The solid year-end issue of the Baltimore City Paper devotes its cover story to “People Who Died” in 2008 (shunning The New York Times Magazine’s euphemistic year-end convention, “The Lives They Lived”). The story is billed as a collection of “alt-obits,” and starts out somberly enough with a roundup of 2008’s catastrophes: “Genocide, war, terrorist attacks, disease—yikes.” Among the ten “semi-famous, semi-obscure folks” here memorialized is Larry Harmon, who didn’t invent Bozo the Clown but “standardized his visage, manner, and blue and red costume,” and whose “size-83AAA shoes will be hard to fill.”

Fans of The Wire will want to check on the “Mobtown Beat” section—this edition features postal pooches fighting crime the Western District way. Specifically, drug-sniffing “K-9s” Britta and Ozzy found several pounds of marijuana in packages en route to ostensible stash houses. Agents also found 519 grams of opium hidden in a magazine mailed to Baltimore from Mumbai. The section also includes a murder blotter that tracks Baltimore-area murders by the week (five this week) and by the year (232 in 2008).

The Arts and Entertainment section profiles avant-garde Indian musician Ami Dang, whose music writer Michael Byrne calls a “synthesis of classically trained, traditional Indian vocals and nimble, adroit sitar playing.” Byrne’s a fan, though he reserves a special place in “the hell of torturous instruments [for] the 20-plus stringed, mutant guitar-looking thing.” Incidentally, another notable 2008 passing the paper mentions but doesn’t detail is that of Transcendental Meditation Guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, whom George Harrison encountered through his own fascination with Indian culture and the sitar.

Some fun, if anodyne, ’90s-era social science research is brought to you by Brian Morton in the “Political Animal” column. Morton argues that “conservatives, by dint of media saturation and message discipline, managed to change the accepted norms of policy discourse.” Social scientist Joe Overton claimed that there is a range or “window” of policies that are acceptable on any given political spectrum. Morton says that Bush “moved the Overton window” further right by “mak[ing]… ideas that are so far off the edge part of the discussion,” thereby making “ideas that were once mildly unpalatable seem reasonable.” Luckily for the alt-weekly demographic, universal health care, also outside the window at one point, is poised to climb in. - Kathy Gilsinan

2000. The European Journal, December 2008

“Dear Colleagues,” writes Vincenzo Merolle, editor of 2000. The European Journal, a biannual newsletter printed on thick yellowish paper, “We have finally crossed the Rubicon, putting to the internet –with many imperfections to be corrected – the part of the European Dictionary which we have compiled up to now. It is a small part, indeed, but has cost us a lot of work.” A visit to the European Journal’s Web site shows that, indeed, a portion of its European dictionary project is available in PDF form, hatched from what Merolle calls the need for demonstrating “the substantial unity” of European history and creating, “where it is lacking, the consciousness of such a unity.” Merolle notes that several well-known publishers “accepted the cultural aim of our project. Nevertheless they were not ready to invest the sum necessary even for the first of these volumes… They did not believe that these dictionaries would sell enough to reward the investment.” Merolle’s response? “Wir werden sehen.” To Merolle: Viel Glück!

For dedicated readers, the rest of The European Journal is comprised of four articles, two in English and two in French. The first, written by an F. L. van Holthoon, compares David Hume’s History of England against Thomas B. Macaulay’s The History of England, From the Accession of James the Second with the hope that it would be “useful for asking how near they approached historical truth,” and more importantly, to see how each fits “with our view of English history.” Whose? European posterity’s, I assume. In the parsing, there are some fun turns of phrase: “Hume regarded Charles I as basically a sincere and virtuous prince. In this he was undoubtedly wrong and Macaulay right.” And from Hume himself, a sentence (describing the reign of Charles II) that I dare Maureen Dowd to serve up:

Thus the two parties, actuated by mutual rage, but cooped up within the narrow limits of the law, leveled with poisoned daggers the most deadly blows against each other’s breast, and buried in their factious divisions all regard to truth, honour, and humanity.

It should be noted that, in his day, Macaulay himself quoted the above sentence “with approval.”

On page three, we find the presumptive reason this pluckily didactic publication reached the CJR offices: an article about Johann Peter Friedrich Ancillon, tutor to the Prussian crown prince and later Prussian Minister of Foreign Affairs, who in 1816 wrote a mostly-forgotten defense of press freedom. Cheers for history-of-press-and-the-law articles! The author, John Christian Laursen, a professor of political science at UC Riverside, argues that Ancillon has been misunderstood—in fact, miscast—as a conservative reactionary (and remembered in the Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie for his receptivity to “the needs of the tender souls of court ladies”). The proof, Laursen writes, is in Ancillon’s text, “On Press Laws,” which begins by “noting that abuse of the press is bad for a country,” and ends with the strong conclusion that “there should be the least restraint on the press as possible, giving liberty the greatest latitude.” Reactionary, schmreactionary. Laursen’s kicker? Don’t trust secondary sources.