Some random things make a post, don't they?

[oursin]

Transport for London havin a laff: I'm convinced that there is someone with a warped sense of humour behind the Journey Planner bit of their website, because there is always one suggested mode of getting from A to B which has me going 'WTF, do we really need to go via L, Q and back to H first, using at least 3 forms of available transportation and also a significant amount of walking?'

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Evil credit card company with whom I had problems way back in 2005/6, have now achieved a situation whereby they credited a cheque intended for two accounts to a single one, leaving the other one with an outstanding balance, a late fee, and interest charge. After some three weeks of headbangingly annoying telephone conversations, they have transferred the relevant amount to pay off the balance and cancelled the late fee. They are not, however, authorised to removed the interest charge via phone contact. I am beginning to be of the opinion that they are hoping that I will think that paying a relatively small interest charge is preferable to the hassle of pursuing them over it. I have writ them a stiff letter. With bullet points.

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Further to discussions going on at some considerable distance from this journal (FOF or FOFOFs even), is anyone at all appalled that I do not reply to each and every comment received?

I thought not.

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Further to a conversation apropos a survey of the sex lives of librarians (apparently entirely spurious and extremely outdated) and the trope of the sexy librarian, is the reason why there is no sexy archivist trope:
a) because very few people actually know what an archivist is and that they are not librarians
b) because people who do know what an archivist is, have a mental image of someone dusty and decrepit shuffling around subterranean chambers filled with tottering piles of manuscripts.

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Erskine [née Chiesley, Cheislie], Rachel, Lady Grange (bap. 1679, d. 1745), victim of abduction: one might not consider that sufficient qualification for inclusion in the ODNB, but, read on. Her marriage having hit the rocks and being essentially over

[S]he took to standing beneath his window in Niddry's Wynd, shouting obscenities. She then moved back into Edinburgh, after being denied contact with her children, and continued to harass her husband. She had become a social embarrassment; then, more seriously, she threatened to disclose her husband's involvement in the Jacobite rising of 1715. James's elder brother, the sixth earl of Mar, had led the abortive uprising and Rachel, who claimed to have evidence implicating James, was known to have Hanoverian sympathies.

Lord Grange had already been involved, in 1728, in the forcible abduction of his sister-in-law Lady Mar (Mary Wortley Montagu's sister), who suffered from mental illness; he now planned to remove the threat posed by his wife in a similar fashion.... Rachel was kidnapped from her lodgings in Edinburgh and taken, bound, blindfold, and gagged, on horseback to Linlithgow. She was then moved to Polmaise, Stirlingshire and held there for four months. After being moved through the highlands in great discomfort she was finally placed on the island of Hesker, off North Uist, where she remained for two years. By May 1734 Sir Alexander MacDonald could no longer afford to keep her and she was sent to the remote island group of St Kilda, 42 miles off Uist. There she was held incommunicado, in very primitive conditions and among Gaelic speakers, on the island of Hirta from 1734 to 1742. Meanwhile James announced her death in Edinburgh and held a mock funeral.

Rachel eventually smuggled out a message to her cousin, the lord advocate, in a ball of wool carried by the daughter of St Kilda's minister. Her cousin sent a gunboat for her but before help could arrive Norman MacLeod had her moved to Assynt in Sutherland, and finally to Skye, where all real pretence of looking after her ended and she was reputedly abandoned to live in a local cavern.

We are not surprised that her sorry fate became famed in song and story: 'Samuel Johnson mentioned her tale in his Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland, and Walter Scott's coadjutor, William Erskine, wrote a romantic poem, Epistle from Lady Grange to Edward D—.... In 1897 Alexander Innes Shand wrote a romance, The Lady Grange.' I'm astonished no-one turned it into an opera.

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This is lovely: Scientific evidence of evolution being a hoax and of God's existence. (Must be a blue moon tonight - this came to me via FaceBook.)