Chesapeake Fury.

Hey…quiet around here again, I know. As of this week, I’ve moved my summer base of operations from New Amsterdam to my folks’ place in Chesapeake, VA. (I’m sure Jack Greene would approve.) And, otherwise, I’m pretty well swamped with some freelance work. So, posting may well be light this week, or it might not…perhaps I can squeeze in some blogging between trips to Chick-Fil-A.

Sippin’ on Gin and Ingsoc.

Just what does Tanqueray have in mind here? How is this foppish hipster supposed to sell gin?” Old friend Seth Stevenson assesses Tanqueray’s new spokesman, Tony Sinclair, who has come to grace a number of bus stops and billboards in my area. For the most part, I think gin is pretty vile — When it comes to the spirits, I’m a Jameson man. That being said, I did enjoy a glass of Victory Gin while re-watching Michael Radford’s powerful version of Nineteen Eighty-Four over the weekend. Winston Smith…now there’s a spokesman Tanqueray should get behind. Doubleplusgood.

Marblehead & McNulty.

Hi y’all…sorry about the recent lack of updates around here. I was in Boston for a few days, where I enjoyed some meetings, a Fenway game, and a scenic excursion to the North Shore. Whatsmore, most of my free time of late has instead been spent catching up on back seasons of my most recent new-favorite show, The Wire. At any rate, updates should resume their normal schedule this week.

Back-Talk and Over-feeding.

In keeping with the design and functionality around here being a good two or three years behind the curve, I’ve gone ahead and enabled Trackback and tried to fix up the RSS feeds (RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0). Please let me know if I broke anything. (Also, if there’s a quick way to allow trackbacks on all the old posts without going through and doing it manually, that’d be helpful to know too.)

The Leak has Sprung.

B.K. DeLong of Brainstream reports that The Leaky Cauldron, the Harry Potter-themed blog I started at the old Geocities site years and years ago, has not only been deemed J.K. Rowling’s favorite fan site, but is also on the short list of press invites to Rowling’s home once the Half-Blood Prince arrives. A hearty congrats to the Cauldron team!

What did I have to do with this? Less than nothing, really — the site just kinda sat there until B.K. took it over and turned it into the flagship Potter fan site. But I did find this news another interesting reflection of just how much Internet-time’s passed since GitM first got off the ground (the second in two days.) I’m old, Gandalf. I may not look it, but I feel it…

My Back Pages.

If you’ve arrived from Ralph Luker‘s kind article in this month’s AHA Perspectives, welcome to GitM. If you click and/or scroll around enough, you should be able to find something that catches your fancy around here. And, if you’re looking for more quality weblogs by historians (and aspiring historians), check out Cliopatria’s comprehensive History Blogroll.