This New England

Everything becomes quaint, or at least commercial, with the passage of time, even such horrors as murder. Thus we have the Lizzie Borden Bed and Breakfast, in Fall River, having duked it out in court with The True Story of the Lizzie Borden Gift Shop and Museum (real name!), in Salem, the City of Witches. The Salem businessman has since settled out of court, agreeing to come up with another name.

B&B owner Donald Woods had asserted that that the Salem outfit iwas infringing on his "Lizzie Borden Museum'' trademark. Ms. Borden, of course, was accused of axing to death her textile-man father and stepmother in 1892 -- an event that has spawned, besides lawsuits, much journalism, fiction and even opera since then.

I myself am related to someone charged with a famous murder (name-dropping in a pinch) -- a young man called Chester Gillette, who reputedly killed his pregnant girlfriend iwith a tennis racquet in upstate New York in 1906, giving rise to Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy and the movie A Place in the Sun. But that killing never quite had the multi-media possibilities of Ms. Borden's case. Neither did the stabbing to death of an uncle of mine...Oh, well....

God help us on what may be coming: The O.J. Simpson Cutlery Shoppe?

The ingenuities of international business

Lies, Bribes, Peril: Lessons for the Real Challenges of International Business is is an amateurishly written and essentially unedited volume by Ron Cruse that recounts some of his near-lethal adventures in doing international business deals.

Despite its many literary flaws, it's a vivid description of why doing business in the West is much better than doing it in most of the world.

There's something to be said for the rule of law; and mandatory bribery ("accommodation'') of innumerable officials must get very tedious after a while. Mr. Cruse's description of the lessons he learned from people in many nations are worth several international-business courses.

Still a gadfly

Rod Driver is running to return to his state representative's job in Rhode Island. Say what you will about Mr. Driver, his intelligence, disinclination to curry favor and wide interests make him one of the Ocean State's most interesting politicians, gadflies or whatever he is besides a retired math professor.

An Arrow Collar man

Kudos to Laurence and Judy Cutler of the National Museum of American Illustration, in Newport, for coming out with a beautiful book on the great illustrator J.C. Leyendecker, whose work created the look of a glamorous lifestyle that underlies a whole school of advertising created in the first half of the 20th Century. See the prints in the book or in the museum, on Bellevue Avenue. The Web can't do full justice to them.

 Tags  Chester Gillette Laurence Cutler Leyendecker Lizzie Borden Ron Cruse

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