"Your eyes are bigger than your belly," my mother used to say when we kids couldn’t finish the food on our plates. I guess that’s still true, although no longer with food, but with facts. When I started this blog I also started a folder into which I tossed ideas for future comments on Seacoast history. I figured I’d blog night and day. Now that folder is exploding out of my TO-DO pile. We kids were also told to "waste-not, want-not". So here are a few thoughts that never got off the ground. Topics include a couple of honors we've won, the Muddy River menu, sound relief coming to atlatnic Heights residents, and an article of ours inspires Christian fundamentalist essay on John Smith. (Continued below)

THE MUDDY RIVER SMOKEHOUSE MENU

I try not to respond when I see errors in local articles or hear mangled facts on ferryboat tours. I don’t want to be that kind of picky historian., since I make plenty of gaffs myself. But sometimes you just have to say – Whoa! Take the opening line of the menu at the Muddy River Smokehouse:

"Settled in 1653, the name Portsmouth was adopted in honor of the colony’s founder. He had been captain of the port of Portsmouth, England."

Portsmouth was settled in 1630 (founded in 1623) and, ignoring the grammar, Mason was the founder, but not captain of the port, if any port ever had a captain. There are a half a dozen more errors in the very brief article, none of them earth shattering, but misleading and confusing to readers eating spareribs and pulled pork. A note at the bottom of the article thanks the Portsmouth Chamber of Commerce for providing the information.

TWO 2009 HONORS & A BACKSLAP

I got a phone call from Frommer’s this week looking for photos of the Isles of Shoals. Seems they are working on a guide to the top 500 islands in the world, and our little Isles made the list. That may be the tenth guide to contact this web site over the years looking for local information – all thanks to the super high Google rating that the site has developed.

On that same note, SeacoastNH.com was among just three local web sites listed for PORTSMOUTH in the 2009 YANKEE Travel Guide to New England. The other two were the Portsmouth Chamber of Commerce and the Press Room. Go figure. And finally, though I hate to brag, my 3,000-word article on Betty and Barney Hill that appeared in last year’s UNH Alumni magazine won an award. Sorry, but so far the entire article is not available online except to UNH alums. The award was a bronze medal for Best Article from the Council for Advancement and Support of Education. (CASE).

TOPPING AMAZON.com, FOR AN HOUR

In the same vein, I was surprised when a reader pointed out that my last two books were listed as #1 and #2 in Amazon’s Top 100 books about NH history. That is an admittedly small category, although the books were also rated highly in Travel books about NH and books about Museumology. Okay, that’s not huge either, but I was able to hold to the top two spots for at least an hour until the ratings shifted. Amazon updates the list on the hour, so you had to look quickly, but I did make a screen dump of the page in case no one believed me.

NOISE ABOUT THE THIRD BRIDGE

Memorial Bridge is now on the national "endangered" list and the fate of it and the Portsmouth’s Sarah Long Bridge are still up in the air. But in my little neighborhood, the big noise is still the Route 95 bridge that cuts right through the historic Atlantic Heights housing development. I can see it out my bedroom window, but it’s the noise from the bridge that drives us batty. On a rainy night when the wind is right, we have to shut the window in summer to muffle the sound of traffic passing way up in the air. We’re still a few blocks from the bridge that seems to hang over the baseball field and literally runs on top of the tennis courts here.

So imagine our surprise to read in "The Heights News" that help is on the way. According to the neighborhood bulletin, and I quote:

"The persistent efforts of neighbor Del Morse over the past four years to obtain relief from the bridge noise have finally been rewarded as the NH state legislature recently approved HB 301, which provides funds for the installation of a sound wall barrier…"

It will still take at least two years for the process to work its way through, and there is currently no money in the till to pay for the thing, but it’s the best bridge news we’ve heard all year. The local newsletter actually reprinted the email from NH DOT’s Charles Hood to Atlantic Heights resident Del Morse.

RIGHT WING RIPOFF & MORE

All history writers rob each other. Borrowing from the writing of another historian is okay as long as you make reference to the original author. II’m constantly quoting other researchers in my books and articles, but it is a little weird to see myself quoted in return. At least half a dozen recent books, including a travel guide, a true crime book, a cook book and a history of a black film actor – all quote passages from this web site. And they do so with full attribution.

Other writers just rip you off. You get used to that online, especially on blogs and personal web sites where the writer probably knows nothing about copyright law. When it happens, I write firmly to insist that the stolen material be deleted. Sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn’t. I had one creepy guy lash back in an email to say that he had followed the law to the letter. Didn’t I notice? After stealing an entire original 1,000 word essay (that had taken me weeks to write) and posting it on his own site, he neatly printed my name and the copyright symbol. The guy really thought that you could TAKE anything, as long as you copy the copyright notification.

Sometimes more frustrating are the articles that rewrite your stuff and claim ownership. We all did this on our third grade reports, when we copied painstakingly transcribed an article from an encyclopedia. Then in fifth grade we learned to change every fourth word, and sign our name.

A reader pointed out the other day that my article "The Ugliest Monument in New England" looked very similar to a piece about Captain John Smith by a writer named Doug Phillips on World Net Daily. The first three paragraphs in his piece are drawn entirely from my research, which technically isn’t a crime. In fact, I might not even have noticed, except that I’m the only other person on earth, so far, to post an article about the John Smith Monument at the Isles of Shoals online. And more so, I posted a ton of info, including over a dozen early pictures, and photos taken on Star Island.

A nod from the author, or at least a link or footnote, is the proper response. From this point on, the article is entirely the work of the author. He moves on to an astounding comparison between George Washington and John Smith in an effort to list Smith as a "founding father" of the United States. The comparison is often stretched and silly. Certainly there were few men as unlike one another as Smith and Washington, but that shouldn’t prevent us from thinking of Smith – as many of us do – as an American "founder".

The whole essay comes crashing down when it turns into a religious polemic on how the two "founders" were linked by their deep faith in Jesus Christ. Uh-huh. It was "hearty, manly Christianity that won the day for our ancestors" the author concludes, "and only this kind of Christianity will win the day now." Yikes! Get me outta here. Okay, sometimes it is better NOT to be linked and cited on the Web.

© 2009 by J. Dennis Robinson. All rights reserved.