If you're looking for sake…

  • Don't search here

    Sake is a Japanese alcoholic drink, nice in an of itself but not the main subject of this page.

    This is my home page, prettily cluttered with various forms of ephemera. The past is a major topic. If you like old things, feel free to explore.

    As the great sage once said, "Everything is illuminated in the light of the past."

  • Where to start?

    At the beginning, of course.

    The navigation menu above will help you on your journey. Give it a whirl and see what you think.

    At right are some photos from my garden and from my ancestry. The young lady is Maggie Petersen at her confirmation in Chicago circa 1903, the children are George and Arnolda Jatho's offspring from Charleston, South Carolina, 1889.


About me

I'm D.L. MacLaughlan Dumes, online name saki, a Beatles fan since December 1963. I've written about The Fabs (as George Harrison dubbed them) and about sixties music in general, some might say to excess, in online forums and in music magazines and journals. My online name was borrowed from my late cat, a Burmese-Siamese mix called Saki, named after the early-19th-century writer of ironically-toned short fiction. But I spell my online name with a small "s" to avoid confusion.

I studied Egyptology at the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago and at UCLA with a specialization in Hellenistic religious texts, particularly animal cults. To earn my keep I work at web development, edit scientific publications, and manage academic conferences. I'm married to another fan of sixties music, Bruce Dumes, a musician and software engineer.

I like to collect tube radios, particularly those with shortwave capability. My favorite is our Zenith 10S690, made in 1942. I also have a nice mid-fifties Grundig and Blaupunkt, both of which sound terrific. Solid-state can be useful too, of course, but nothing beats a good warm set of tubes.

Genealogy is another passion, a personal archaeology, more or less. If you have Danish, German, French, or Russian ancestry please feel free to check out the photos and documents at my genealogy pages. Let me know if there are any connections to your own family. I'm always happy to share research with others or do free look-ups for those still searching for their roots.

Speaking of roots...check out my garden page, where I share pictures of landscape designs and show what's in bloom. If you want to talk about antique and heritage roses, send me an email.

What I'm reading right now

Every few years I revisit Samuel Richardson's "Clarissa or the History of a Young Lady." It's not light reading, running to 1,600 pages in the Penguin paperback edition, so reading it to the end will take awhile. One of the first novels in English, it deals with themes later explored by Jane Austen, who was a great fan of the book: family economy or lack thereof, arranged marriages, resistance to arranged marriages, flight, abduction, seduction, and the elusiveness of true love. What's not to like? It has the added attraction of being arranged as a series of letters, rather like the back-and-forth of present-day email. I plan to take it slow and savor it.