Famous Recorded Quotes

I always tell the girls never take it seriously, if you never take it seriously you never get hurt, if you never get hurt you always have fun, and if you ever get lonely just go to the record store and visit your friends.

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o’clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously.

Dwarves sat on stoops, clapping and cheering as we ran by. A few of them recorded videos of us on uniquely crafted smartphones. I figured our attempted getaway would go viral on the Dwarven Internet, famous among Internets.

Colonel Aubertin and his two colleagues sat on a park bench in the private garden of Dorset Square. Rougemont sat between his two superiors, pleased that for once the commandant appeared to have had an abstemious lunch. “Major Vane-Stewart was telling me the other day that this was once the site of the first important cricket ground in London, established by the same Thomas Lord who later built the famous ground that bears his name, a few miles to the north of us in St. John’s Wood. There is a plaque recording this fact in that shed over there. In the middle of the square.” “Cricket.” Angers spat out the words with disgust. “A stupid game played by idiots. Only the English could invent such a boring name.

The mistake we all make is in assuming anybody remembers anydamnthing from one day to the next. If that were true, we'd stop getting involved with approximately the same kind of wrong lover each time, we'd learn the lessons of history, the death penalty would discourage those plotting murder, and George Santayana's famous quote would be about as popular as "the bee's knees." But few of us keep accurate records of what we've learned as we hobble through life barking our shins in the dark on experiences we've already had....

Eighty-five percent of recorded species live in the terrestrial realm, and the majority of these, some 850,000, are arthropods (that is, insects, spiders, and crustaceans). Most of the arthropod species are insects, and almost half of these are beetles, a fact that is said to have inspired a famous epigram from the British biologist J.B.S. Haldane. On being asked, one day, by some clerical gentlemen what his study of the natural world had revealed to him about God. Haldane is said to have replied that it indicated that He had "an inordinate fondness of beetles.

At first I stayed in a hotel – the Inn On The Park, the location for the famous story about me ringing the Rocket office and demanding they do something about the wind outside that was keeping me awake. This is obviously the ideal moment to state once and for all that this story is a complete urban myth, that I was never crazy enough to ask my record company to do something about the weather; that I was simply disturbed by the wind and wanted to change rooms to somewhere quieter. Unfortunately, I can’t tell you that, because the story is completely true.

Her name is Nikki. She’s a recording artist. A famous one. She was in Cambodia setting up a women’s home for survivors of sex trafficking.” I scanned my limited knowledge of current recording artists. “Nikki…Nikki who?” “Her stage name is Lola Simone.

Similar ecological disasters occurred on almost every one of the thousands of islands that pepper the Atlantic Ocean, Indian Ocean, Arctic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea. Archaeologists have discovered on even the tiniest islands evidence of the existence of birds, insects and snails that lived there for countless generations, only to vanish when the first human farmers arrived. None but a few extremely remote islands escaped man’s notice until the modern age, and these islands kept their fauna intact. The Galapagos Islands, to give one famous example, remained uninhabited by humans until the nineteenth century, thus preserving their unique menagerie, including their giant tortoises, which, like the ancient diprotodons, show no fear of humans. The First Wave Extinction, which accompanied the spread of the foragers, was followed by the Second Wave Extinction, which accompanied the spread of the farmers, and gives us an important perspective on the Third Wave Extinction, which industrial activity is causing today. Don’t believe tree-huggers who claim that our ancestors lived in harmony with nature. Long before the Industrial Revolution, Homo sapiens held the record among all organisms for driving the most plant and animal species to their extinctions. We have the dubious distinction of being the deadliest species in the annals of biology. Perhaps if more people were aware of the First Wave and Second Wave extinctions, they’d be less nonchalant about the Third Wave they are part of. If we knew how many species we’ve already eradicated, we might be more motivated to protect those that still survive. This is especially relevant to the large animals of the oceans.

