What Was In Your Mailbox Today??

Q/ What is a "mouse" ?

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey (who, if the science is correct, will be forgetting 'mouse-mat' before he forgets 'Fidel')

"If e'er thy breast with freedom glowed,
And spurned a tyrant's chain,
Let not thy strong oppressive force
A free-born mouse detain".

Anna Barbauld, The Mouses's Petition

Finally received my long awaited May 23, 1934 (PM) cover with Scott #729 cancelled onboard the U.S.S. Robin. The reason this is important (at least for someone who loves history like myself) is that this was cancelled on the same day that Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker (aka "Bonnie and Clyde") were ambushed in Bienville Parish, LA by Texas Rangers and local Law Enforcement.

I decided to snatch this up off of ebay after watching "The Highwaymen" on Netflix, which is all about hunting down Bonnie and Clyde- I highly recommend it!

I got this one in today. An envelope posted in the UK for shipping to Yezd in Persia.
Apparently the envelope took its time. Departure August 7 1914, Received at Yezd October 13 1914 with a few transitional postmarks on the back.

Northwinds - that is a remarkably nice cover. If you haven't yet done so, plug in the departure and arrival cities into your favorite online map and take a look at the inhospitable ground it covered, and this was in 1914. Good pickup.

Q/ Is the name of the ship (USS ROBIN) important because of the pun?

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

Hah, I wasn't paying attention to the name of the ship, more so the date (5/23/1934). Come to think of it, it's a fitting name (pun wise)!

I just got this postcard from ebay, postmarked 6 May 1907 at Rock Ferry, Birkenhead, which is right across the River Mersey from Liverpool.


The seller had several similar cards addressed to the Simplified Spelling Board up for auction, but this was the most interesting to me, because of the note on the back: "I am [thoroughly >] thoroly in sympathy with the spelling reform movement, tho not with all you say in Circular I about English becoming the 'dominant & international' language of the world."

This note made me suspect that the writer was an Esperantist, and some Googling confirmed it. Gabriel Dawson Lewis was a Fellow of the British Esperanto Association from October 1906 and the author of the article on Esperanto in the 1926 edition of Chambers's Encyclopædia.

Rock Ferry Birkenhead No 2 hammer- New Find
Currently only hammers 1 &4

Cool! I reckon that was $4 well spent!

Received a bevy of 2018/2019 stamps from the USPS website including the Art of Magic sheet, the new Post Office Murals sheet, some green Statue of Freedom $1 stamps (my absolute favorite modern design) among others. Very pleased!

Got this letter in the mail. Had to go down to the BMEU office at the main/downtown post office to get it sorted. Turns out that the tracking system does not differentiate between bulk mail accounts and precancel accounts. And since my precanceled mail is not "tracked", it got flagged. The fix was them putting a note in my account to "not cancel".

Sorry, I don't know the current Scott's number, but here are the high value ($5.00 and $2.00) issues from 2018. They arrived on a package from APS. I find the microprinting area interesting, as shown below. The Two dollar microprinting appears to be very consistent, but I also see a small dot above the you of USA. The Fiver dollar microprinting, on the other hand, appears to be inconsistent, with a large I in the last Five. I also don't have a dot above the U, but I do see a dot above the laurel.




I also seem to have a missing area in the S of the 5 Dollar, as shown below. It could be quite normal, but I don't have anything to compare against.

Something struck me as a bit ironic on the postal card to the Simplified Spelling Board, from Mr G Dawson Lewis of Liverpool, and that is the spelling of the street he lives on: Fenwick Street. It's pronounced "Fennick" in Great Britain, i.e. the "w" is silent, so if Mr Lewis were a true advocate of simplified spelling, he would lobby for or even use, a simpler version of the name in which the spelling comported with the way it's pronounced, and write Fennick, or Fenick or something similar, of course his local postal authorities might not be amused
Then again, Britain is full of place names that have spellings that come nowhere near the way they are pronounced. A good test of whether someone is a true Brit or not (I bet you could detect a spy trying to pass themself off as British this way) is to show them a list of some of these names and see if they pronounce them correctly. A few are well known: Leicester and Gloucester (pronounced "Lester" and "Gloster" respectively), then there's Leominster, pronounced Lemster, Cholmondeley, pronounced Chumley (as in the guy on Pawn Stars) and the biggest head scratcher of all: a former county in Scotland: Kirkcudbrightshire, pronounced, believe it or not and you will only believe it if you are a Brit: "Kircoobree-sheer"

My mailbox today had a letter from a prospective trader offering to trade 200 small or large WW used for same. Also two items won in the latest ISWSC auction, a group of US postage due blocks and a lot of Belgium BOB Parcel Post stamps with mostly readable station/town cancels. Plenty to do!