Darwin on the toilet
An auction house says it is selling a rare first edition of Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” found in a family’s guest lavatory in southern England.
I think I would be pleased if I were completely covered in fur
They Get Like Little Cookies
numerology
the new atheism
He explains that he was raised Methodist, has a Buddhist friend and dates a Wiccan.
Daily Detritrus
Assorted fishwrap from New York and Chicago, a "Walking Liberty" half dollar (1935), a pencil sharpener and two writing implements, and a plastic tumbler less than half full of flat bottled water.
what you see is what you get
It gets to the point you think leather is black.
1963 Aston Martin DB4 GT Lightweight up for auction
full throated sort
I meet with the gays here and there. They were in my house two weeks ago. I don’t mind gays. But I don’t want ‘em stuffing it down my throat all the time.
up and at ‘em
After a year knocked out by electrical failure, the Large Hadron Collider is running again.
When the machine is fully operational, the magnets will control the beams of protons and send them in opposite directions through two parallel tubes the size of fire hoses. In rooms as large as cathedrals 300 feet (100 meters) below the ground the magnets will force them into huge detectors to record what happens.
get it off your chest
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said Friday that 40-year-old Michael Plank of Lomita, Calif., was returning from Australia when U.S. Customs agents found two geckos, two monitor lizards and 11 skinks — another type of lizard — fastened to his body Tuesday.
First Thought
Marilyn Monroe singing Happy Birthday, Mr. Peppermint.
Do they stick to their hair? (When they’re damp they do)
Slaybell Slapdown
Hipsters discussing Cyclocross
the hidden valleys of Mustang
The Buddhist idea of Shambhala, or spiritual paradise, may have a literal origin.
“Shambhala is also believed by many scholars to have a geographical parallel that may exist in several or many Himalayan valleys,” Coburn said.
“These hidden valleys were created at times of strife and when Buddhist practice and principals were threatened,” Coburn said. “The valleys contained so-called hidden treasure texts.”
Elaine Brook, author of Search for Shambhala, said the hidden valleys of Mustang indeed “have some of the characteristics of the mythical land of Shambhala.”
science and technology paving the way for the future…
OK
The etymology.
Readability
Readability is one of those incredibly powerful bookmarklets you either know about or you don’t. It reformats content into larger text and removes all ads, sidebars, and other unnecessary distractions. To return a page to normal, all you need to do is refresh. For example, this:
| At the end of my freshman year of college, back in 1936, I flunked five out of five subjects. Flunking three out of five would have made me eligible to report for an invitation to attend some other college in the fall. But men in this three-out-of-five category sometimes had to wait outside the Dean’s office as long as two hours. Men in my group – some of whom had big dates in New York that same night – weren’t kept waiting a minute. It went one, two, three, the way most men in my group like things to go. |
Turns into this:
There, now y’all know.
J.D. Salinger’s uncollected stories
Wow. They are all here. The formatting needs to be, um, reconsidered. But what a great resource.
(via kottke)
violation
The Mesquite ISD — yes, that’s Texas — has outlawed skinny jeans.
“We don’t allow striped shirts or check shirts,” said Laura Jobe, a district spokeswoman. “There are certain types of clothes that are not acceptable dress style.”
how to expose film
If there’s a crazy man staring into the sun, shoot at f16.
If there’s smog and a crazy man is about to be attacked by a shark, shoot at f11.
If it’s smoggy and there are sky turds, shoot at f8.
If the sky turds are higher than the sun, shoot at f5.6.
If you see a garden slug with a turd on its head, shoot it at f4.
If you’re about to be run over by a docking ocean liner, @##$@!
In the belly of the headless donkey piñata (Otra vista)
La venganza.
Looking for sweetmeats, are you, little greedy-guts?
Have a load of violence and scandal and grimy fingers for your pains.
That’ll learn ya.
For Andrew
“Of course from one point of view she was right about the Church, which grew so far, almost at once, from anything which can have been intended, and became so blood-stained and persecuting and cruel and war-like and made small and trivial things so important, and tried to exclude everything not done in a certain way and by certain people, and stamped out heresies with such cruelty and rage. And this failure of the Christian Church, of every branch of it in every country, is one of the saddest things that has happened in all the world. But it is what happens when a magnificent idea has to be worked out by human beings who do not understand much of it but interpret it in their own way and think they are guided by God, whom they have not yet grasped. And yet they had grasped something, so that the Church has always had great magnificence and much courage, and people have died for it in agony, which is supposed to balance all the other people who have had to die in agony because they did not accept it, and it has flowered up in learning and culture and beauty and art, to set against its darkness and incivility and obscurantism and barbarity and nonsense, and it has produced saints and martyrs and kindness and goodness, though these have also occurred freely outside it, and it is a wonderful and most extraordinary pageant of contradictions, and I, at least, want to be inside it, though it is foolishness to most of my friends.”
Rose Macauley, The Towers of Trebizond.
My cat is a climber.
And the best thing about Lena’s arboreal activity this afternoon was this: She was climbing the tree for no apparent reason. She was neither fleeing a pursuer nor chasing prey.
She was just climbing a tree — and jabbering her fool head off. Talking to herself.
