London's Bicentennial (Snippet 43)

 The Kidnapping of John Labatt - 1934
  If you search for old news about London, you will find many mentions of this event. Over three days in August 1934, newspaper readers wanted to know what had happened to this wealthy beer baron.

You will notice that in Nome the Dionne quintuplets are mentioned and the articles provide another example of words spelled differently in British/Canadian and American English - kidnapped/kidnaped.

This is what the front page of the London Evening Free Press looked like on Aug. 14, 1934.

  It is found on the website of the Archives and Special Collections at the Western Libraries. See, Labatt: A Closer Look, from which the following is copied:

  "The fact that the Labatt brewery prospered during prohibition when so many other breweries failed made John S. Labatt a target for kidnappers. Kidnapping was common during the darkest days of the Great Depression. Kidnappers targeted people who could command a “king’s ransom,” and few had prospered more than the beer barons who had survived prohibition. In 1934, John S. Labatt was one of the wealthiest brewers in Canada. At a time when many across the nation could not even afford the gas to run their cars, John Sackville was chauffeured around in a stately black limousine.

   On August 14, 1934, three kidnappers pulled John Sackville from his car on a secluded gravel road just outside of London and ordered him to write a note to his brother. “Dear Hugh,” John wrote, “do as these men have instructed you… and don’t go to the police.“ On the other side of the note, the gang’s leader, Michael McCardell, a sharp-featured man of forty-two who had lost his index finger in a shoot-out with police, wrote: “We are holding your brother for $150,000 ransom. Go to Toronto immediately and register at the Royal York Hotel… You will know me as Three-fingered Abe.”

   For three days, John Labatt remained blindfolded and chained near Lake Muskoka. When the kidnapping became front-page news, the bandits panicked and agreed to let Labatt go if he promised to pay them $25,000. At 12:30 am on Friday August 17, John Labatt was dropped off at the corner of Vaughan Road and St. Clair Avenue in Toronto, just a few miles northwest of the Royal York Hotel, where Hugh Labatt was stationed. John Labatt was free."
[The author of the above is Matthew J. Bellamy.]

Sources: 
  For additional ones, see the Wikipedia entry for, John Sackville Labatt, where this one is found: "Three Fingered Abe and the Labatt Kidnapping."

Postscript:
   There is still a Labatt's brewery in London, but it is no longer Canadian-owned. The oldest baseball park is also in London and it is Labatt Mermorial Park. See Snippet 11.

Campus Novels (#2)

    Back in 2024 I offered a list of sixty novels that take place in the groves of academe. The Groves of Academe is on the list and is mentioned in the post. Henry Mulcahy is a character in it, but we are not related. It is a work of fiction.
   In a newsletter provided by The New Yorker, Merve Emre offers her choice of "Five Great Campus Novels" and those choices are provided here along with pictures of Professor Emre. I hope she doesn't mind. I trust, as well, that The New Yorker won't mind my copying her selections. They do appear in a newsletter and I am not sure if they will show up in the print magazine, to which I subscribe, so I am offering them here in a post for posterity. 

  

Five Great Campus Novels (Selected by Merve Emre - "What We're Reading," The New Yorker Newsletter, c. Aug. 1, 2026)

  “Half the campus was designed by Bottom the Weaver, half by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe,” Randall Jarrell writes in “Pictures from an Institution.” In the 1954 novel, the university is home to two types: the asses and the industrialists. The former are dreamy, romantic; the latter, hard-nosed, pragmatic. Each of the campus novels below makes comedy out of these types, and warns us, as Jarrell did, “This institution’s drunk.”

The Amanda Cross Mysteries, by Carolyn Heilbrun (1964-2002)

Heilbrun was the first tenured woman in Columbia’s English Department. In her detective series, under the pen name Amanda Cross, an English professor solves murders whose motives include bad psychoanalysis, student riots, and biographers who know too much for their own good. My favorite, “Poetic Justice,” was described as a “homicidal valentine” to Heilbrun’s mentor, Lionel Trilling.

