Ben Owen III doesn't make the dirt dishes of his grandfather's era.
But it seems likely that the pottery business would have remained utilitarian and local had Juliana Busbee, a Raleigh socialite, not noticed the simple elegance of an orange clay pie plate -- called a dirt dish by locals -- at a county fair in 1915.
In the run-up to Twitter's successful IPO (initial public offering), it was with a twinge of sorrow that I read all the dirt dished on co-founder, Jack Dorsey.
Tuning into the gossip the Divine Miss M spews jubilantly as another Divine Miss M is such fun it hardly matters that five minutes after the romp ends, much of the dirt dished with such five-alarm relish has completely faded in the cool night air.
Even though Mr. Summers did disappoint in the dirt-dishing department, his message resonated with some alumni.
So as well as a lot of material on the history and workings of the "chauffeured-transportation industry", there's celebrity gossip here too, albeit none of it of the dirt-dishing type.
A few years later, Juliana Busbee opened The Village Store, a fashionable tearoom at 60 Washington Square in New York, where she sold dirt-dish pottery and the increasingly sophisticated works created at Jugtown, the new studio founded by her husband, until 1926, when she moved to Seagrove.
The news media oblige by dredging up the dirt and dishing it.
Rupert, an inveterate gossip, is renowned for calling up reporters at his papers on both sides of the Atlantic for dirt (while dishing some of his own).
Never has dirt been dished with more justification.
In part, that is surely because there is more dirt to dish: the loser lost, after all, suggesting that things did not run that well in his camp.
