Archive for July 23rd, 2025

My blog is broken. Day 4.

Wednesday, July 23rd, 2025

It has been close to 24 hours since Bluehost “escalated” my case.

I still can’t upload photos, and Bluehost has made no attempt to contact me: I’ve checked my email, including the junk and spam folders.

That doesn’t mean, however, that someone hasn’t been working on my blog.

I discovered when I went to write today’s obit watch that Someone Who Isn’t Me (SWIM) had disabled all my plugins. Including the one that disables the WordPress block editor, and the spam filtering plugin. Which were the only two I had enabled. Yes, disabling plugins is a good diagnostic step, but once you’ve run the diagnostics, shouldn’t you put them back?

And I think I know why I can’t upload images, not even small ones, at least at the moment: someone set the “Maximum upload file size” to “0 B.” Yes, zero bytes. Additionally, there are about five images in my media library that weren’t there before, and are duplicates of images previously uploaded.

I’m going to give Bluehost another 24 hours to fix the problem before I ask for a status update. That’s 48 hours.

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Obit watch: July 23, 2025.

Wednesday, July 23rd, 2025

Ozzy Osbourne roundup: THR. NYT. ASM826 by way of Borepatch.

In honor of Mr. Osbourne and ASM826’s obit, please feel free to share your favorite “inappropriate public urination” story in the comments below. You can remain monogamous if you’d like: I’m certainly not going to out anybody.

The quartet released its debut album, also called “Black Sabbath,” in 1970, and followed with seven more over the next eight years. The band’s music was largely reviled by critics and snubbed by radio stations, but its albums were consistently certified platinum, and songs like “Paranoid,” “Iron Man” and “War Pigs” became anthems for generations of disaffected youth.

…

Mr. Osbourne had long drunk to excess, but as Black Sabbath became successful he could afford a wider variety of intoxicants, and he enthusiastically pursued all of them. As he wrote in his autobiography, “I Am Ozzy” (2009), “Over the past 40 years I’ve been loaded on booze, coke, acid, quaaludes, glue, cough mixture, heroin, Rohypnol, Klonopin, Vicodin, and too many other heavy-duty substances to list.” Throughout his career he frequently announced his sobriety, only to backslide into addiction.

Sarah Morlok Cotton. She was the last survivor of the Morlok quadruplets. And this is one of those sad stories from before my time. I think this is sort of before my mother’s time, even.

They were born in 1930.

Donations poured in almost immediately. The city of Lansing provided the family with a rent-free home. The Massachusetts Carriage Company sent a custom-made baby carriage with four seats. Businessmen opened bank accounts for each child.
“Lansing’s Morlok quadruplets,” The Associated Press wrote, “are the most famous group of babies on the American continent.”
The Morloks charged visitors 25 cents to visit their home and see the babies. Carl Morlok, who ran for constable of Lansing in 1931, used photos of his daughters on his campaign ads with the slogan, “We will appreciate your support.” He won in a landslide.

The Great Depression was ongoing, so their mom turned them into song and dance performers. All four girls were also abused by their father.

He banged the sisters’ heads together when they wouldn’t go to sleep. A germophobe, he forbade them from going to the library because he worried that there were germs on the books. Worst of all, Ms. Farley noted, he sexually abused all of the girls when they were teenagers.

When the girls were in their 20s, they began to show signs of mental illness.

Eventually, a doctor who had been treating the sisters in Michigan referred them to the National Institute of Mental Health in Maryland. Intrigued by the connections between the genetic and environmental causes of mental illness, a team of researchers there studied the quadruplets from 1955 to 1958. Each woman had her own psychiatrist, though only Sarah was able to engage in meaningful psychotherapy.

…

Only Sarah recovered enough to live on her own. Ms. Farley attributed that to two factors: She had endured less abuse from her father than her sisters had, and she had benefited from exceptionally good psychotherapy during the study in Maryland.
“She knew quite clearly that she got better at NIMH and her sisters didn’t,” Ms. Farley said in an interview. “And she always had survivor’s guilt about that.”

…

Sarah met George Cotton, an Air Force officer, at Luther Place Memorial Church in Washington, D.C. They married in 1961, and for many years she worked as a legal secretary and typist.
Mr. Cotton died in 2023. In addition to their son David, Mrs. Cotton is survived by four grandsons. Another son, William, died in 1994. As for the other Morlok sisters, Wilma died in 2002, Helen in 2003 and Edna in 2015.

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