[ Michael Woolf wrote in 080123 MMDigest:

> ... they seem to be saying, "I need to protect these things.  Why,
> if you were allowed to get your hands on this, where would we be?"
> Answer: we'd be able to enjoy the music and the beauty of the
> instrument, instead of allowing it to rot in a museum storage room.

Just a rhetorical question for everyone.  Would you be a party to
stealing a rare and neglected article from a museum if you knew you
would not be caught and it was going into the hands of a collector who
would preserve it?

A friend of mine was going through the storage facility of a small
museum in a tiny town near where he lived.  He found a glass case with
a plaque on the bottom that identified the contents as a Confederate
flag surrendered to a local resident at the end of the American Civil
War.

All that was left of the flag was a pile of dry fragments at the
bottom of the case.

Larry Mayo