LATEST ADDITIONS

Several folks make the case&mdash;Agnes Selby, author of <I>Constanze, Mozart's Beloved</I> does so most emphatically. <I>Sound And Fury</I> has it all covered.

George Kerevan reviews Christopher Duffy's <I>Through German Eyes: the British and the Somme 1916</I>, which sounds like a corker. In the first 24 hours of that battle, Britain lost more men than in the Crimean, Boer, and Korean wars combined.

Maybe so. I think I prefer Michael Dibdin's solution in <I>The Last Sherlock Holmes Story</I>, but fiction is frequently more fun than fact.

Jeff Wong passed along this obit, which I find interesting for all kinds of reasons. Mickey Spillane, the creator of Mike Hammer, was a Jehovah's Witness?

<i>Feeling uninspired &#151; burned by the heat and wearied by spreadsheets &#151; Kristina fights off a case of the Monday Blahs while searching for her mechanical eye.</i><br>
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Well yes, obviously&mdash;but Mexican epidemiologist Rodolfo Acu&#241;a-Soto thinks that the 16th Century plague that reduced the Aztec population from 22 million to 2 million was <I>not</I> smallpox brought over by the Spaniards. Aztec historians of the time referred to it by a different name than smallpox, with which they were familiar(!), and, after 12 years of research, Acu&#241;a-Soto concurs.

Okay, no list of 50 could be perfect, but this one's pretty good. I could probably come up with a list of 50 that <I>also</I> changed music without any overlap, but that's one of the pleasures of the list game.