Possession, by A. S. Byatt (1990)

A swoony double romance. The first love affair is between a Victorian poet and poetess who wrote coded letters and poems to each other in the nineteenth century. The second is between two scholars in the nineteen-eighties who set out to answer the only question worth asking: Did the poets do it? A little-known fact: great chunks of the poems are sentences in blank verse from Henry James’s “The Golden Bowl.”

Moo, by Jane Smiley (1995)

A pastoral satire about a Midwestern land-grant university, for readers who find John Williams’s “Stoner” too nostalgic and sentimental. The campus novel with the funniest building name (“Old Meats”), and the only one I have read that features the workers of the university: cafeteria servers, horse trainers.

The Last Samurai, by Helen DeWitt (2000)

A zany modern epic about a suicidal mother and her genius son, who trade perusing the dust-choked libraries of Oxford for riding the Tube, and the pathetic utilitarianism of the élite university for a useless love of ancient languages, atonal music, and games of chance. Also: a helpful book for teaching young children the Greek alphabet.

I Am Charlotte Simmons, by Tom Wolfe (2004)

Wolfe’s most hated novel, but my guilty pleasure since freshman year of college. At the fictional Dupont University, the beautiful, naïve, and self-superior Appalachian protagonist learns that what counts in the twenty-first century is not what you know, it’s who you know. Its alternative title could have been “Hillbilly Elegy.”

Sources: 
  A list of the "60 Best Campus Novels"  is found in Mulcahy's Miscellany in Campus Novels.  It is based on a list taken from Literary Hub and the citation is found in the post. Another list of "9 Best Campus Novels" is also provided, and for even more see Wikipedia's, Campus Novel.  

CANCON:

   For some older campus Canadian content see, The Rebel Angels, Robertson Davies.  For some very new, read the review of Lords of Serendipity, by Randy Boyagoda: "Both Sides Now: With His New Novel Lords of Serendipity, Randy Boyagoda Combines Two Worlds: Authorship and Academia," Emily Donaldson, Globe and Mail, Sept.3, 2026. An enticing bit from the review:
   "Lords of Serendipity is ultimately a campus novel that’s less about campus life than the global market that feeds it. Here is the university reduced to a ticket, a brand, a status symbol. Devi has set her sights on getting into Ochyps (OxfordCambridgeHarvardYalePrincetonStanford). What she wants to study is beside the point. She wants to study at Harvard because she wants to go to Harvard.

   The universities of Lords have effectively become borderless, drawing students from across the world even as their own substance and history are being hollowed out. Chapels become wellness centres, library stacks give way to meditation zones, a century-old Gothic quadrangle is “a beautiful front for hedge fund investments.” Employees are made to train the artificial-intelligence bots designed to replace them.

Boyagoda has, as ever, a sharp eye for the absurdities of university politics and pieties."

Anger Management

 "You're A Loser!" - "No, You're A Loser!" - We Are All Losers Now

  That represents the low level of discourse these days and whataboutism abounds. Everyone agrees that everyone is angry and everyone seems on the verge of shouting, at whatever network they are watching - "I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!"

 Tempers High 

   Proof of the madness has been offered and that is the reason I now provide a short post about the current affairs we all try to ignore. The illustration above "shows the evolution of anger in policy-related congressional floor speeches since 1874. Anger rises sharply after the mid-2010s in both the House and Senate and reaches its highest level in the 2020s." Another set of results "documents a sharp rise in anger in political discourse, with anger emerging as the dominant emotion among citizens, voters, and policymakers alike." This study suggests that "American politics is angrier than ever."

   I am choosing not to say more because I am more depressed than angry. Those wishing to investigate the anger should read the following article, and the study on which it is based:

  "Quantifying Anger in American Politics: The Country is Awash in Indignation," The Economist, Aug. 30, 2026.

