Loose Facts In Wax
22-Sep-07
The DC Madame Tussauds opens soon, and as part of the build up they are doing stunt arrivals. A sadly
unanimatronic Abe Lincoln arrived by plane.
And yes, America’s hunger for Oval Office replication will be satisfied!
4 Minutes get Another 15 Minutes of Fame
18-Sep-07
Hat’s Off?
02-Aug-07
Trouble Lincoln Land?
The Lincoln Library wants the city of Springfield to front for them in issuing $25 million in bonds to pay for a substantial collection of Lincoln odds and ends, the star of which is one of three stovepipe hats known to exist. But museums don’t usually go into debt to build their collections. And while issuing tax exempt bods makes the funds cheaper for the museum, someone [ie the feds] gets the tax loss.
The Lincoln’s Executive Director assures the “Springfield Journal Register” that it’s all magic money. “This collection is, essentially, a gift to the people of the state of Illinois. The foundation is paying for it.†But the paper says the foundation has some $19 million in the bank, and fund-raising is nowhere near where they projected it.
This Always To Tourists
17-Jul-07
No end of woe as Springfield Illinois lumbers from loss to loss. Fewer tourists are visiting the home of the Abraham Lincoln Library and other, actual Lincoln sites, in a year when Chicago and downstate Illinois as a whole are up.
Hopes of turning it around may rest on a tourist guide where children can collect stamps from all the local sites, from the Museum of Funeral Customs [motto: “Death is Only the Beginning!”] to The Edwards Place, home of the Lincoln Courting Couch. Scattered early reports in the Springfield Journal Register have “a handful” or “two or three a day” tourists visiting sites bearing the guides, with 20,000 on the streets.
Citizens of Springfield! You can’t get a break.
The latest indignity to befall the Land of Lincoln is it’s snubbing by the producers of The Simpsons Movie, who held a bake-off of the nation’s Springfields to decide where to premiere the film next week.
Illinois’s effort was brightened by referencing the classic episode where Groundskeeper Willie doused the eternal flame on Adlai Stevenson’s grave. 
The full entry is really quite bad:
Lincoln Lore & Legends
Slate excerpts the Lincoln museum chapters of Andrew Ferguson’s “Land of Lincoln: Adventures in Abe’s America”
His summary of the Disney Treatment:
“In the end what you come up with is that he’s interesting because a lot of people over the past 150 years have been interested in him. He’s been hated and loved, pondered and studied, honored and mourned so intensely for so long that it doesn’t seem to matter why. He’s reached the zenith of American celebrity. He’s famous for being famous.”