google ngrams

[Iconoclast]

Come clean, Ike, instead of changing the subject.
Do you think Caroline Brown's latest attempt makes any sense? Or will you once again circle the wagon trains around a non-starter?
If Barrett's attempt to buy a blank Victorian diary was "a simple experiment that would cost him no more than making a phone call" why did Barrett order the bloody thing to the tune of twenty-five pounds?
Why didn't he just hang up the phone with a 'thanks, Marty! That's all I needed to know'??
It's nonsense on stilts, Ike. Barrett wasn't seeing if it could be done, Barrett was attempting to obtain a blank diary.

So Barrett wanted a blank diary?

And you're asking me how that could possibly fit in with Barrett having recently acquired the possibly priceless possible diary of Jack the Ripper?

Hmmm. Don't know, but - I'll tell you what - 'doppelgänger' seems to be seared in my brain right now. Can't think why ...

[rjpalmer]

Come clean, Ike, instead of changing the subject.

Do you think Caroline Brown's latest attempt makes any sense? Or will you once again circle the wagon trains around a non-starter?

If Barrett's attempt to buy a blank Victorian diary was "a simple experiment that would cost him no more than making a phone call" why did Barrett order the bloody thing to the tune of twenty-five pounds?

Why didn't he just hang up the phone with a 'thanks, Marty! That's all I needed to know'??

It's nonsense on stilts, Ike. Barrett wasn't seeing if it could be done, Barrett was attempting to obtain a blank diary.

[Iconoclast]

No, Ike, I'm not playing your silly game. It's been discussed to death. Search the archives, you'll find those discussions.

Damn - that's what I should have said to your mate Sholmes.

My only purpose was to discuss Caroline Brown's new theory, which strikes me as utterly flawed.

Your only outcome is to get yourself tied-up in knots over why Barrett would think a tiny, dated, 1891 diary would be any use to him given that his foil had shuffled-off in May 1889.

Rookie error on Barrett's part, no doubt about that. This really was his first rodeo, wasn't it?

[rjpalmer]

When Martin Earl contacted Michael Barrett to say he had an 1891 dated diary, why didn't Barrett run a mile?

No, Ike, I'm not playing your silly game. It's been discussed to death. Search the archives, you'll find those discussions.

My only purpose was to discuss Caroline Brown's new theory, which strikes me as utterly flawed.

Have a great evening.

[Iconoclast]

Clearly, the Diary Gang still has no rational explanation for why Barrett was seeking the raw materials for a hoax.

I'm not sure if anyone takes that seriously, RJ, but ...

... help us all out ... When Martin Earl contacted Michael Barrett to say he had an 1891 dated diary, why didn't Barrett run a mile?

I'm sure you've RJsplained it to us all before, but I need a good laugh so let's have it again, eh?

This was a few days before David Barrat's Miracle Auction of March 31, 1992, so what on earth was in Mike's mind (if anything whatsoever, ever) when he agreed to take that diary?

"Hmmm. If a usable document from about that time doesn't turn up at that Miracle Auction on March 31, I'll at least have this handy pocket-sized diary from '91 to record all of my thoughts this year as I seek some other way to pay this mortgage that has never bothered us once since we bought the house. Hold on - it's just occurred to me - this is 1992 not 1991! Sugar lumps! Look at it - it should have been perfect but it's a year out! Hold on, does that say '18'???"

[rjpalmer]

Sorry, Observer, I don't know why Mike wanted that wretched 1891 diary, but then nobody else does either, so I'm not alone. My best guess would be that if he had seen the diary down the pub, with the name Jack the Ripper and the year 1889 at the end, he might naturally have considered the real possibility that it was an elaborate leg-pull - the latest in a history of hoaxes, very possibly inspired by the Hitler Diaries from the 1980s. As such, it might have occurred to him to test his suspicions with a simple experiment that would end up costing him no more than a phone call. How would a leg puller have found a genuine 1880s diary in 1992, which still had a decent number of unused pages for the purpose?

My apologies, but I meant to address this old post from January 9th before I parted ways with its author, so let me do so now.

Let's see if this theory makes any sense.

1. First, if what Barrett had seen down the boozer was an over-sized photo album, wouldn't Barrett have tested whether he could find a similar item instead of seeing if he could find any old non-specific diary? The logic here seems more than a little strained.

2. Notice the self-own in bold. What does it mean that it would "end up costing [Mike] no more than a phone call?" Once Barrett was informed by Martin Earl that he could indeed be supplied with an old blank Victorian Diary, Mike could have ended the phone call if the above theory made sense. But the theory doesn't make sense because Mike didn't do that. Mike ordered the bloody thing. It did cost him more than a phone call --it cost him twenty-five pounds he couldn't afford--for the obvious reason that a suspicious Barrett wasn't merely testing whether such an item could be obtained, he was attempting to obtain it for himself! The theory must be abandoned on this point alone.

3. What Barrett allegedly saw down the boozer had dozens of pages of handwriting. If his goal was to test how easily such an item could be obtained, why would he ask for a diary with as little as twenty-blank pages? That makes no sense, either.

4. Finally, once Martin Earl confirmed that such a diary was obtainable, did Barrett cancel the alleged black-market deal with Ed Lyons, now convinced blank diaries could be easily obtained? Did he heck. None of this happened, of course, but Barrett was clearly in possession of the diary in London in April. It's a theory in search of confirmation, and the confirmation is non-existent.

Clearly, the Diary Gang still has no rational explanation for why Barrett was seeking the raw materials for a hoax.

Have a great day.

[caz]

Tumbleweed.

