Updates: Today's Doodle, Boyton book, Danish instrument, 2 million page views; short break

There are a few things to catch up on for SearchResearch... 

... so I wanted to drop you a note with a few odds-and-ends.  

 1.  If you haven't seen today's Google Doodle, you really should.  It's worth playing the Doodle game all the way to the end.  Just go to Google.com (TODAY only), and you'll see what I mean.  

And... Happy Beethoven's Birthday!  

 2.   Remember our fun Challenge with Paul Boyton? Both Rosemary and Remijj found a full PDF copy of The Story of Paul Boyton (by Paul Boyton; originally from Project Gutenberg).   This is an excellent find.  I printed out a full copy for myself, and am having a wonderful time reading it.  

 3.   Speaking of Paul Boyton, I also found a few fun newspaper articles about Boyton.  (I did this by searching the Google's News Archive.) Here's one from the April 7, 1889 edition of the Morning Review (Spokane, WA) that lists all of the wonderful things he did in one of his "swimming programes."  Fascinating.  (Click to see at full size.)  

And I also found this article in the Aurora Daily Express, July 8, 1898 (Aurora, Illinois), in his column, "Our New York Letter," Dexter Marshall writes about Paul Boyton as "one of the most picturesque yarn spinners to ever draw breath..."  Which tells me that we should take some of his tales with a grain of salt.  Interestingly, this same paper reports on the annexation of the Hawaiian Islands to the US by President McKinley, and has several advertisements for "slaughter sales," which are what we might call "fire sales" -- deep discounts (and having nothing to do with actual slaughter).   

 4.   The Danish optician's instrument?  Whatever happened to that?  Answer:  We still don't have definitive proof of what it is one-way-or-the-other.  Until someone happens to actually spot one in the wild (or more likely, in a museum), we'll keep this Search Challenge as unsolved so far.  

 5.   Just so you'll know, our blog just exceeded 2 million page views.  Yes, you're part of a trend!  Thanks, readers, this has been a great ride thus far--with more to come.  The next goal:  5 million page views!!  

 6.   Speaking of the blog thus far, after next week, I'm going to take a couple of weeks off over the holidays.  Don't worry, I'll be back with more Challenges, 1MMs, and updates.  So stay tuned... 

Search on!