Once she called to invite me to a concert of Liszt piano concertos. The soloist was a famous South American pianist. I cleared my schedule and went with her to the concert hall at Ueno Park. The performance was brilliant. The soloist's technique was outstanding, the music both delicate and deep, and the pianist's heated emotions were there for all to feel. Still, even with my eyes closed, the music didn't sweep me away. A thin curtain stood between myself and pianist, and no matter how much I might try, I couldn't get to the other side. When I told Shimamoto this after the concert, she agreed. "But what was wrong with the performance?" she asked. "I thought it was wonderful." "Don't you remember?" I said. "The record we used to listen to, at the end of the second movement there was this tiny scratch you could hear. Putchi! Putchi! Somehow, without that scratch, I can't get into the music!" Shimamoto laughed. "I wouldn't exactly call that art appreciation." "This has nothing to do with art. Let a bald vulture eat that up, for all I care. I don't care what anybody says; I like that scratch!" "Maybe you're right," she admitted. "But what's this about a bald vulture? Regular vultures I know about--they eat corpses. But bald vultures?" In the train on the way home, I explained the difference in great detail.The difference in where they are born, their call, their mating periods. "The bald vulture lives by devouring art. The regular vulture lives by devouring the corpses of unknown people. They're completely different." "You're a strange one!" She laughed. And there in the train seat, ever so slightly, she moved her shoulder to touch mine. The one and only time in the past two months our bodies touched.

Karen: It was a man's world. The whole world was a man's world but the recording industry .... it wasn't easy. You had to get some guy's approval to do just about anything and it seemed there were two ways to go about it. You either acted like one of the boys, which is the way I had found. Or you acted real girlie and flirty and batted your eyelashes. They liked that. But Daisy, from the beginning, was sort of outside of all that. She was just sort of "Take me or leave me." Daisy: I didn't care if I was famous or not. I didn't care if I got to sing on your record or not. All I wanted to do was make something interesting and original and cool.

Bhagat Singh revered Lajpat Rai as a leader. But he would not spare even Lajpat Rai, when, during the last years of his life, Lajpat Rai turned to communal politics. He then launched a political-ideological campaign against him. Because Lajpat Rai was a respected leader, he would not publicly use harsh words of criticism against him. And so he printed as a pamphlet Robert Browning’s famous poem, ‘The Lost Leader,’ in which Browning criticizes Wordsworth for turning against liberty. The poem begins with the line ‘Just for a handful of silver he left us.’ A few more of the poem’s lines were: ‘We shall march prospering, not thro’ his presence; Songs may inspirit us, not from his lyre,’ and ‘Blot out his name, then, record one lost soul more.’ There was not one word of criticism of Lajpat Rai. Only, on the front cover, he printed Lajpat Rai’s photograph!

All records are moments. But the great records are for moments to which we wish to return.

Become that first person to break records, that others thought could never be obtained.

He had sometimes attempted to keep a diary himself, the kind of record of his daily life that could rival famous clerical diarists of the past, a nineteen-seventies Woodforde or Kilvert. What was he to write about the events of this morning? ‘My sister Daphne made a gooseberry tart and told me that she was going to live on the outskirts of Birmingham’? Could that possibly be of interest to readers of the next century?

So now here we were with David's second big bout against whatever it was, and it had pretty well gotten him. He was taking a lot of morphine for the paid and looked terrible, although the spirit was still in his eyes, weak as it was. "Do you have any advice for me on my music going forward?" I asked David. "Just make sure to have as much of you in the recording as you can," he said. "Stay simple. No one gives a shit about anything else." He tole me to keep it simple and focused, have as much of my playing and singing as possible, and not to hide it with other things. Don't embellish it with other people I don't need or hide it in any way. Simple and focused. That is what I took away. He didn't exactly say that, but I got the message. I have failed to do that in some instances. "Be great or be gon," his famous phrase, choes in my head. I have to remember that for sure. Damn. So I left the apartment after a hug. It was devastating. He died a week later. He wanted to go. His body was all fucked up and it was not easy. His tenacious spirit would not let him go.

And because I had the latest advanced mathematical training, I was given the job of analyzing the retractable landing gear for Jimmy Doolittle’s Lockheed Orion 9-D, a modification of the basic Orion. That was my first contact with any of the famous early aviators who would frequent the Lockheed plant. Others included Amelia Earhart, Wiley Post, Sir Charles Kingsford-Smith, and Roscoe Turner. Doolittle, of course, was an early record-setting pilot, both military and civilian, with a master’s degree and doctorate in science from M.I.T. Then he was flying for Shell Oil Company, landing in out-of-the-way fields, cow pastures, and other unprepared strips.

