Unabomber Land (Minus Cabin) for Sale - Any Takers?

If you had an extra $69,500 lying around and didn't care whether you even broke even on the investment, you might want to get in touch with the John Pistelak Realty of Lincoln, Mont. That's the company selling the land once owned by the Unabomber.


Yes, Theodore Kaczynski, the great opponent of advanced technology who is now serving a life sentence for his mad nationwide bombing spree, is still making the news, this time for 1.4 acres of land in western Montana — far from the ravages of such hallmarks of civilization as electricity and running water. It's basically a big bunch of trees and surrounding lands, no doubt by now teeming with wildlife.

The land is listed as "Very Secluded."

Kaczynski himself isn't far away: he's in a maximum security prison in nearby Colorado. Whether he profits from the sale isn't clear, and the realty company hasn't commented much other than to post the particulars of the sale, which include photos that show a very technological chain-link fence and barb-wire apparatus surrounding the property. (Guess they didn't want looters busting in and setting off their own bombs.)

One photo also shows FBI carved into a tree. Whether Kaczynski himself made the alteration in true Croatoan fashion isn't known.


One thing you won't find on the property is the Unabomber Cabin. No, that startling piece of back-to-nature living space is on display in the nation's capital, at the Newseum. Still, if you're looking to get away from it all, you could spend a lot more money and get a lot less land than this option.

Lee Harvey Oswald's Coffin - Cheap!

You have to wonder about the spending power of some folks in these dreary economic times.

One of the items being given away to the highest bidder by a Los Angeles auction house is the original coffin of Lee Harvey Oswald.

Remember him? The guy who shot JFK? Or was he merely the guy who was killed because he was believed to have shot JFK? Either way, he's still long dead.

Now, the coffin he was buried in is up for sale, and the current high bid is $1,000.

This all might be a bit on the really weird side if you didn't know that the coffin is, at the moment, quite empty. That's right — this isn't the box that currently holds the body. No, this is the box that originally held the body.

Seems that conspiracy theorists had had enough and, not waiting even 20 years, had Oswald dug up in 1981, to prove once and for all that it really was him in the coffin and not some Soviet agent who happened to look just like him. (That might have been the only thing they proved, but that's a story for another day.)

So after Oswald was identified as himself, he was placed back in the ground — in a different casket this time — and that's the one in which his body still resides.

The coffin on auction is that original box and is much the worse for wear, having suffered water damage over the years. In fact, what you'll get if you win the auction isn't even the box as a whole, since the water damage has done the deed and created more than one piece. Still, as the auction house is quick to point, you do get all the pieces, and you could certainly have the pieces put together.

What you do with it is up to you. Why, you could even use it to store "magic bullets."

Act quickly, though: The Auction ends on December 18. Maybe by then we'll know everything about the Kennedy Assassination.

Celebrate Secession? Just Say No

Some in the American South are planning, in conjunction with the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, to celebrate secession. What a horrible idea!

The very principle of states' rights that the secessionists of the mid-19th Century (and the nullificationists a few decades before them) is foreign to the ultimate success of a federal government, as was proved quite convincingly by the failure of the Articles of Confederation. And yet we have now, as we did then, people who are standing up in public and celebrating the idea that the much smaller state (or even a larger confederation of states) is (or are) better off without the umbrella of the federal government.

Surely this kind of thinking went out the window along about Appomattox Court House time!

First and foremost is the necessity of a united armed forces, as World War I and World War II proved. Had what is now the United States been two or more countries during either of these worldwide conflicts, the outcome could have been quite different, at the very least the same result achieved in a much longer timeframe and with a much higher death toll. It was precisely America's ability to marshal great amounts of manpower, womanpower, and dollar-power and apply all of it to the war effort that turned the tide in 1918 and again in 1945.

And, as was seen in the aftermath of the Revolutionary War, the nation was able to as a whole pay off its debts after the wars and, further, after World War II, offer vast sums of money to European countries to help rebuild the devastation wrought across the continent.

The economic powerhouse that the U.S. still is would be nigh on impossible if the country had been parceled up into two or more entities. The states that resulted from such a divorce would have been far less enlightened than the countries that currently make up the European Union; and communication, trade, and taxation between the various state-level entities would have been far more contentious than they are now, in the U.S. or in the EU.

Politically, the continent would be a much weaker force as well, with the presidents of the various countries vying for supremacy in their own back yard before they ever got out of the gate and onto the world stage. It is doubtful in the extreme that had the country been split in two, the president of either North or South would now be viewed as the "leader of the free world."

The one thing that binds all people who live in the United States of America is the idea of being American — whatever each person views that to be. The idea of being an American means different things to different people, but the overriding identity that Americans feel toward their country, their flag, their freedom, and their rights under the laws of the land unite them in a way that living in cities, states, commonwealths, townships, and counties can't approach.

Such honoring of the idea of splitting off from the American way of life and rejecting all of the benefits and protection that federalism allows is to remember a failed idea in the positive — a dangerous practice indeed.

Civil War Re-examination Years in the Making ... and Doing

A full 150 years ago, Abraham Lincoln was elected President of the United States. That election, and its result, set the nation on the course to civil war, changing the fate of the nation in ways that are still being felt and explored.

To commemorate the sesquicentennial, the National Park Service is planning a large series of commemorative events, beginning with a re-enactment of the election and running right through to a re-enactment of the end of the war, five years later.

Re-enactment events are planned for the major battles of the war, including Gettysburg, Antietam, and the First Battle of Bull Run (Manassas). It's probably not too much of a stretch to anticipate a re-enactment of the Gettysburg Address.

