
From The Oxford Clarion: “The Eagle & Child is Oxford’s most storied inn. It was here that the Inklings met every Tuesday lunchtime – a writing group including J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Hugo Dyson, who infamously dismissed a plot twist in the Lord of the Rings with “Not another —ing elf!”. Larry Ellison is the billionaire behind US database giant Oracle. He owns the sixth largest island in Hawaii, hired Steve Jobs as his wedding photographer, and was compared to a lawnmower by a disgruntled engineer. He also doesn’t drink. All this makes him an unusual candidate for an Oxford pub landlord. But then the new Eagle & Child is going to be an unusual pub: it is to be the in-house bar for Ellison’s new Oxford outpost, the Ellison Institute of Technology.”
Letters hidden in my family’s attic reveal a 1910s bank con in Key West

From Atlas Obscura: “My mother doesn’t remember much about when she found the letters. The year was 1975, she was 10, and her father had just purchased a dilapidated two-story house on the island of Key West. She remembers finding a box containing 20 or so handwritten letters that were dated between 1913 and 1915. The collection of letters chronicles the correspondence between two bank colleagues: James L. Johnson, a cashier who lived at 616 Caroline Street, and E. M. Martin, the bank’s vice president and a shadowy figure whose life was riddled with many peculiar twists and turns. Both men worked at the Island City National Bank, a small bank open for only 10 years. The bank has long been an enigma. Its bizarre story stretches over a decade between various cities, countries, and continents. And these hidden letters turned out to be a missing piece of the puzzle, a winding tale of fraud, manhunts, and amnesia.”
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