Moreover, it is not just that the early documents are silent about so much of Jesus that came to be recorded in the gospels, but that they view him in a substantially different way -- as a basically supernatural personage only obscurely on Earth as a man at some unspecified period in the past, 'emptied' then of all his supernatural attributes (Phil.2:7), and certainly not a worker of prodigious miracles which made him famous throughout 'all Syria' (Mt.4:24). I have argued that there is good reason to believe that the Jesus of Paul was constructed largely from musing and reflecting on a supernatural 'Wisdom' figure, amply documented in the earlier Jewish literature, who sought an abode on Earth, but was there rejected, rather than from information concerning a recently deceased historical individual. The influence of the Wisdom literature is undeniable; only assessment of what it amounted to still divides opinion.

Have you forgotten me? by Nancy B. Brewer The bricks I laid or the stitches I sewed. I was the one that made the quilt; a drop of blood still shows from my needle prick. Your wedding day in lace and satin, in a dress once worn by me. I loaned your newborn baby my christening gown, a hint of lavender still preserved. Do you know our cause, the battles we won and the battles we lost? When our soldiers marched home did you shout hooray! Or shed a tear for the fallen sons. What of the fields we plowed, the cotton, the tobacco and the okra, too. There was always room at my table for one more, Fried chicken, apple pie, biscuits and sweet ice tea. A time or two you may have heard our stories politely told. Some of us are famous, recorded on the pages of history. Still, most of us left this world without glory or acknowledgment. We were the first to walk the streets you now call home, Perhaps you have visited my grave and flowers left, but did you hear me cry out to you? Listen, my child, to the voices of your ancestors. Take pride in our accomplishments; find your strength in our suffering. For WE are not just voices in the wind, WE are a living part of YOU!

Last fall, I was sitting at the kitchen table of two friends who have been together since 1972. They tell me a story about how they got together. She couldn't decide between two suitors, so she left New York City to spend the summer in an ashram. (Did I mention was 1972?) One of the suitors sent her postcards while she was gone, the famous postcards that came inside the sleeve of the Rolling Stones' Exile on Main Street. Needless to say, he was the suitor that won her hand. They tell me this story, laughing and interrupting each other, as their teenage daughter walks through the kitchen on her way out to a Halloween party. I've heard of these postcards - over the years, I've heard plenty of record-collector guys boast that they own the original vinyl Exile on Main Street with the original postcards, intact and pristine in the virgin sleeve. I've never heard of anybody getting rid of their prized Exile postcards, much less actually writing on them and sending them through the mail to a girl. I watch these two, laughing over this story at the same kitchen table they've shared for thirty years. I realize that I will never fully understand the millions of bizarre ways that music brings people together.

And in the famous picture of the 1776 crossing of the Delaware on Christmas night, two men depicted at the front of the boat include Prince Whipple and Oliver Cromwell – two black patriots who served with George Washington and other American generals during the Revolution.

A year before Wenger’s appointment, Leyton Orient manager John Sitton had been the subject of a Channel 4 documentary that recorded him threatening to fight his own players in a famously bizarre dressing-room outburst. ‘When I tell you to do something, do it, and if you come back at me, we’ll have a fucking right sort-out in here,’ he roared at two players. ‘All right? And you can pair up if you like, and you can fucking pick someone else to help you, and you can bring your fucking dinner, ’coz by the time I’ve finished with you, you’ll fucking need it.’ That was the 1990s football manager.

The result is autobiographical, although whenever someone’s asked me over the course of these last three years just what the book is about, I’ve usually avoided such a description. An autobiography promises feats worthy of record, conversations with famous people, a central role in important events. There is none of that here.

It was new to me, that you could treat someone famous like they weren't that special, that you could see all the ways they were disappointing and regular or notice the way his kitchen smelled of trash that hadn't been taken out. The phantom squares on the wall where photographs had once hung, the gold records leaned against the baseboard,, still wrapped in plastic. Suzanne acted like it was really only she and I that mattered, and this was all a little game we were playing with Mitch. He was the background to the larger story, which was our story, and we pitied him and felt grateful to him, at the same time, for how he sacrificed himself for our enjoyment.

The idea of freedom is complex and it is all-encompassing. It’s the idea that the economy must remain free of government persuasion. It’s the idea that the press must operate without government intrusion. And it’s the idea that the emails and phone records of Americans should remain free from government search and seizure. It’s the idea that parents must be the decision makers in regards to their children's education — not some government bureaucrat. But most importantly, it is the idea that the individual must be free to pursue his or her own happiness free from government dependence and free from government control. Because to be truly free is to be reliant on no one other than the author of our destiny. These are the ideas at the core of the Republican Party, and it is why I am a Republican. So my brothers and sisters of the American community, please join with me today in abandoning the government plantation and the Party of disappointment. So that we may all echo the words of one Republican leader who famously said, "Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, we are free at last.

