Eventually he made it to Buckingham Palace, where the king famously startled Lindbergh by asking him how he had peed during the flight. Lindbergh explained, a touch awkwardly, that he had brought alon...
Even so, as was his custom, he writes the name in an abbreviated form: Wllm Shaksp. It also has a large blot on the end of the surname, probably because of the comparatively low quality of the paper....
England? she said with unreserved amazement. Why do you live in England? Because it is nothing like Indianapolis
Eenie, meenie, minie, mo is based on a counting system that predates the Roman occupation of Britain, that may even be pre-Celtic.
Dressing impractically is a way of showing that one doesn’t have to do physical work.
Does anyone really need 50 percent more of plenty? The
Depending on where it falls, the prognosis for a water molecule varies widely. If it lands in fertile soil it will be soaked up by plants or reevaporated directly within hours or days. If it finds its...
Criminality was so widespread that its practitioners split into fields of specialization. Some became coney catchers, or swindlers (a coney was a rabbit reared for the table and thus unsuspectingly ta...
Clearly there was a need for some inspired and clever experimentation, and happily the age produced a young person with the diligence and aptitude to undertake it.
But Pauline would not take advice,She lit a match, it was so nice!It crackled so, it burned so clear,—Exactly like the picture hereShe jumped for joy and ran about,And was too pleased to put it out. N...
Built in the hope of distracting workers from the peril of drink, it contained a gymnasium, a laboratory, a billiards room, a library, a reading room, and a lecture and concert hall. Never before had...
Brain cells last as long as you do. You are issued with a hundred billion or so at birth and that is all you are ever going to get. It has been estimated that you lose five hundred of them an hour, so...
Bell treated his friend and colleague Watson generously. Though he had no legal obligations to do so, he awarded Watson 10 percent of the company, allowing Watson to retire rich at the age of just twe...
Bashfully I dropped my shirt onto the sand and stood naked but for my sagging trunks. Glenn, never having seen anything quite this grotesque and singular on an Australian beach, certainly nothing stil...
At the time of our hike, theAppalachian Trail was fifty-nine years old. That is, by American standards, incredibly venerable. The Oregon and Santa Fe trails didn't last as long. Route 66 didn't last a...
At a conference of sociologists in America in 1977, love was defined as the cognitive-affective state characterized by intrusive and obsessive fantasizing concerning reciprocity of amorant feelings by...
As far as we can tell, we are the best there is. We may be all there is. It's an unnerving thought that we may be the living universe's supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously.
As Davies puts it, If everything needs everything else, how did the community of molecules ever arise in the first place?
And yet in Britain, despite the constant buffetings of history, English survived. It is a cherishable irony that a language that succeeded almost by stealth, treated for centuries as the inadequate an...
And then we went out to see the town. I was particularly eager to have a look at Gatlinburg because I had read about it in a wonderful book called The Lost Continent. In it the author describes the sc...