Everyone - even in countries where they don’t play baseball, or have only the foggiest idea what the sport is all about - is probably familiar with the use of baseball metaphors to describe sexual activity, though not everyone agrees on what each “base” is. (See Wikipedia for more.) According to Wikipedia, this is a post-WWII thing, though I’m not sure anyone has ever tried to track down the origin of the usage.

I spent a little time recently digging into it, and I was a bit surprised at what I found. You might be, as well.

If you hunt around with Google, it’s possible to find baseball being used as a metaphor for progress in general as early as 1920, and possibly even a few years before that. But that’s distinctly non-sexual, non-romantic.

As near as I can tell, baseball as a metaphor for (romantic) progress between two people can be documented to 1935 or so , and can be documented in a popular magazine a year later.
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No, this (probably) isn’t going to become a regular thing, but while looking for photos that were taken on July 12th - i.e. yesterday - throughout history, I also stumbled across a neat photo taken on July 13th - i.e. today - that I thought was too cool not to share.

Imagine this, okay? The date is July 13th. You’re in Chicago, America’s “second city”. It’s 1955; the war has been over for ten years, technological progress and modern society have surpassed everything you ever thought they would be. It was sunny out. In England, Ruth Ellis had just been put to death for killing her husband, in what would prove to be the UK’s last execution for at least half a century.

Somewhere downtown Chicago, meanwhile, there’s a Shriner’s convention going on, and Chicago has arranged… entertainment.
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It’s been a while since I’ve geeked out over old photographs, so I delved into the Library of Congress’ archives, and the Life magazine archives, and came up with a handful of kind of neat old photographs from way back when - all of which were taken on the same day of the year… July 12th.

Why? Because I can, of course…
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A couple of weeks ago, I bought one of those Eken M-001 devices that have received such scathing reviews throughout the blogosphere. What the heck is an Eken M-001? It’s a seven-inch touch-screen tablet computer that runs Google’s Android operating system, that’s what. It’s sometimes called a “tablet notebook” or even a “tablet netbook”, and gets compared really often to the Apple iPad, for obvious reasons.
The comparison is never flattering, of course. Partially this is just Apple fanboys being Apple fanboys, and partially this is haters of Chinese electronics being haters of Chinese electronics. But, sure, there is room for complaint. Android is not really an operating system meant for “computing”, and doing “computing” things with only a touchscreen and six buttons is far from ideal. The Eken runs a slightly older version of Android, meaning some newer apps can’t be installed easily. Battery life when the wifi is on is fairly unspectacular - two to three hours, tops. The 350MHz processor combined with the software isn’t really beefy enough to play high-bitrate video files. Sound through the speakers is decent; sound through the headphone jack sucks sweaty donkey balls.

But, as a $99 e-book reader, this thing rocks.
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While browsing Google Books today during lunch, I came across an interesting 1872 book on “submarine telegraphy”, i.e. the earliest trans-oceanic cables. I immediately found two things very interesting - the profit-sharing arrangements that were involved between various companies, and the downtime that was apparently considered permissible. Consider:

The [Anglo-American Telegraph Company] messages are taken from London to Valentia, through the Wexford cable, two wires being specially reserved for the American messages; at Heart’s Content they are handed to the New York, Newfoundland, and London Telegraph Company, who transmit them as far as Plaister Cove, whence they are sent by the Western Union Telegraph Company direct to New York.

From the opening of the Atlantic cable for traffic, on the 28th July, 1866, until the 15th August, 1869, the Anglo-American Company had no rival; but immediately upon the opening of the French Atlantic Company’s cable for traffic on the latter date, a sharp competition commenced, which resulted in an agreement being made between the two companies for a division of receipts, as follows :—

The gross receipts accruing to the two companies, from messages passing over their lines (the French Company being considered as commencing at Brest and ending at Boston, and the Anglo Company as beginning at Valentia and ending at Plaister Cove), to be divided, by giving the French Company 36 2/3 per cent., and the Anglo Company 63 1/3 per cent., irrespective of which company may have done the work. Special arrangements are also made in case of the breaking of all or any of the three cables, which are as follows :

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