American baseball, by luck, trial, and error, and since the famous playing rules council of 1889, had struck on an almost perfect balance between offense and defense, and it was that balance, in fact, that and the accountability—the beauty of the records system which found a place to keep forever each least action—that had led Henry to baseball as his final great project.

The titles of his books are recorded as follows: The Twelve Caesars; Royal Biographies; Lives of Famous Whores; Roman Manners and Customs; The Roman Year; Roman Festivals; Roman Dress; Greek Games; Offices of State; Cicero’s Republic; The Physical Defects of Mankind; Methods of Reckoning Time; An Essay on Nature; Greek Objurgations; Grammatical Problems; Critical Signs Used in Books.

As new discoveries continued to accumulate it became apparent that almost every group of coelurosaurs had feathered representatives, from the weird secondarily herbivorous forms such as Beipiaosaurus to Dilong, an early relative of Tyrannosaurus. It is even possible that, during its early life, the most famous of the flesh-tearing dinosaurs may have been covered in a coat of dino-fuzz.

Eventually they [Sarunas Marciulionis and Don Nelson] got a call from a representative of the Grateful Dead, whose members had been inspired by Lithuania's struggle for independence. Nelson and Marciulionis showed up at the address they were given in San Francisco, which was a small, nondescript garage. 'I thought we were the victim of a practical joke until we opened the door and there was a state-of-the-art recording studio' says Nelson. 'I still remember the Dead were trying out Beatles covers, doing stuff like "Here Comes the Sun" and "Hey Jude"... but they were just kind of working through things and sounding kind of nasally and, well, maybe there was a little pot going on. So Sarunas pulls me aside and says 'Donnie, no way these guys are famous. They're terrible.' '.

For his son-in-law the Pope suffered no further spasms of morality. Rather, judging from Burchard’s diary, the last inhibitions, if any, dropped away. Two months after Alfonso’s death, the Pope presided over a banquet given by Cesare in the Vatican, famous in the annals of pornography as the Ballet of the Chestnuts. Soberly recorded by Burchard, fifty courtesans danced after dinner with the guests, “at first clothed, then naked.” Chestnuts were then scattered among candelabra placed on the floor, “which the courtesans, crawling on hands and knees among the candelabra, picked up, while the Pope, Cesare and his sister Lucrezia looked on.” Coupling of guests and courtesans followed, with prizes in the form of fine silken tunics and cloaks offered “for those who could perform the act most often with the courtesans.” A month later Burchard records a scene in which mares and stallions were driven into a courtyard of the Vatican and equine coupling encouraged while from a balcony the Pope and Lucrezia “watched with loud laughter and much pleasure.” Later they watched again while Cesare shot down a mass of unarmed criminals driven like the horses into the same courtyard.

Socratese was a famous IRL troll of pre-internets Greece credited with inventing the 1st recorded trolling technique and otherwise laying the foundation of western philosophy. Accounts of his successful trolls are in the form of TL;DR copypasta on Plato's livejournal. They have been causing all manner of butthurt and ass disaster for thousands of years in philosophy 101 classes around the world

Deferral of gratification may be an effect, not a cause. Just because some children were more effective than others at distracting themselves from [the marshmallow in the famous Marshmallow Test] doesn't mean this capacity was responsible for the impressive results found ten years later. Instead, both of these things may have been due to something about their home environment. If that's true, there's no reason to believe that enhancing children's ability to defer gratification would be beneficial: It was just a marker, not a cause. By way of analogy, teenagers who visit ski resorts over winter break probably have a superior record of being admitted to the Ivy League. Should we therefore hire consultants to teach low-income children how to ski in order to improve the odds that colleges will accept them?

