When you're a newspaper dork, stuff like this is pure gold. I ran across this on The Daily Mirror, a scan of the Los Angeles Daily Times from, egads, 100 years ago. I can't copy the text, but if you click here, you can see the whole thing.

Here's what I love-- the banner headline basically tells ya that the story to come is going to be boring.

"No muck for mob at Corwell trial," it reads, followed with a subhed saying "Another of the Eyewitnesses to the killing of Bennett, Gives Details that Fail to Excite Morbid Gathering at the Trial."

And the story continues in the same vein, leading with "To the bitter disappointment of a large crowd of men and women there were no suggestions of indecent detail in the Corwell murder trial yesterday."

That sounds pretty much like court reporting a century later. Some days you get these crazy, unbelievable moments -- a few weeks back, before I started the blog, I heard the defendant in People vs. Mark Allen Steffen calmly describe about how he kept his dead girlfriend's body in a shed while he invited his new squeeze over for a barbecue.

But most of the time, as the unknown reporter found out in the Corwell trial, it's just sitting around, listening to procedural testimony. So you look for whatever details you can find, such as this delicious line, "Mrs. Welch, the mother of the accused, is a splenid type of Spanish woman, who suffers tortures with a cold, haughty pride."

I'm guessing they meant "splendid," but the mind still wonders what the hell that all means. Whatever the case, I hope that if I'm ever the defendant rather than the courtroom observer, that I can suffer my torture with my cold, haughty pride intact.