That's - interesting.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

However, at the scale of your graph, the difference in timing between the 1988 Centenary & the 1992 Diary Discovery is negligible.

In that case, what do you make of the difference in timing between Battlecrease floorboards being raised for electrical work, on the morning of Monday 9th March 1992, and Mike Barrett's first known reference later the same day to the diary, which covers the exact period of James Maybrick's residency in Battlecrease, between February 1888 and May 1889?

Bear in mind that one of the electricians who admitted - nay, insisted - that he remembered helping out on that particular job also had a local pub in common with Mike Barrett, which is over in a different area of Liverpool.

Love,

Caz
X

[Iconoclast]

However, at the scale of your graph, the difference in timing between the 1988 Centenary & the 1992 Diary Discovery is negligible.

Correct, as is evidenced by the zero impact of the apparent rush to use 'spreading mayhem' in the late 19th century. When set against the occurrences of just 'mayhem', it sinks rapidly back to zero. This sudden 'rush' can be easily explained by the Books Published graph (that doesn't make it the reason but you certainly have to acknowledge it or even exclude it before you draw conclusions about anachronisms in Victorian texts).

[Lombro2]

A picture speaks more than 190 billion words:

And they all don't amount to a mole bonnet hill.

[C. F. Leon]

Here is the graph that puts all these google ngrams in context.

Print media took off after the Diary was allegedly written.

Not that I believe that the Diary is authentic, of course. I just want to be fair.

However, at the scale of your graph, the difference in timing between the 1988 Centenary & the 1992 Diary Discovery is negligible.

[Iconoclast]

Here is the graph that puts all these google ngrams in context.

Print media took off after the Diary was allegedly written.

Not that I believe that the Diary is authentic, of course. I just want to be fair.

You are being scrupulously fair, Viscount L..

As a statistician, I look at that graph and am not in the slightest bit surprised that certain familiar phrases are far more often discovered by the Google algorithm in the latter part of the 20th century than they are in the same period a century earlier.

When there is more extant data to sample in certain parts of your population, you can easily draw inaccurate conclusions if you don’t understand what the underlying population of data you’re drawing from looks like.

Ike
Thank Goodness I’m Here

[Lombro2]

Here is the graph that puts all these google ngrams in context.

Print media took off after the Diary was allegedly written.

Not that I believe that the Diary is authentic, of course. I just want to be fair.

[Iconoclast]

Stopping short every time could appear to be a survival instinct kicking in, but could also point to him knowing nothing and therefore being unable to prove anything.

Stopping short and coming up short are just two rather glaring alerts to the keen mind that it is hearing Billy Bullshit not the glorious truth.

Barrett was drunk at the Cloak & Dagger Club in April 1999, but in wine is truth and the truth will out [thank you, Dostoyevsky] and the truth was out that evening because the drunkard on the cramped stage was unable to convince anyone of anything on the night and led the intrepid Lord Orsam many years later to twist and turn a thousand times to make his (Barrett's) tale fit for the fabrication which was to follow.

A fabrication which was helped by paying unreasonably close attention to the fool crying in the corner, singing his plaintive songs, but only hearing the ones Orsam really wanted to hear and becoming rather plaintiff himself as a hopeless consequence ...

Dean Martin knew Mike Barrett better than even Dean Martin himself could ever have known:

I'm praying for rain in California
So the grapes can grow and they can make more wine
And I'm sitting in a honky in Whitechapel
Broken-hearted with a woman on my mind

That's the thing about women, RJ - we can't live with them [long pause] ... [thank you Norm, best ever line in Cheers].

The best of them just drive us to drink, mate [thank you whoever invented ambiguity].

[caz]

I wonder where the idea came from to portray Maybrick as the Ripper. Did it come from Mike, or Anne? Maybe Devereux, or elsewhere? Did Billy Graham have a hand in it? Maybe it's an old idea -- that started out as just a spoof.

Hi Scotty,

Your question got me thinking about this again, and how having a real historical figure as Jack the Ripper would have made the diary unique in terms of ripper hoaxes - at least before the watch emerged to join in the fun and games!

If, as the evidence suggests, Mike brought this diary home and showed it to Anne, could she have worked out fairly quickly that it was meant to be by James Maybrick, from the reference to Battlecrease on the second page? If so, it would have added to her anxiety about Mike's plans to find a publisher, knowing that the name would make it instantly identifiable to whoever might have a claim on it when the story broke. While there had been hundreds of anonymous Jack the Rippers going back to 1888, only the diary identified him as a real person named James Maybrick - making it a very risky business for the Barretts if it had just been nicked from somewhere - as Anne pointedly asked Mike the following February in front of witnesses. What she could hardly have hoped for back in March/April 1992 was that it might have been in someone's house without their knowledge, even if Mike had told her that: "Absolutely no f...ing bugger alive today" knew about it, which were the words he quoted in his affidavit of April 1993 and attributed to the late Tony Devereux when he needed to reinforce his original provenance story, due to certain electricians who were singing from a different hymn book.

Even when Mike was trying his hardest to give a coherent explanation of the reasoning behind fingering Maybrick of all people, for the infamous murders down in Whitechapel, London, he only manages a credible impression of a hoaxer without a clue about his own hoax. It has been argued that it was the drink talking, and he was at least trying to tell the truth despite all the changes in his story. But that would apply equally if he had been lying throughout. It might be better for Barrett believers to put it down to Mike's fear of being nicked if he gave a provable account. Stopping short every time could appear to be a survival instinct kicking in, but could also point to him knowing nothing and therefore being unable to prove anything.

Love,

Caz
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