We know from subsequent leaks that the president was indeed presented with information about the seriousness of the virus and its pandemic potential beginning at least in early January 2020. And yet, as documented by the Washington Post, he repeatedly stated that “it would go away.” On February 10, when there were 12 known cases, he said that he thought the virus would “go away” by April, “with the heat.” On February 25, when there were 53 known cases, he said, “I think that’s a problem that’s going to go away.” On February 27, when there were 60 cases, he said, famously, “We have done an incredible job. We’re going to continue. It’s going to disappear. One day—it’s like a miracle—it will disappear.” On March 6, when there were 278 cases and 14 deaths, again he said, “It’ll go away.” On March 10, when there were 959 cases and 28 deaths, he said, “We’re prepared, and we’re doing a great job with it. And it will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away.” On March 12, with 1,663 cases and 40 deaths recorded, he said, “It’s going to go away.” On March 30, with 161,807 cases and 2,978 deaths, he was still saying, “It will go away. You know it—you know it is going away, and it will go away. And we’re going to have a great victory.” On April 3, with 275,586 cases and 7,087 deaths, he again said, “It is going to go away.” He continued, repeating himself: “It is going away.… I said it’s going away, and it is going away.” In remarks on June 23, when the United States had 126,060 deaths and roughly 2.5 million cases, he said, “We did so well before the plague, and we’re doing so well after the plague. It’s going away.” Such statements continued as both the cases and the deaths kept rising. Neither the virus nor Trump’s statements went away.

One of my favorite album covers is On the Beach. Of course that was the name of a movie and I stole it for my record, but that doesn't matter. The idea for that cover came like a bolt from the blue. Gary and I traveled around getting all the pieces to put it together. We went to a junkyard in Santa Ana to get the tail fin and fender from a 1959 Cadillac, complete with taillights, and watched them cut it off a Cadillac for us, then we went to a patio supply place to get the umbrella and table. We picke up the bad polyester yellow jacket and white pants at a sleazy men's shop, where we watched a shoplifter getting caught red-handed and busted. Gary and I were stoned on some dynamite weed and stood there dumbfounded watching the bust unfold. This girl was screaming and kicking! Finally we grabbed a local LA paper to use as a prop. It had this amazing headline: Sen. Buckley Calls For Nixon to Resign. Next we took the palm tree I had taken around the world on the Tonight's the Night tour. We then placed all of these pieces carefully in the sand at Santa Monica beach. Then we shot it. Bob Seidemann was the photographer, the same one who took the famous Blind Faith cover shot of the naked young girl holding the airplane. We used the crazy pattern from the umbrella insides for the inside of the sleeve that held the vinyl recording. That was the creative process at work. We lived for that, Gary and I, and we still do.

As Rodney Stark puts it, “Almost generation after generation, Christian writers recorded acts of persecution and harassment, to the point of slaughter and destruction, suffered at the hands of Muslim [Arab, Persian, and Turkish] rulers.”9 That said, the persecution and carnage had reached apocalyptic levels by the 1090s. THE CALL FROM CLERMONT It was in this context that, on November 27, 1095, Pope Urban II (r. 1088–1099) made his famous appeal to the knights of Christendom.

Breathhold Walking Anders Olsson uses this technique to increase carbon dioxide and, thus, increase circulation in his body. It’s not much fun, but the benefits, Olsson told me, are many. Go to a grassy park, beach, or anywhere else where the ground is soft. Exhale all the breath, then walk slowly, counting each step. Once you feel a powerful sense of air hunger, stop counting and take a few very calm breaths through the nose while still walking. Breathe normally for at least a minute, then repeat the sequence. The more you practice this technique, the higher the count. Olsson’s record is 130 steps; mine is about a third of that. 4-7-8 Breathing This technique, made famous by Dr. Andrew Weil, places the body into a state of deep relaxation. I use it on long flights to help fall asleep. Take a breath in, then exhale through your mouth with a whoosh sound. Close the mouth and inhale quietly through your nose to a mental count of four. Hold for a count of seven. Exhale completely through your mouth, with a whoosh, to the count of eight. Repeat this cycle for at least four breaths.

But there is another possible attitude towards the records of the past, and I have never been able to understand why it has not been more often adopted. To put it in its curtest form, my proposal is this: That we should not read historians, but history. Let us read the actual text of the times. Let us, for a year, or a month, or a fortnight, refuse to read anything about Oliver Cromwell except what was written while he was alive. There is plenty of material; from my own memory (which is all I have to rely on in the place where I write) I could mention offhand many long and famous efforts of English literature that cover the period. Clarendon’s History, Evelyn’s Diary, the Life of Colonel Hutchinson. Above all let us read all Cromwell’s own letters and speeches, as Carlyle published them. But before we read them let us carefully paste pieces of stamp-paper over every sentence written by Carlyle. Let us blot out in every memoir every critical note and every modern paragraph. For a time let us cease altogether to read the living men on their dead topics. Let us read only the dead men on their living topics.