  The study: "The Rise of Anger: Emotions and Policy Views," Eve Davoine, et al. can be found here and the abstract is provided:

Abstract:

  "In this paper, we document the rise of anger in U.S. political communication and study its effects on policy views. We combine online and offline data, including the full record of congressional floor speeches since the 1870s, tweets from members of Congress, tweets from voters matched to electoral registries, campaign speeches, and Reddit comments. Anger in U.S. congressional speeches has risen sharply in the last decade, reaching its highest level in a century and a half. In voter tweets, the share of policy-related sentences expressing anger rises 35% between 2013 and 2025. In tweets by members of Congress, the angry-sentence share rises by 72%. Angry tweets by members of Congress or by voters receive around 60% more retweets relative to tweets with no emotion. Our two experiments show that negative emotions increase support for protectionism, restrictive immigration policies, and redistribution. Positive emotions mainly improve perceptions and reduce support for populism. Anger also changes climate policy views, while fear has no detectable effect. Building on the ACTORC framework of Bordalo et al. ( 2026 ), our model shows how emotions direct attention toward different features of policy problems. Overall, emotions shape both engagement and policy views."

The entire report is available as a pdf and it consists of 186 pages!

Postscript:
In Canada it seems that we are just as angry, but perhaps a bit less mad.

London's Bicentennial (Snippet 42)

 Some Taddy Snuff 
   Shopping on Dundas Street over 150 years ago appears to have been better than it is now. Perhaps one didn't have to go to Tytler & Rose if they also delivered the wine along with the white fish.

Source: London Free Press, April 7, 1873

Fireflies

Lightning Bugs

  This year again we had fireflies in our garden. It seems fitting to write about fireflies on the first day of September, since they give us something bright to remember  as winter approaches.
   We called them "lightning bugs" back in Maryland when I was growing up and I still remember how our hands smelled after catching them to light up old Mason jars. Over the years, living mostly in an urban environment, I had forgotten about fireflies until a fair number of them showed up over the last few years bringing along their lanterns, lured by warm weather and a damp garden. They are only around for a very short period. It would be nice to have them during the long, dark nights ahead.
   Recently, I am pleased to report, they have been spotted in Brooklyn. I am not so happy to let you know that they are facing some difficulties in Bali, but it was good to learn that they exist in other regions of the world and some steps are being taken to protect them.
   While typing this I remembered something about "flocks" of fireflies (I am not sure what collective noun applies) all flashing at the same time. I figured it might be just a rural myth, but Synchronous Fireflies do exist in the Smokies. So many people travel to see them, that getting into Elkmont is almost as difficult as getting into the Masters in Augusta.

Sources:

   "When the Fireflies Come Out to Play: For a Few Weeks in the Summer, They Emerge from Underground and Perform Their Aerial Light Show, Hoping to Find Some Action," Hilary Howard, New York Times, Aug.2, 2026.
In Brooklyn, they , noticed the spike in fireflies about three years ago. “And this summer has been no exception..." Fireflies, which are technically beetles, thrive on the resulting rich soil, she said. They spend most of their lives — two years — underground in their larval stage, “so the soil needs to have enough life in it to support them,” she said. By the time they are airborne adults, they are interested only in mating and don’t eat that much, occasionally sipping on water or plant nectars, she said. Recent firefly swarms in the city are somewhat of a mystery. There is no official data to indicate whether the presence of fireflies is increasing..."  
   The most vulnerable populations in the Northeast and mid-Atlantic regions tend to live in salt marshes, a rapidly disappearing habitat, Mr. Joyce said.  Fireflies have only a few weeks to live after they emerge from the ground. “The males, once they’ve done their duty, that’s the end of their life cycle,” Ms. Rossi said. “The females are going to lay their eggs in the soil again.” Then, it’s lights out.

   "A Quest to Restore the Sacred Glow of Fireflies in Bali: The insects, revered in local culture, are disappearing for many reasons, including rapid development to cater to tourists," Mukitita Suhartono, New York Times, Aug. 12, 2026.
   "For generations, the soft glow of the lightning bugs was part of the steady rhythm of nightfall in rural Bali. Today, they are fading, driven away by climate change, aggressive land development for tourism, chemical-intensive farming and artificial light that disrupts their mating rituals."
   In 2018, after more than a decade of working as a server on cruise ships, Mr. Wardika moved back to Taro, an ancient village about 20 kilometers, or around 12 miles, north of Ubud, Bali. Converting a corner of his family compound he then founded the Firefly Conservation House, Indonesia’s first firefly conservation facility, which melds Balinese tradition with rigorous science.
   A team of biologists at the lab conducts research ranging from field mapping and population counts to controlled rearing and breeding. Researchers build small glass terrariums they call honeymoon suites, a microhabitat designed specifically for courtship. Inside they pair lab-reared females with males caught from the wild, which they say ensures optimal breeding results.
The payoff is not quick. While an adult firefly lives for a brief 22 days, growing one from an egg into a mature beetle takes anywhere from six months to nearly two years, depending on the species. Raising fireflies inside the lab is half the battle. To ensure the fireflies have a safe environment to return to, Mr. Wardika encourages local farmers to switch to regenerative organic agriculture. To cut down on chemical use, Mr. Wardika has given out homemade compost, fruit-fermented fertilizer and natural tobacco-based pesticides.The sanctuary also operates as an eco-tourism destination, which acts as a source of revenue."

