are structurally similar. Analyzing end-word rhymes, both follow an a-a-b-b pattern: 

Ride a cock-horse to Banbury Cross, (a) 
To see a fine lady upon a white horse. (a)  
Rings on her fingers and bells on her toes, (b)  
And she shall have music wherever she goes. (b)

That's the same rhyming scheme we see in: 

To market, to market, to buy a fat pig, (a)
Home again, home again, jiggety-jig. (a) 
To market, to market, to buy a fat hog, (b)
 Home again, home again, jiggety-jog. (b) 
To market, to market, to buy a plum bun, (c)
Home again, home again, market is done. (c)

I frankly cannot recall from university literature courses whether the number of syllables per line is supposed to follow a strict pattern. But I counted them anyway. "To market, to market" follows a strict classical 11-10-11-10 syllabic structure, bringing to mind titan wordsmiths of the past. Spenser. Marlowe. And Shakespeare, of course. Don't forget Shakespeare. 

The first line of "Ride a cock-horse" has 9 syllables, followed by 10, 11 and 10 syllables respectively. Intriguing: 9-10-11-10. Was it deliberately designed that way? Perhaps there were two more lines, continuing the syllabic pattern to 12-10. Completing the cycle.  What happened to those two final lines, now lost in the mists of time, like in a Dan Brown novel? What secrets lie concealed here? Diabolical conspiracies? Ancient heresies? Buried treasure? What does it all mean? 

Hidden mysteries, indeed. 

Old Silver

On a snowy winter day, I was checking my mail box at the post office. A little girl was trying to buy stamps from a vending machine, putting coins in one by one. 

She was having trouble. One of the coins kept getting rejected. She retrieved it and put it through the machine several times -- same result. The vending machine refused to accept it. 

Finally, she asked me: "Do you have a quarter? The machine won't take this one."

She handed me the coin. I immediately saw that it was a pre-1964 quarter. I gave her old quarter back to her and told her to hang on to it. "It's got silver in it," I told her. Then I gave her a shiny new one. The machine took it.  

Good deed done, I trudged off into the snow with my mail.

The Dumfriesshire Hoard

A treasure hunter with a metal detector has unearthed a hoard of Viking gold and silver, one of the most significant ever discovered in Scotland.  This haul includes a gold cross (photo below), armbands and brooches. Estimated value: 1 million pounds sterling. 

As you can see in the video included in the excellent BBC story (link below), the lucky fellow who found it looks like a stereotypical Scottish hard man. With his burly, broken-nosed air of bald-headed  menace, this guy could easily pass for a Glaswegian knee-breaker in a novel by Denise Mina or Ian Rankin. He also resembles Phil Mitchell on Eastenders and Mike Tindall, Zara Phillips' rugby-playing husband.     

Links:

Viking treasure haul unearthed in Scotland - BBC News, October 12, 2014

1000-year old Viking treasure hoard found in Scotland - Reuters

Dumfriesshire Hoard - Wikipedia

Cross, circa 900 AD, from the Dumfriesshire Hoard.

There also exists a Dumfriesshire Hound. But that is another story. 

Dead Flowers Pressed Between Pages of Tennyson

This phrase, or something close to it, appeared in a Rolling Stone review of the first album by the band It's A Beautiful Day. As important as Rolling Stone was way back in 1969, that disparaging review didn't seem to hurt record sales. In the crowd I moved in, this album was a constant presence. The cover art was simply impossible to forget. And the song White Bird was everywhere on FM radio, with good reason.

1969

I was living in England when the band appeared at the Bath Festival of Blues and Progressive Music in 1970. One of the English music papers ran a photo of the band's singer Pattie Santos onstage. Her dark beauty, the presence of a Latina in a rock band and Santana's performance at the same event made me wonder what the hell was going on in California.  

What happened to It's A Beautiful Day? It's a sad story. After losing a lawsuit brought by their former band manager, in 1973 they were forbidden to perform under the name It's A Beautiful Day and ordered to pay their former manager over $188,000. The band broke up in 1974. Read more about that here.  

Santos was killed in a car crash in  in 1989. She wasn't wearing a seat belt. But I'm still listening to White Bird.  It's a terrific song that holds up well, even after 45 years.  

Healdsburg (CA) Tribune, December 20, 1989

It's a Beautiful Day reformed in 2000, led by original vocalist/violinist David LaFlamme. They continue to tour. 