I would walk round that beautiful, unspoilt little island, with its population of under a hundred and where there isn’t a single tarmac road, thinking about how he would truly sound. Perhaps the quietness of the island helped me do so. ‘Everybody thinks he’s French,’ I said to myself as I walked across the great stones that littered the beach at Rushy Bay, or stomped over the tussocky grass of Heathy Hill, with its famous dwarf pansies. ‘The only reason people think Poirot is French is because of his accent,’ I muttered. ‘But he’s Belgian, and I know that French-speaking Belgians don’t sound French, not a bit of it.’" "I also was well aware of Brian Eastman’s advice to me before I left for Bryher: ‘Don’t forget, he may have an accent, but the audience must be able to understand exactly what he’s saying.’ There was my problem in a nutshell." "To help me, I managed to get hold of a set of Belgian Walloon and French radio recordings from the BBC. Poirot came from Liège in Belgium and would have spoken Belgian French, the language of 30 per cent of the country’s population, rather than Walloon, which is very much closer to the ordinary French language. To these I added recordings of English-language stations broadcasting from Belgium, as well as English-language programmes from Paris. My principal concern was to give my Poirot a voice that would ring true, and which would also be the voice of the man I heard in my head when I read his stories. I listened for hours, and then gradually started mixing Walloon Belgian with French, while at the same time slowly relocating the sound of his voice in my body, moving it from my chest to my head, making it sound a little more high-pitched, and yes, a little more fastidious. After several weeks, I finally began to believe that I’d captured it: this was what Poirot would have sounded like if I’d met him in the flesh. This was how he would have spoken to me – with that characteristic little bow as we shook hands, and that little nod of the head to the left as he removed his perfectly brushed grey Homburg hat. The more I heard his voice in my head, and added to my own list of his personal characteristics, the more determined I became never to compromise in my portrayal of Poirot.

Don Chrisantos Michael Wanzala "Don CM Wanzala" (born April 13), popularly known as Don Santo (stylized as DON SANTO) is a Kenyan singer, rapper, songwriter, arranger, actor, author, content producer, Photo-Videographer, Creative Director (Blame It On Don), entrepreneur, record executive and Leader of the Klassik Nation and chairman and president of Global Media Ltd, based in Nairobi City in Kenya. ​ The genius of DON SANTO rests in his willingness to break from traditional formula and constantly push the envelope. He flips the method of the moment with undeniable swagger and bold African sensibility. As a songwriter, Santo revisits simple, but profound aspects of the human experience – love, lust, desire, joy, and pain that define classical art and drama. He applies his concept to rich, full vocals that exude his intended effect. It is this uncanny ability to compose classics and deliver electrifying live performances that define everything that is essential DON SANTO. In 2015, Santo won the East Africa Music Awards in the Artist of the year Category while his song "Sina Makosa" won the Song of The year. A believer in GOD, FAMILY & GOOD LIFE (Klassikanity).

friends and I used to play an invented parlor game called the Worst Records Never Made. The point was to hypothesize the most stunningly inappropriate albums we could imagine—pairings of artists and material so horrific that even the famously dunderheaded major labels would hardly consider making them. Most of our inspirations have been lost to memory, but the notion of discs like “Yodel with the Berlin Philharmonic,” “The Three Tenors Sing Gilbert and Sullivan,” and—my favorite—“The Chipmunks Present Your Favorite Spirituals” can still inspire what P. G. Wodehouse used to call “the raised eyebrow,

The fact that an educated Roman governor and Consul (the highest possible office in the entire Roman Empire, short of actually being the Emperor) knows so little about Christianity that he has to conduct interrogations to get the basics proves that it was still a little known fringe movement at this time. What’s more, Trajan’s reply mentions no trial precedents or decrees against Christians, highlighting the fact that no trial records existed in Roman archives for famous Christians like Jesus, Peter or Paul. If there had been, Pliny would not had to go into detail describing the trials he conducted.