   Synchronous Fireflies - Great Smoky Mountains National Park.     

Fireflies of the Smokies
   "Great Smoky Mountains National Park is home to 19 unique species of fireflies out of over 2,000 species identified worldwide. Among these, the synchronous fireflies (Photinus carolinus) are particularly famous, known as one of few species with the incredible ability to synchronize their flashing patterns. This mesmerizing display transforms sections of the forest into a flickering spectacle, a true marvel of nature.

Why the synchrony?
   "Researchers have investigated the reasons behind this synchronized flashing behavior; however, the synchronous behavior is not yet fully understood. One theory suggests that males flash in unison to elicit a call-and-response interaction from the females. A study found that female fireflies of this species only respond when an adequate amount of flashing is presented to them. Once enough light is generated in the forest, the much dimmer females will respond during the pauses in the males' flashing pattern.
   The flash pattern of Photinus carolinus is a remarkable sequence of five to eight distinct flashes, followed by an eight-second pause of darkness, before the cycle repeats. Initially, the flashing may appear random, but as more males join in, their rhythms align, creating a breathtaking display of pulsating light throughout the forest."

London's Bicentennial Snippet (41)

 

The Dawn of Tomorrow
   That is the front page of a Black Canadian newspaper as it appeared one hundred years ago. It was published in London, Ontario.

   This is one of the stories on that page. There is a Wikipedia entry for The Dawn of Tomorrow.  For a recent article about the newspaper see: 

   "Q&A: Granddaughter Pens Book About the Pioneer Behind London's First Black Newspaper:James Francis Jenkins Was the Editor of Dawn of Tomorrow That Started in London in 1923," CBC NEWS, FEB. 15, 2026. For additional information see, Michelle Angela Jenkins. 

Olde Posts Addenda (9)

(New items related to old posts)

More Feats By Olivia Ferney
  This concierge from the campus close by, recently arranged what she hoped would be the world's "largest champagne presentation", in Vegas for one of her clients who wanted something "epic." There is really no category for champagne chugging, but an adjudicator from Guinness World Records showed up and for this portion of the party, "The final cost for the liquid alone (125 bottles of Perrier Jouet Grand Brut, 50 bottles of Dom Pérignon Brut Luminus and five bottles of Dos Hombres Blanco tequila) amounted to $226,000 and change."
If you are not impressed, those are U.S. dollars. 
  I told you about Ms. Ferney in this post, "Serving the Ridiculously Rich," which provides other examples of her feats, and if you combine this post with that one you will have an extensive Ferney bibliography. She is from Dundas and went to Western.
   "She Makes the Impossible Happen for Her Ultrarich Clients," Guy Trebay, The New York Times, Aug. 10, 2026.
   "Over-the-top was the mandate. The client, a wealthy med-tech entrepreneur, was on his way to Las Vegas to close a $150 million business deal. A celebration was to be had. “He wanted something crazy,” Olivia Ferney said.
    A child of Canadian schoolteachers, Ferney knew nothing about the world of private jets and $25,000-a-day cabanas until she discovered her unusual line of work about three years ago.
   “I was basically up there in my little log cabin,” she said.
   Nowadays, more than two million social media followers watch the videos she posts of her interactions with her tough-to-please clients. She is also making an impression beyond her core audience. Time magazine included her in its list of the top 100 digital influencers of 2026. And Fifth Season, the production company behind “Severance” and “Killing Eve,” has signed a deal with Ferney and her business partner and fiancé, Troy Arnold, for a scripted series based on their agency, Top Tier Travel.... 
  One of Ferney’s working mottos is, “Our job is to execute, not judge.” Given that she and her business partner are routinely tasked with fulfilling the whims of those who think nothing of laying out $2.25 million for a weeklong yacht rental on the Côte d’Azur (as recently happened), this makes a kind of cockeyed sense. 
   Each client of Top Tier Travel must fork over an annual fee of $100,000 and agree to book $1 million in yearly travel. John Block, the chief operating officer of Park West Gallery, which sells high-priced works of art on cruise ships, said the fees were worth it. Not long ago, he explained, Top Tier booked a private jet on short notice to collect his ailing sister for a family vacation. “You can’t just order up a jet like an Uber,” Block said."
[Western is not mentioned in this article, but it is in the articles in my first post about Ferney.]

