Kriegsgefangenenentschädigungsgesetz (a law pertaining to war reparations),
Mrs Loudon was even more successful than her husband thanks to a single work, Practical Instructions in Gardening for Ladies, published in 1841, which proved to be magnificently timely. It was the fir...
In the summer of 1876 in Montana while George Armstrong Custer and his troops were being cut down at Little Big Horn, Cope was out hunting for bones nearby. When it was pointed out to him that this wa...
As many as one-third of all stair accidents occur on the first or last step, and two-thirds occur on the first or last three steps.
As we parted at the Natural History Museum in London, I asked Richard Fortey how science ensures that when one person goes there's someone ready to take his place.He chuckled rather heartily at my nai...
I longed for artificial bacon bits, melted cheese in a shade of yellow unknown to nature, and creamy chocolate fillings, sometimes all in the same product. I wanted food that squirts when you bite int...
In office buildings and retail premises in which entry is through double doors and one of those doors is locked for no reason, the door must bear a large sign saying: This Door Is Locked for No Reason...
The older you get the more it seems the world belongs to other people.
What moves the planets and stars is the distortion of space and time. Of
Once there were many more in like vein—e.g., tuifu (the ultimate in fuckups), tarfu (things are really fucked up), fubar (fucked up beyond all recognition), and fubid (fuck you, buddy, I’m detached).
By the time I had finished my coffee and returned to the streets, the rain had temporarily abated, but the streets were full of vast puddles where the drains where unable to cope with the volume of wa...
Jennings quotes the response of a contestant in the Miss Teen USA competition when asked to explain why so many Americans couldn’t even find their own country on a map. With solemnity and conviction s...
It is one of the felicities of English that we can take pieces of words from all over and fuse them into new constructions—like trusteeship, which consists of a Nordic stem (trust), combined with a Fr...
We were idiots really, but awfully happy, too.
There is actually a certain value in not finding anything, he said. It helps cosmologists to work out the rate at which galaxies are evolving.
H. L. Mencken called it the one authentic rectum of civilization, but for most people Hollywood was a place of magic.
No less than 99.5 per cent of the world’s habitable space by volume, according to one estimate, is fundamentally—in practical terms completely—off limits to us. It
ONE OF THE THINGS that happens when you get older is that you discover lots of new ways to hurt yourself. Recently, in France, I was hit square on the head by an automatic parking barrier, something I...
Out of the thirty thousand types of edible plants thought to exist on Earth, just eleven—corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, cassava, sorghum, millet, beans, barley, rye, and oats—account for 93 percent of a...
Shakespeare’s mother, Mary Arden, provides us with a history that is rather more straightforward, if not tremendously vivid or enlightening.
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