Tech support, circa 1878

Published 8:28 pm Thursday, January 5, 2012

Can you hear me now? A New Hampshire dealer is auctioning a letter from Alexander Graham Bell to his parents that instructed them on how to properly ground the telephone he invented by running a copper wire from their house to the duck pond.

Other letters from Bell to his parents provided detailed (and exasperated) instructions on finding a lost email in their spam folder, recording a greeting on their answering machine and setting their VCR to record “Antiques Roadshow.”

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When it rains, it pours: Heavy November rains overwhelmed Everett’s combined sewage and stormwater system, forcing the city to make the unpalatable decision to flush raw sewage into the river and bay. The state says it won’t fine the city because it is working on long-range solutions.

While it might help in the short term, Everett has decided against asking residents to hold it in when it rains.

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Don’t know much about history: On this day in 1540, England’s King Henry VIII married his fourth wife, Anne of Cleves, a marriage that lasted about six months before the pair divorced.

Henry and Anne said they would remain friends and still cared for each other, making separate statements via Twitter, which at the time involved trained birds that chirped out the message in code.

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