The Alleged News®

We’ve All Done It

by

[Who among us has never written a check, early in January, and written upon it the previous year’s date? The same pitfall awaits publishers. In 1886, our predecessor, Washington Freeman, fell victim to it. We did the same one year, we can’t recall exactly when. — The Ed.] The police of Detroit, Mich., formed themselves into a mob on the night of Dec. 29th, and destroyed the office of the Sunday Sun, a sensational newspaper which had criticized their conduct. The streets of Lawrence, Mass., are now lighted with the Edison incandescent electric light. Judge Yates, of Peoria, Ill., has gone to Canada after stealing …

Read more

Fake News in a Bottle

by

SANDWICH, MASS., Dec. 14 – A bottle containing the following note was picked up on the beach to-day, three miles below Sandwich harbor: “Bark J.R. Humphrey, Bath, Me. We were out in the storm of November 25, and we wrote this to our friends, for when it is found we will be at the bottom of the wild ocean, hoping that you will pray for us and tell your friends.” Signed, John Wilson, captain, Pat Hoey, Tim Lewis, John O’Neil, Billy Cartell. On the reverse side was: “We are all lost.” [There is no such vessel as the “Bark J.R. Humphrey of Bath, Me.,” or …

Read more

Where the Money Is

by

Perhaps the most lucrative office in the national government, next to the presidency itself, is the clerkship of the supreme court at Washington. It yields an annual income in fees of from $25,000 to $40,000. – New York Evening World [That would be $852,568 to $1,364,109 in today’s debased currency. – The Ed.] The New Hampshire Gazette, November 1, 1888 At Pittsburg, Pa., about the middle of October, Miss Virginia Knox, a young American woman of considerable wealth, was married to Count Di Montcalleri. The couple were expelled from a hotel in Paris on Oct. 29th., the “nobleman” having scandalized the other inmates of the …

Read more

Lucky He Was Drunk

by

Isaac Bennett of South Berwick visited Dover, N.H. on Saturday, got gloriously drunk and drove his horse recklessly about the streets until the animal ran away and “fired out” the drunken driver, landing him on his head on a reservoir cover. He was badly cut and bruised; had he been sober his brains would have been scattered all over the street. The Rochester correspondent of the Portsmouth Times asks: “Will some one throw a brick at the Portsmouth correspondent of Foster’s?” He evidently thinks Portsmouth is south of the Mason & Dixon’s line. Morris Hennessy, sixty years old, was killed by the fall of a …

Read more

Nineteenth Century Humanity

by

Charles Parker, wife, and two children aged two and four years, fled from Decatur, Ala., when the yellow fever broke out there, to the home of relatives at Oak Mountain. When within fifteen miles of Oak Mountain they were confronted by the shot-gun quarantine, and driven back. On the 7th inst. a brave physician went in search of them, and found them all dead, the parents having died in the woods of yellow fever, and the children of starvation. The Biddeford Journal remarks: “The democratic newspapers are still strugling [sic] to hold down the remaining republican plurality in Maine. It reminds one of the late …

Read more

Tramps! Mugwumps! Women murdered in Whitechapel, London!

by

News and Notes Jeremiah O’Neil, one of a gang of four white loafers who undertook to give two colored men an unprovoked thrashing in Providence, R.I., Sept. 15th, was fatally shot by one of the colored men. There was a free fight in the Westminster Presbyterian church at St. Paul, Minn., Sept. 16th, over the alleged immorality of the late pastor. The police quelled the riot. Charles Kinsel of Philadelphia is experimenting with an air-sailing ship. The mugwump bosses of New York have ordered their followers to vote against Hill for governor. A full-blooded negro testified in a rich Irish brogue before a Brooklyn court …

Read more