BREAKING NEWS – Saratoga Springs, New York – A century and a half after Confederate officer James Malbone wrote his Civil War diary partly in code, a couple of Yankees have figured out why he took the precaution: He liked to gossip. Sprinkled amid entries on camp recipes and casualties are encrypted passages in which he dishes on such juicy topics as a fellow soldier who got caught in bed with another man’s wife. Kent D. Boklan, the Queens College computer science professor and former National Security Agency cryptographer deciphered Malbone’s code with little difficulty. Boklan also said one of the other controversial entries in the diary was Malbone stating that “I completely understand why the general public believe blondes and southern belles aren’t too intelligent, because when speaking, they both sound pretty stupid”.