I have a guest blogger coming...

I'm so happy that my daughter Melina has agreed to be my guest blogger this summer while I'm in the wild, granola-crunching north. I got a gig starting late this month, for 3-1/2 weeks, doing a Village Harmony travelling camp with teenage singing whizzes - we'll stay at a Buddhist-type retreat center in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont (right next to Quebec evidently) rehearsing for seven hours a day, and then pile into hippy busses and spend two weeks on the road, doing a concert in a different town every night.

The Buddhist retreat center seems quite anti-technology so blogging there will be impossible (though I hear there may be a wireless-ly wired town a mere six miles away). As for being on the road in three mini-busses with 27 teenagers - the mind reels.

Anyway, starting in about three weeks Melina will be covering for me. She will be in Jackson Mississippi, doing her summer job, which is the taking of oral histories from elderly Jews. If I were looking for elderly Jews from whom to take oral histories, Mississippi might not have been my first choice of a stomping ground, but I'm sure she'll be able to explain.

Melina, a history buff who as you know just graduated from college, has been the source of some of my favorite posts like the Jefferson's Cheese and the Boston Molasses Disaster of 1919 and even today's Questing Behavior of Ticks.

She has become the world's leading expert on George Cleeve, who in the 17th century, as I understand, was an agent charged with funneling the riches of Maine to his employers in England - said employers' juxtaposition of the words "riches" and "Maine" suggesting their ignorance of the actual situation - but who instead, for a while, managed to invent and rule his own kingdom of Lygonia, a kingdom snatched and devised via a confusion of paperwork. "Your million acres? Oh, I thought it was MY million acres."

Did I get that right, dear?