Hiya Skeleton Crew,

Congrats, youse guys: we made it to the last day of Season 31!

I’m happy to say I can report some kinda resolution to BOTH the storylines I’ve been wrapped up in. They’re even kinda related, turns out!

That sword + suit of armor I got from Scotland, the one that’s haunted by a boggart? Apparently it wasn’t just diggin ’round the graveyard for no reason. When I went to nab it last night, it actually spotted me & took me over to the hole it dug … & wouldn’t ya know it? There was a weird metal box labeled AMER. TELEPHONE & TELEGRAPH in there!

I guess whoever laid down the cable decided it’d be good to do it … through a graveyard??

Well of course I called up the folks at the cable company, I asked ’em to take a look, & sure enough: my internet was HAUNTED. THAT’S why it wasn’t workin right!

Anyways, apparently they put some special polywarding sheathin on the cable box, plus they installed this weird li’l inverter machine outside the Skeleplex. Now the only cursed stuff that’s gettin piped in through my internet is just, y’know, the normal everyday news that everyone gets.

So my internet’s back, PLUS I’ve got a new boggart friend who’s apparently good at sniffin out wifi issues. Which, heck, ya never know when that’ll come in handy! Now I just gotta give him a proper name. Maybe … Angus?

(Oh, btw, today’s issue don’t got a mini-theme. No reason – I just kinda got wrapped up with stuff & forgot to do one! Sorry ’bout that.)

Trivia 1

I checked the popularity of Lois on one of those “chart a name’s popularity by year” websites, & sure enough it peaked in the 1930s as the #21 girls’ name in the U.S. of A. That tracks pretty good with the debuts of the Superman comics (1938) & Kiss Me, Kate (1948).^[1]

As ya mighta guessed, the name Lois had a pretty precipitous drop after the ’30s; it ain’t too unusual for baby names to cycle in & outta fashion like that. But IMO, the mother of all nominative declines has gotta be what name, which held the #1 spot on the girls’ name list from the 1880s^[2] all the way up to the 1950s – but which nowadays don’t even break the top 100?

Trivia 2

In Kiss Me, Kate, the titular Kate is Kate Minola from Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, which is bein staged in the context of the musical in one of those play-within-a-play type situations. Kate’s sister, Bianca, is the character portrayed by Lois Lane’s character.

Bianca, now THAT’S a name! I wonder how popular that one is? Let’s just pop it into this li’l online chart thingamajigger I just found …

Huh! A pop of popularity in the ’80s/’90s … for some reason?

Hmm …

I dunno. Bianca … Jagger? Was she popular … then?

Oh, hey, y’know what? Maybe it was teevee! The character Bianca Montgomery was born in ’88 on what daytime soap opera? One of the more famous storylines that Ms. Montgomery was involved in was when she came out to her mom, Erica Kane, in a 2000 episode of this show.