January 2011
54 posts
I had to keep the Buick speed below what I took to be about sixty because at that point the wind came up through the floor hole in such a way that the Heath wrappers were suspended behind my head in a noisy brown vortex.
—Charles Portis.
Many unlikely sounding ingredients have been used in beer. In the 1700s, roosters, often soaked in Madeira, were used, perhaps to provide nutrition for the yeast, but also as a flavoring. Some domestic brewers continued to add meat well into the 20th century. In 1996, the Boston Beer Company made a Cock Ale in this way.
—Michael Jackson.
December 2010
37 posts
A study at University College London in the UK has found that conservatives’ brains have larger amygdalas than the brains of liberals. Amygdalas are responsible for fear and other “primitive” emotions. At the same time, conservatives’ brains were also found to have a smaller anterior cingulate — the part of the brain responsible for courage and optimism.
...
…compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience…
-Colossians.
Suddenly I saw that before us, just rising eighteen inches or so above the surface of the lake, was what looked like the top of the arch of a submerged cave or railway tunnel. Evidently, from the watermark on the rock several feet above it, it was generally entirely submerged; but there had been a dry season, and the cold had prevented the snow from melting as freely as usual; so the lake was low...
In 1988, a cloud scientist named Nancy Knight (at the National Center for Atmospheric Research—let’s not defund it) took a plane up into the clouds over Wisconsin and found two simple but identical snow crystals, hexagonal prisms, each as like the other as one twin to another, as Cole Sprouse is like Dylan Sprouse. Snowflakes, it seems, are not only alike; they usually start out more or less...
There were about a dozen people left at the party; that hard kernel of gaiety that never breaks. It was about three o’clock.
—Evelyn Waugh.
Writing about science poses a fundamental problem right at the outset: You have to lie.
I don’t mean lie in the sense of intentionally misleading people. I mean that because math is the language of science, scientists who want to translate their work into popular parlance have to use verbal or pictorial metaphors that are necessarily inexact.
Here is where the art of science writing...
Scandalous as it may sound to the ears of Republicans schooled in Reaganomics, one critical measure of the health of a modern democracy is its ability to legitimately extract taxes from its own elites. The most dysfunctional societies in the developing world are those whose elites succeed either in legally exempting themselves from taxation, or in taking advantage of lax enforcement to evade...
The storm was just in time to disrupt the plans of thousands of people trying to get home after the holiday, return unwanted gifts or take advantage of post-holiday sales. Public schools had not been scheduled to be in session, much to the dismay of many children in the Northeast.
—NYT, 11/27/10.
What a strange world unknown to most of us lies under our feet: we live above a cavernous land of waterfalls and rushing rivers, where tides ebb and flow as in the world above. If you have ever read the adventures of Allan Quatermain and the account of his voyage along the underground river to the city of Milosis, you will be able to picture the scene of Lime’s last stand. The main sewer, half as...
For a fairyland it was—the most wonderful that the imagination of man could conceive. The thick vegetation met overhead, interlacing into a natural pergola, and through this tunnel of verdure in a golden twilight flowed the green, pellucid river, beautiful in itself, but marvelous from the strange tints thrown by the vivid light from above filtered and tempered in its fall. Clear as crystal,...
When gods are in haste fulfillment is swift and ways are short…
—Pindar, trans. Anthony Verity.
It is no coincidence that many of the greatest philosophers have also been prodigious walkers. Thales is known to us not only for launching the tradition of Western ontology but also for stumbling, absent-mindedly, into a well. The formidable ironist Socrates is praised by Alcibiades not only for his unironic barefoot exploits on the battlefield but also for his martial swagger. Even Plato, about...
Don’t nobody love me but my momma, and she may be jivin’ too.
—B.B. King.
At some point in her journey through this world, she collided with Tan Ru…
—Lincoln Ashbury.
The first air-breathing fish and amphibians extracted oxygen using gills when in the water and primitive lungs when on land—and to do so, they had to be able to close the glottis, or entryway to the lungs, when underwater. Importantly, the entryway (or glottis) to the lungs could be closed. When underwater, the animals pushed water past their gills while simultaneously pushing the glottis...
Source: Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913)
Dayspring \Day”spring`\ (d[=a]”spr[i^]ng`), n. The beginning of the day, or first appearance of light; the dawn; hence, the beginning. —Milton.
The tender mercy of our God; whereby the dayspring from on high hath visited us. —Luke i. 78.
Werner Muensterberger, the author of Collecting: An Unruly Passion, has observed that many great collectors suffer as children from the sudden and unexplained absence of their parents. To alleviate feelings of vulnerability, “aloneness and anxiety,” he says, they invest their favorite objects with magical qualities; those objects, in turn, provide them with the sense of permanence,...
There is no period in human history that matches the years between 1990 and 2010 in the degree to which the common terminology used at the end would have been unrecognizable to those who lived at its beginning.
—Barrett Brown.
Got on my dead man’s suit and my smilin’ skull ring,
My lucky graveyard boots and song to sing.
I got a song to sing, it keeps me out of the cold,
And I’ll meet you further on up the road.
—Johnny Cash.
Paul uses the example of differing opinions about food and days among the believers in Rome to teach that Christians should not despise or judge one another. Note that he does not advise them to find a happy medium between the contending opinions or to average the two extremes into a compromise. On the contrary, he admonished that “every one be fully convinced in his own mind.” He declares...
Observe what happens when sunbeams are admitted into a building and shed light on its shadowy places. You will see a multitude of tiny particles mingling in a multitude of ways in the empty space within the light of the beam, as though contending in everlasting conflict, rushing into battle rank upon rank with never a moment’s pause in a rapid sequence of unions and disunions. From this you...
O my body! I dare not desert the likes of you in other men and
women, nor the likes of the parts of you, I believe the likes of you are to stand or fall with the likes of the soul, (and that they are the soul,) I believe the likes of you shall stand or fall with my poems, and that they are my poems, Man’s, woman’s, child, youth’s, wife’s, husband’s,...