Today will be a scorcher, and I'll be spending it at a training session with a group of Telling Room teaching artists. After that I'll be shopping for ceviche ingredients and hoping I'll manage to get my laundry off the line before the thunderstorms start.

As I was delving into a box of books yesterday, I came across a book that we acquired somewhere along the line. It's titled Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds and was first published in 1853. The author, Charles McKay, is, according to the 1932 foreword of this edition, "a narrator, not a diagnostician," and "no preventative is anywhere suggested." In other words, he just enjoyed telling the tales of various moments of public craziness.

My favorite chapter title, hands down, is "Influence of Politics and Religion on the Hair and Beard." Even better is the chapter's epigraph, which quotes Hudibras: "Speak of respect and honour / Both of the beard and the beard's owner."

I can't wait to learn more.