The strange life of Mary Carleton

This morning's Pepys's Diary has introduced me to a new historical person, the rather excellent-sounding Mary Moders ( / Carleton). A summary of the key events of her short life goes something like this:

• bigamously marries two men in Kent, is arrested and tried, flees to Cologne;
• there undertakes a wedding with a local nobleman, bus scarpers back to England with the wedding presents;
• in London, goes under the false identity of an orphaned German princess and marries John Carleton;
• is exposed and tried, but is acquitted after claiming that Carleton himself pretended to be a nobleman;
• writes a book about her life so far, which is turned into a play, in which she plays herself (and is seen by Pepys);
• marries a man who's admired her in the theattre, and absconds with his money;
• an indefinite series of further masquerades, frauds and duperies;
• eventually the law catches up with her and she is transported to the Jamaican penal colony;
• she escapes, returns to London again, and again posing as an heiress, marries a wealthy man and absconds with his money;
• sadly, escaping penal transportation is a capital offence: next time she's caught, she's hanged, at the age of just 31.

This seems to me to be crying out for a film. Eat your heart out Princess Caraboo!

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Source: mostly Wikipedia

Only in America... (hopefully)

I don't normally post this sort of thing, but I was rather touched by this heart-warming little story from the Chicago Sun-Times:

"Ronald Michalowicz, a fire inspector for the village of Bedford Park, was given a 27 percent chance to live as he battled a rare form of tongue cancer.
"The community rallied around him, raising about $25,000 to help.
"He fought the cancer into remission.
"But the village where he had worked for 28 years fired him for taking the contributions, in alleged violation of the Illinois Gift Ban Act and village code prohibiting employees from soliciting gifts that could affect their decision-making."

No further comment required really!