Garden Of Blog

It got me.

Here’s a piece published in the Wire today about the addiction, obsession, or whatever you want to call this phenom.

Gawd that’s cool.

…and another angle…

Some of you may know that I am a founding member of the seminal psychedelic band Cozmik Corkscrew. We rock.

Well it turns out that moving to Alton, New Hampshire some years ago has brought me to one of the corkscrew’s most historic places. William Rockwell Clough moved his corkscrew manufacturing to Factory Street (now Gilman Road) in 1903, and the company proceeded to crank out more than a billion corkscrews about 5 miles from where our home sits now.

In 1904, “Clough married his second wife Nellie Sophia Place, daughter of George Place, an Alton lumber dealer and businessman” according to chapter four of William Rockwell Clough, a book by Ron MacClean. This is all from that book, including the image of the corkscrews to the right. Look closely: yup, those miniature corkscrew samples are from Alton. There’s a lot more Alton stuff at the end of chapter four (scroll down) in MacLean’s book.

In other Alton/corkscrew synchronicity news, you may be familiar with Alton Towers, a huge amusement park in the U.K. In 1980 it added a rollercoaster called The Corkscrew which was the first coaster to invert in Britain.