The Seaton Down Hoard

A treasure hunter discovered 22,000 Roman coins in Devon.  "Initially, I found two small coins the size of a thumbnail sitting on top of the ground. The next shovel was full of coins – they just spilled out over the field."

Link: 

Treasure hunter guards biggest find of Roman coins by sleeping in his car

Daily Telegraph, 9/26/14 

Lone Wolf McQuade

My wife is out of town. Having nothing better to do, I watched this 1983 Chuck Norris/David Carradine action movie last night. It's so bad it's good, which confounds conventional rating systems. One star? Five stars? I'm not sure it deserves a rating at all.

Just one example: bad guy Carradine attempts to do away with good guy Norris by placing the unconscious Texas Ranger behind the wheel of his pickup truck, pushing the truck into a big hole in the ground and dumping tons of dirt on top. Our hero is now buried alive! But with a mighty heave, ol' Chuck fights his way back to consciousness just long enough to grab a can of beer, taking a huge swig of Coors and dumping the rest on his head to revive himself! Thus restored, snorting and gasping, hell-bent on revenge, Norris guns the engine and the pickup comes bursting out of the ground with an almighty roar. Then all hell breaks loose. And then..., well, you get the idea.

Ten years later, Norris reworked this character into the TV show Walker, Texas Ranger, which ran for on CBS for an astounding nine seasons.

The St. Zita Society by Ruth Rendell

Hardcover, 272 pages

Scribner, August 14, 2012

ISBN: 1451666683 (ISBN13: 9781451666687)

A highly enjoyable novel. To my mind, this one’s at least equal in quality to Portobello and No Man’s Nightingale (by Rendell) and The Cuckoo’s Calling (by Galbraith/Rowling). 

This is a crime novel in name only. The crime element is only the framework for Rendell's shrewd observations about the characters’ interior lives. Her graceful style highlights just how mediocre James Patterson, Michael Robotham and certain other popular thriller writers really are. For me personally, the London setting is another attraction.

Readers with incipient senility may be put off by the bewildering array of characters. But I say: no problem. Simply make a list of the ten most frequently mentioned characters, with a key fact about each to jog your memory. That’s what I always do. If you have a Kindle, it’s easy to search by character name for Dex, Dr. Jefferson, Mrs. Neville-Smith, Jimmy, June, Henry, Huguette, Montserrat, Rad Sothern, Thea, Miss Grieves...and that's not even all of them. I’m sure I’ll read more by The Right Honourable The Baroness Rendell, CBE. 

Link: New York Times Book Review, August 31, 2012

Bricked-Up Passageway to Hotel

The Knickerbocker Hotel in New York has been closed since 1920. Now, it's being restored. While cleaning out the basement, workers uncovered a bricked-up door, the entrance to a forgotten passageway between the hotel and the Times Square subway station. 

This resolves the mystery surrounding a long-disused door on the subway platform.  It retained its old "Knickerbocker" sign for all those years. Now we know why. 

Subway side view

Hotel side view

This story is a potent link to certain childhood fantasies. As a boy I longed to discover secret passageways, bricked-up doors, hidden staircases and the like. And why not? Adventurous young fellows were always stumbling across such things in Hardy Boys adventures such as The Secret of the Lost Tunnel, The Tower Treasure and The House on the Cliff. Sadly, our house in New Jersey contained none of these hidden mysteries. However, my searches did uncover mysteries of a different sort in my father's sock drawer, including racy James Bond novels, a 1952 Georgia Tech college yearbook and -- most shocking of all -- a marriage manual. 
Links:

• Sneak peek at new Knickerbocker Hotel - New York Post, July 14, 2014
• Behind Subway’s Phantom Hotel Entrance, Neither Arias Nor Opulence - New York Times, July 17, 2014

Coin Hoard in Old House

Someone cleaning out an old house in England found a "junk box" containing coins.

Most were worthless, but one turned out to be a 1793 cent worth over $41,000.

Link:  

Cent Found in Junk Box Becomes Auction Bonanza

Coin World, July 4, 2014

The Tunguska Event

On this day in 1908, the Tunguska event occurred in Siberia. Most scientists believe it was an asteroid airburst explosion. But a few people believe it was... something else. Black hole passing through the earth? Exploding alien spacecraft? There may be aliens among us.

Link: 

The Tunguska Event

Wikipedia