My Bartleby daily email was late in getting to me yesterday (in fact I only got it this morning). Otherwise I would have known that yesterday, the 12th, was H.L. Mencken‘s birthday.

It’s a milestone important to any crotchety press critic.

And speaking of crotchety, I also want to acknowledge an objection from Daniel Fienberg, a friend of mine who writes and regularly posts his work to the web. It wasn’t so much that I forgot about him when I was writing the original acknowledgements in this blog, as my making a subconscious distinction between my amateur blogging and his professional work.