bean_fidhleir

Sorry, Ben, but I really must contradict you: the incompetent look of the alleged Deconet writing is very much to the point. And Shakespeare was, at best, semi-literate judging from his alleged signatures. Signatures are generally the best-practiced significant words anyone writes. I have an indenture on parchment dating from 1674, not even 100 years after Shakespeare's time, and well before Deconet's. The signatures of the contracting and witnessing parties - John Hoyle, Tho: Hesletine Jno, Tho. Nisbett Jnr, Jos: Heslerton, Thomas Rayson, Richard Benson, Matthew Rayson, Samuell Smith, G. Frost, and John Herbet - are as smoothly written as anyone's signature today. They were obviously done by people completely comfortable with the pen and the written word. Just as obviously, Deconet (if that writing is his) was not.

The example with the signature suggests to me that the writer wrote too little to have mastered the quill pen, which if you've ever used one yourself you know is quite tricky. Note that there are 4 examples of the e in the signature alone, and no two are alike; there are also 2 c's that are completely dissimiliar. The writer might well have been nearly illiterate. Compare that scribble with the preserved facsimiles of, e.g., Jeffrey Amherst's correspondence from the same time period - the difference is great. The "setembre" on the label is done with much more care, but the writer still ran out of room at the end and jammed the final letters together hopelessly.

Not really different: the key issue in both cases is not how far or to what location it was taken, but that it was neither returned nor paid-for. I would think that Bromptons would have a fiduciary responsibility in the matter, but it seems that these days there's an increasing number of opportunities for the wealthy to steal from the rest of us without committing an indictable crime.

To extend(?) Jacob's reading Profision __hretnis

Excellent!

Very true. I think my point was mostly that even an 18th c. fiddle made in the fons et origo of fiddles (in both senses of the term) turned out to be Not Much.

Abundant and okay.

"Fiddler Ron Gonnella was originally from Dundee, and lived for many years in Crieff, Perthshire until his death in 1994. Gonnella's great grandfather was a Robert Dewar, who was a shepherd near Tulliemet in Perthshire. Ron Gonnella recorded at least fifteen albums and taught at Morrison's Academy in Crieff for many years. When he wasn't there he was travelling the world playing Scottish fiddle, recording albums, and performing on radio, stage and dance halls. The instrument he mostly played was a 1722 Italian violin made by Carlo Antonio Tanegia. I have been told that after his death there were a number of fiddlers desperate to try it to achieve the same wonderful tone that Gonnella produced; in the end it turned out to be a mediocre fiddle, and it was the musician who was special, not the instrument." (from http://www.nigelgath...lers/gonel.html, emphasis mine. I'm listening at the mo to a recording of Gonnella playing Scott Skinners medley Miss Laura Andrew/Laird of Drumblair/BonnieBanchory on Skinner's own Stroh fiddle--which sounds quite remarkable, especially considering it was a block of wood with an aluminium horn)

Thank you, Professor Pio, for taking the time to increase our communal knowledge.

I think a lot of this virtual name-calling, slanging, and backbiting could --and should-- be obviated by the UCC, which says that a seller had better not make any representations that won't hold up to peer scrutiny. IOW, if you're selling waterfowl, and claim that a bird on offer is a goose, you're in the gyppo if your peers say it's a duck. And if you say it's a Merganser duck, then you better hope your peers wouldn't identify it as a Mallard. The only stay-out-of-jail-free card is if the industry is sufficiently notorious for misrepresentation in certain ways. If the majority of sellers can't tell a goose from a parrot, or swear with a straight face that the parrot they're trying to fob off on you is just pining for the fjords rather than being a defunct psittacoid, then all bets are off and the sellers can tell you the parrot is not only just resting but on awakening will lay golden eggs for you, too. So perhaps Mnetters should take a decision on what the industry standard for truthiness is and make that the basis for posting here. If the industry is filled with fraud, then nobody has any right to catechise anyone else about their listings. Only if everyone decides that, on balance, fraud is rare, should people be allowed to be obnoxiously critical (I name no names) in what they write. Changing the model to be like the rugs place or violins.com (same model) would not, imo, be a good solution.

Lyndon, the counter looks at the IP address and possibly the member identity. If they're not on the list, they get added and the counter bumps by 1. But with IP addresses being assigned dynamically, the same person can come back each time they reboot their system and get counted again as long as they're not logged in to ebay itself. So it's best to treat counter totals as approximations only.

FWIW, which I'm sure isn't much, I find it repulsive to watch a few people gather around someone with a sack of rocks to enjoy a good old-fashioned stoning. It doesn't make it okay that the rocks are allegations rather than cobblestones.

Nah, the last flick is with the top off - I thought at first it didn't have a back

Ah, sorry, I misunderstood. I don't think I would call it " hand written" . "Hand enhanced" or "hand written-over", okay. But the enhancement looks too regular in spacing to be anything but tracing ink-over-ink, especially considering how badly the letters themselves are formed. Plus, if the original had been "erased" it would have to have been done with a knife because ink doesn't just sit on the top the way pencil marks largely do. It's either liquid (writing ink) and stains the substrate fibers or semi-liquid (printer's ink) and gets pushed into the interstices where it polymerises and locks in. But if they had used a knife, it would have stripped away the surface grunge, too, which as we can see it didn't. And the "M" really truly isn't an "M". Look at the alleged center downstrokes and compare the color to the ink and to the surrounding grunge. It matches the latter, not the former. And an M wouldn't have the center strokes off-center, and there'd be two of them meeting in a V, not one skewed off to the side. The only faces where the central V doesn't go all the way to the bottom are modern monospace fonts where they don't have room. Which this wasn't, as we see from the fact that the lower-case chars are of different widths.

Stainer did such lovely work. What a pity that he was afflicted with such a dreaful life. I'm sure it diminished his output greatly.