Unpublished Newswire

R ecently, I showed up in Picton, Ontario, to slake a thirst that I worked up while scouting local quarries for trilobites. I noticed the cute but hobbit-free Shire Hall, the seat of government for Prince Edward County. There’s a building next to it, the local land registry office. These were common in Ontario: little squat fireproof stone buildings that will be there when everything else is gone. The little registry offices were important to the people who built them. The records of land ownership were stored there, and they looked after them very carefully. If they burned, people...