Travelling Locally

  Six years ago I did a post about GRASSROUTES and you will recognize the signs around Middlesex County which are used to promote local tourism. If you want to find more trail guides for our area, this link is the place to start since some of the links in my older post seem to have rotted. 
  Back then I did the post because of the covid pandemic. Now there are other reasons for being reluctant to wander too far from home. Who wants to fly anywhere and should we really cross the border near by?
  If you just want to go for a ride through the Ontario countryside and visit a few bookstores, here is the guide you need: Unique and Independent Bookstores In Ontario. (Cardinal Books in Birr is not included, but you can search the store from here or just keep going north on Richmond St.) 
   If you are more interested in Literary Events, which include The Book Drunkard Literary Festival, click on the link provided. Additional destinations are listed at Destination Ontario, where you will also find an alpaca farm and some eco-resorts.

  Two years ago, when things were a bit better with our neighbour, I provided a guide to U.S. Literary Landscapes. I encourage you to look at that post, which is an interesting one, but I suggest that we avoid heading south at this time.

The Bonus: - Going Somewhere in Canada for 36 Hours
  Two years ago I also provided you with a post that indicated how one could spend 36 hours in Toronto. If you type the word "Toronto" in the MM search box, you will find little about that city that is positive and there are many other places I would rather visit, including Mogadishu. 
   Still I overcame my prejudices and the Visiting TORONTO post points you to an article in the New York Times indicating how to best spend 36 Hours in Toronto. Given my prejudices, I thought that the suggestions provided would hardly result in a surge of tourists venturing north in search of, for example, "The Philosopher’s Walk [which] winds through the leafy St. George campus of the University of Toronto." But, "you could quench your thirst at the "Bathurst Local [which] is a laid-back bar with a maze of private karaoke rooms."

An Even Bigger Bonus - 36 Hours: The Series
  The New York Times has for many years offered travel suggestions under the title, "36 Hours in ....." The latest one as I write is, "36 Hours in the Cotswolds" (Aug. 20, 2026.") Typically included are: Key Attractions, Restaurants and Bars, Shopping, Where to Stay and Getting Around. The suggestions are not necessarily intended for those on a limited budget. For example, one place to stay in the Cotswolds, is the Estelle Manor at around £600 per night.
   Back to Toronto. The post "Visiting Toronto" was about what was recommended in the spring of 2024. But, I then provided references to articles indicating what was worth checking out in Toronto in 2016 and 2005.

   I then gathered all of the other 36 HOURS --- ELSEWHERE IN CANADA which were published in the NYT, between 2002 and 2024. The cities covered range from St. John's to Victoria. There is one for the entire island of PEI and there are four for Whistler and Vancouver.

   This post will be tremendously useful for someone who wonders how one could have best spent 36 hours in Newfoundland in 2006, or if one is curious about what changed for tourists in Victoria between 2004 and 2018. It is certainly likely that the names of some of the Key Attractions will have vanished if they were named after some formerly popular Canadian, now out of favour. 
  Once again, all of this valuable information about what was worth visiting for 36 hours in Canada over a number of different years in many different areas is found in the post, "Visiting Toronto", where I still think spending 36 hours is much more than enough.