PHARAOH’S BROKER: BEING THE VERY REMARKABLE EXPERIENCES IN ANOTHER WORLD OF ISIDOR WERNER WRITTEN BY HIMSELF (1899) – Written by Elmer Dwiggins under the name Ellsworth Douglass. For obvious reasons I shortened the title for the blog post headline.
Isidor Werner is a successful wheeling and dealing speculator on the grain market in Chicago. His old teacher from Heidelberg, Professor Anderwelt, comes to him seeking financial backing for an antigravity device he is working on. In exchange for 90% of the profits from the device (seems reasonable), Werner agrees.
Anderwelt uses the funding not only on the antigravity technology but for the construction of a spaceship. The professor convinces his former student Isidor to ride along with him on a trip to Mars. Continue reading
Independent Voter site Balladeer’s Blog comes to you once again from an America divided by the Democrats’ hatred and racism, just as it has been for the past five years. It’s no secret that in the United States the REAL division is not black people vs white people or gay people vs straight people or women vs men – it’s DEMOCRATS VS EVERYBODY ELSE. 
FIRST SEMIFINAL – The NORTHWESTERN (IA) COLLEGE RED RAIDERS took down the two-time defending national champions, the MORNINGSIDE COLLEGE MUSTANGS. The Red Raiders visited the champs and spent most of the game chasing them. A 14-9 1st Quarter edge for the Mustangs became 27-23 by Halftime. The 3rd Quarter ended with Morningside College on top 34-29 but in the 4th Northwestern College roared back to win the game 44-41. 
MISTER SCARLET 
MARY MARVEL 
CAMERONE DAY – A month ago Balladeer’s Blog examined the 1895 collection of short stories 
THE BATTLE OF CAMERONE (Camaron in Spanish) – Getting back to the topic of this blog post, it’s sort of the French Foreign Legion’s central Alamo event. And I say central because many of the most famous battles of the Legion are like a long series of Alamos. Camerone set the standard, though. As usual, the Legion’s cause was not a virtuous one by our standards. The execrable Napoleon the Third was using the FFL and other French forces to try to prop up his Austrian ally Maximilian, the so-called “Emperor of Mexico.” 
Independent Voter site Balladeer’s Blog noted that, with more and more states introducing legislation to prevent the “vote fraud by mail” scams that Democrats used in 2020 from being used in future elections, and with ongoing investigations into that vote fraud finding more and more evidence, Joe Biden and his fellow fascists decided to lie some more to distract from all that. 
Anyone who thinks that the January 6th protest against an election (that was as tainted as the 1876 and 2000 elections) was “an insurrection” or was “worse than 9-11” needs to seek professional help. 3,000 people died on 9-11. Only people who are insane or are unthinking political robots would compare the two. 
AGON: ATOMIC DRAGON, also called Phantom Monster Agon and Giant Phantom Monster Agon, is an overlooked miniseries from Japanese television. It was produced in 1964 but due to legal action over the monster’s similarity to Godzilla its creator’s old Toho contract was invoked to prevent the miniseries from being televised until 1968. This black & white miniseries ran just four half-hour episodes and aired on four consecutive nights, from January 2nd – 5th, 1968. 
When an irritating reporter named Goro Sumoto aka “the Suppon” arrives to report on the police and the Atomic Energy Authorities scouring the beach for the lost uranium, Agon rises up from the sea in the exact same “bubbling waters first” technique favored by Godzilla. Goro photographs Agon, who vogues for a while, then submerges again. The reporter also meets Monta, the obligatory wise-ass little kid character so common to kaiju stories. 
THE SCARLET PLAGUE (1912) – Written by THE Jack London. Years ago Balladeer’s Blog reviewed London’s mad scientist horror tale A Thousand Deaths, now I’ll examine The Scarlet Plague, London’s post-apocalypse plague story set in the year 2073. 
James Howard Smith is that elderly survivor in a world returned largely to hunting and gathering. He is cared for by his three grandsons, Edwin and two others whose absurd names probably contribute to keeping The Scarlet Plague so underappreciated – Hoo-Hoo and Harelip. (?) They get by as well as they can in northern California, raising dogs to help them herd the goats that they raise for meat and milk, and relying on the ocean for much of the rest of their food supply. Primitive weapons like bows and arrows are all they have on hand to use against wild bears and other menaces. 
THE BAKARIDJAN KONE EPIC – Djeli, the poet-historians of the Bambara people for over 300 years, would often recite, chant and sing this epic myth while playing their stringed instruments called ngoni. 
I can certainly understand Tatum’s surprise at how uninformed the newsreader is. I’m often amazed myself at the way people who don’t live here presume to know more than we do about political and social situations in the country where we live. I sometimes remind overseas people who condescendingly spout wrong information like this that they do not get an accurate view from the brief, isolated sniglets of “news” (LMAO) that they see. It’s why you never see me telling people in other countries how they should feel about events in their home nations. 
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