"The Most Beloved Columnist in 45 States"
(and the recently annexed territories of Puerto Rico, the Phillippines and Guam)

I'm Back!
After an almost 32 week hiatus while I've been down with the Influenza, my columns have become woefully late, but I'm doing much better. Sainted, yet still unable to vote, wife Barbara has been regularly applying the leeches and I'm consuming prodigious quantities of laudanum and quinine. I appear to be on the mend and pray the damage to my lungs from the incessant coughing doesn't lead to a bout of tuberculosis. Son, Edward (10) is quite enjoying his new life on the day shift (freeing up the waning evening hours for reading his "penny dreadfuls" by gaslight) and cherubic daughter Kelly (8) wants to know why they call them "sweat shops" if there is no heating oil and most of her co-workers on the line are coming down with the consumption and, in some cases, pneumonia. Any of the legions of PAOA fanatics that can answer the sweet moppet's query will receive a splendid reward from Poor Anthony's Vault of Stipends. Now, on with the column...

In The News
There are many among you who have taken me to task of late for devoting more space in my columns to my political views and less to entertainment news, stating that this is an ersatz "popular entertainment" column. To this I answer with a resounding "fie"!  This has ever been, and shall continue to be, my forum to do with as I will. Besides, there are precious few Sarah Barnhardt plays that make it to this neck of the Ohio woods and Tom Edison's new "moving picture" camera invention is but a passing fancy. A novelty to amuse the jaded New Yorker, at best. T'will be al but forgotten in five or six years. You may bank on that! In any case, it appears that President William "I'm an Imperialist" McKinley is at it again (I can't believe he's a fellow Ohioan, hailing from nearby Niles)! As if his economic policies concerning the gold standard and his vilifying Democratic leader William Jennings Bryant weren't heinous enough, now the puppet ruler of Marcus "Hello, Nursie" Hanna -- king of the trusts -- has profiteered through the recent strife with Spain by annexing Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Guam. I mean, really... Guam? While I welcome our Hispanic brethren from P.R. into the bosom of democracy, I see absolutely no reason for bringing a useless atoll like Guam into the fold. With our current leanings toward isolationism, I doubt the wretched isle could even serve as a strategic military installation. Guam... Ha! I guess this is what comes from absorbing those rascally northern Whigs into the new Republican Party.

On The Book Shelves
L. Frank Baum has a new book out called "The Wizard Of OZ". I found this to be smashing escapist entertainment of the highest caliber. 'Tis no "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" to be sure, but twill suffice. I'd go so far as to say that, were the moving picture technology not already obsolete (in my humble opinion and, as regular readers of PAOA know, my opinions are rarely incorrect), this novel might make a mildly amusing moving picture. And elsewhere, now that the Boer War is winding down in Africa, and physician/writer Arthur Conan Doyle is soon to return to merry Olde England, could we be seeing new adventures of a certain detective from Baker Street in the offing? Yes, I realize that Holmes was "seemingly" killed in his last adventure almost three years ago, but remember, we never did see the body...

I'll be back tomorrow with more bon mots of wisdom.

POOR ANTHONY
February 11, 1900