It's not just the battles, however. Shortly after the election re-enactment, the presidential train will get revved up and ready to go, replicating Lincoln's journey from his home state of Illinois to the nation's capital, Washington, D.C. Other similar nonviolent events are planned in many states affected by the Civil War. In all, more than 75 different battlefields and historic sites will have events. And that's not covering the various museums and privately operated sites planning events as well.

The District of Columbia tourism bureau will open an exhibit titled "Civil War to Civil Rights." Also getting into the act will be the National Archives, which will open its vaults to allow viewings of rarely seen gems from history, including an original draft of the 13th Amendment (banning slavery) that didn't get past the draft stage.

It's entirely fitting and proper for the NPS, the National Archives, and other entities to take a good, hard look at these momentous events, especially at a time when the nation as its stands now is (or should be) doing a lot of soul-searching over its direction forward. By examining the past, we can divine not only what happened but also what should have happened (depending on your point of view), not only what might have been but also but still could be.

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Rare Baseball Card a Home Run for Nuns

No swing and a miss here. These nuns have knocked one out of the park.

The School Sisters of Notre Dame, a Baltimore-based order of nuns, is today $220,000 richer, thanks entirely to the sale of a baseball card.

This wasn't just any baseball card, though. It was a rare one. The card in question was a Honus Wagner T206, of which only about 60 are known to exist.

The card, produced by the American Tobacco Company between 1909 and 1911, was discontinued soon after because the player wanted it gone. Wagner, one of the game's all-time greats (and, some say, the greatest shortstop ever to play the game), didn't want to encourage smoking by children, the natural audience for baseball cards. However, some sources say that Wagner demanded more money than ATC was willing to pay and that it was perhaps the tobacco company that pulled the plug on the Wagner card. Whatever the motivation, the card was no more.

The actual sale price was $262,000 and was rung up at an auction run by Heritage Auction Galleries, an outfit based in Dallas. The card will now be in the possession of Doug Walton, a collector and card shop owner from Knoxville, Tenn.

The nuns, who had to part with a buyer's premium off the top of the sale price, had the card in the first place because they inherited it from the brother of a nun. Virginia Muller, the sister in charge, says the money will go entirely to more than 30 countries around the world.

For more details, see this post.

Civil War Dolls Pegged as Smugglers

The Civil War continues to fascinate as its 150th anniversary approaches. The latest story to capture the public fancy is that of a pair of dolls thought to have been vessels for smuggling.

The papier mache dolls, which measure up to 3 feet in length and have been resting quietly at the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond, Va., have become items of intense speculation in recent days, as recent X-rays have revealed hidden cavities and other hints that medicine was smuggled inside the two wooden girls (called Lucy Ann and Nina) on a ship bound for the American South from Great Britain. The idea would have been to get the medicine inside the dolls past the ever-present Union blockade.

No evidence of what was smuggled has been found, but officials at the Virginia Commonwealth University Medical Center have scanned evidence that something was in this cavities, most prominently evidenced by not only a gash in the head of one dolls but also signs of the dolls' heads being stitched back on the bodies, presumably after the contents were removed.

The two dolls came from two different donors, both of whom insisted that medicine was the substance was smuggled into Confederate hospitals. The most obvious entities would be morphine and quinine, which could be used to malaria and other sources of devastation far behind enemy lines.

Lucy Ann came from an anonymous donor. Nina's donor, however, is known. That would be the children of Gen. James Patton Anderson, the commander of the Tennessee Army of the Confederacy.

Further tests, if ordered, would be forensic in nature, to discover traces of the smuggled contents, whatever they were.

Nuns to Make Money Off Baseball ... Card

The Lord works in mysterious ways. It's a common refrain among the Christian clergy and the Christian laity, and it's certainly applicable in this case.

Seems a certain man who died a few years ago left everything he had to the order of Roman Catholic nuns to which his sister belonged. Also seems that among the man's possessions was a very rare baseball card.

Collectors will immediately recognize the value of a T206 Honus Wagner, of which only 60 are known to exist. This is the most famous baseball card in history.

The paucity of copies of this card is the first clue that the card's worth has some heft. The card is more well-known, however, in collecting circles because of why so few copies exist.

Wagner was a super baseball player, one of the best in the history of the game, one of the first five ever inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. A shortstop for the Pittsburgh Pirates, he was a speedy hitter (nicknamed the "Flying Dutchman") with tremendous defensive range and a terrific eye at the plate, compiling a lifetime .328 batting average. He won the National League batting title eight times, and his Pirates won the World Series in 1909.

The baseball card in question is famous because Wagner wanted it gone. He pressured the American Tobacco Company to take his card out of production, and so the T206 series, which was printed from 1909 to 1911, is the only known series to contain a Honus Wagner card. Wagner's commonly acknowledged motivation for doing this was because he didn't want to encourage smoking by children, the natural audience for baseball cards. However, some sources say that Wagner demanded more money than ATC was willing to pay and that it was perhaps the tobacco company that pulled the plug on the Wagner card. Whatever the motivation, the card was no more.

The current card is in the hands of the School Sisters of Notre Dame, in Baltimore, Md. The nuns are planning to put the card up for auction. The last Wagner sold brought in $2.8 million, the largest amount of money ever paid for a baseball card. That was in 2007, and that card was in mint condition. The nuns hope to fetch up to $200,000 from a collector willing to put up with the slight imperfections of the card, including a few missing borders and a large crease in one corner. The deceased had owned the card since 1936 and had had the card laminated, no doubt after watching the card's value go up over the years.