But that was where his excitement began to melt into cold anxiety. His dad had been the Gryffindor Seeker, the youngest one in Hogwarts history. The best he, James, could hope for was to match that record. That’s what everyone would expect of him, the first-born son of the famous hero. He remembered the story, told to him dozens of times (although never by his own dad) of how the young Harry Potter had won his first Golden Snitch by virtually jumping off his broom, catching the golden ball in his mouth and nearly swallowing it. The tellers of the tale would always laugh uproariously, delightedly, and if Dad was there, he’d smile sheepishly as they clapped him on the back. When James was four, he found that famed Snitch in a shoe box in the bottom of the dining room hutch. His mum told him it’d been a gift to Dad from the old school headmaster. The tiny wings no longer worked, and the golden ball had a thin coat of dust and tarnish on it, but James was mesmerized by it. It was the first Snitch he had ever seen close up. It seemed both smaller and larger than he’d imagined, and the weight of it in his small hand was surprising. This is the famous Snitch, James thought reverently, the one from the story, the one caught by my dad. He asked his dad if he could keep it, stored in the shoebox when he wasn’t playing with it, in his room. His dad agreed easily, happily, and James moved the shoebox from the bottom of the hutch to a spot under the head of his bed, next to his toy broom. He pretended the dark corner under his headboard was his Quidditch locker. He spent many an hour pretending to zoom and bank over the Quidditch green, chasing the fabled Snitch, in the end, always catching it in a fantastic diving crash, jumping up, producing his dad’s tarnished Snitch for the approval of roaring imaginary crowds.

While on the subject of burning books, I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength, their powerful political connections or great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and destroyed records rather than have to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles. So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House, the Supreme Court, the Senate, the House of Representatives, or the media. The America I loved still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.

At the end of Stephen Vincent Benét’s famous short story “The Devil and Daniel Webster,” the Prince of Darkness is forced to promise that he will never again show his face in the state of New Hampshire. It is nowhere recorded that any such promise was made about Massachusetts. The Bay State’s history is rife with documented cases of devil worship, witchcraft, and black magic. The state that is known for producing presidents and scholars is also known for Lizzie Borden, who “took an ax and gave her mother forty whacks/Then when she was good and done/Gave her father forty-one,” and for being the home of Albert DeSalvo, the “Boston Strangler.

Sydney has no box jellyfish, I was pleased to learn. The famous local danger is the funnel web spider, the most poisonous insect in the world with a venom that is “highly toxic and fast-acting.” A single nip, if not promptly treated, will leave you bouncing around in the grip of seizures of an incomparable liveliness; then you turn blue; then you die. Thirteen deaths are on record, though none since 1981, when an antidote was devised. Also poisonous are white-tailed spiders, mouse spiders, wolf spiders, our old friend the redback (“hundreds of bites are reported each year…about a dozen known deaths”), and a reclusive but fractious type called the fiddleback.

The malicious erasure of women’s names from the historical record began two or three thousand years ago and continues into our own period. Women take as great a risk of anonymity when they merge their names with men in literary collaboration as when they merge in matrimony. The Lynds, for example, devoted equal time, thought, and effort to the writing of Middletown, but today it is Robert Lynd’s book. Dr. Mary Leakey made the important paleontological discoveries in Africa, but Dr. Louis Leakey gets all the credit. Mary Beard did a large part of the work on America in Midpassage, yet Charles Beard is the great social historian. The insidious process is now at work on Eve Curie. A recent book written for young people states that radium was discovered by Pierre Curie with the help of his assistant, Eve, who later became his wife. Aspasia wrote the famous oration to the Athenians, as Socrates knew, but in all the history books it is Pericles’ oration. Corinna taught Pindar and polished his poems for posterity; but who ever heard of Corinna? Peter Abelard got his best ideas from Heloise, his acknowledged intellectual superior, yet Abelard is the great medieval scholar and philosopher. Mary Sidney probably wrote Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia; Nausicaa wrote the Odyssey, as Samuel Butler proves in his book The Authoress of the Odyssey, at least to the satisfaction of this writer and of Robert Graves, who comment, “no other alternative makes much sense.

When people are deeply “in” a film, you’ll notice that nobody coughs at certain moments, even though they may have a cold. If the coughing were purely autonomic response to smoke or congestion, it would be randomly constant, no matter what was happening on screen. But the audience holds back at certain moments, and I’m suggesting blinking is something like coughing in this sense. There is a famous live recording of pianist Sviatoslav Richter playing Musorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition during a flu epidemic in Bulgaria many years ago. It is just as plain as day what’s going on: While he was playing certain passages, no one coughed. At those moments, he was able to suppress, with his artistry, the coughing impulse of 1,500 sick people.

Joseph also administered the new, secret rite of the Second Anointing for chosen couples upstairs at the store. He sealed polygamous marriages in the second-floor office, never revealing them to the Saints at large. Smith and Brigham Young kept coded records of these events, sometimes using pseudonyms. In his diary, Smith occasionally called himself “Baurak Ale.” To record his marriages, Young might write “saw E. Partridge,” a code which meant “[s]ealed [a]nd [w]ed Emily Partridge,” or “ME L. Beaman,” which would mean “married for eternity Louisa Beaman.” One of Joseph’s plural wives, Willard Richards’s sister Rhoda, lived in the store, which was also the site of Brigham Young’s soon-to-be-famous, botched seduction of British teenager Martha Brotherton.

The former South African archbishop Desmond Tutu used to famously say, “We are prisoners of hope.” Such a statement might be taken as merely rhetorical or even eccentric if you hadn’t seen Bishop Tutu stare down the notorious South African Security Police when they broke into the Cathedral of St. George’s during his sermon at an ecumenical service. I was there and have preached about the dramatic story of his response more times than I can count. The incident taught me more about the power of hope than any other moment of my life. Desmond Tutu stopped preaching and just looked at the intruders as they lined the walls of his cathedral, wielding writing pads and tape recorders to record whatever he said and thereby threatening him with consequences for any bold prophetic utterances. They had already arrested Tutu and other church leaders just a few weeks before and kept them in jail for several days to make both a statement and a point: Religious leaders who take on leadership roles in the struggle against apartheid will be treated like any other opponents of the Pretoria regime. After meeting their eyes with his in a steely gaze, the church leader acknowledged their power (“You are powerful, very powerful”) but reminded them that he served a higher power greater than their political authority (“But I serve a God who cannot be mocked!”). Then, in the most extraordinary challenge to political tyranny I have ever witnessed, Archbishop Desmond Tutu told the representatives of South African apartheid, “Since you have already lost, I invite you today to come and join the winning side!” He said it with a smile on his face and enticing warmth in his invitation, but with a clarity and a boldness that took everyone’s breath away. The congregation’s response was electric. The crowd was literally transformed by the bishop’s challenge to power. From a cowering fear of the heavily armed security forces that surrounded the cathedral and greatly outnumbered the band of worshipers, we literally leaped to our feet, shouted the praises of God and began…dancing. (What is it about dancing that enacts and embodies the spirit of hope?) We danced out of the cathedral to meet the awaiting police and military forces of apartheid who hardly expected a confrontation with dancing worshipers. Not knowing what else to do, they backed up to provide the space for the people of faith to dance for freedom in the streets of South Africa.

I want to sleep with people, steal, get run out of town, leave my fingerprints on every scene. We have a name for it, our generation. It’s our Baghdad.” “Your what?” “My Baghdad,” Tommy said laughing, knowing it was dumb, savoring the dumbness, and maybe also its truth. “The situation you get into knowing it’s fucked-up but you keep doing it anyway, making it an even bigger disaster. Everyone gets one, but that’s how you learn. It builds character, makes you dirty and real. You know you’re a superpower when you can lose every war and still be a superpower. Maybe you’re a superpower because you can afford to lose them. Same here. There should be a Web site that records all the risks a person has taken, all the famous people they’ve met, all their gnarly trips and bad decisions. Like a Web site that ranks who’s lived the most.” “Isn’t that called Facebook?” Mills asked.

My uncle arranged for us to have a day together at a simulated shooting range near where he lived on the West Coast. The entire staff turned out to make sure we had fun-and to catch a glimpse of the newly famous hero. I went through the range with him, and the results were not quite what I expected. I did well, but… To give you some background: The range featured tactical situations where you did more than stand behind a bench and shoot at a paper target and a bale of hay. Videos supplied an immersive experience; it was a little like being part of a video game, except that you moved around and had a full-sized weapon as opposed to a game controller. The results were recorded, and we reviewed them later on. Chris’s shots were all head and chest. Mine were all in the crotch. “Do we need to talk?” asked Chris. I swear, there was no hostility. I was just aiming low, expecting the recoil to bring the shot up. Really.

The obvious costs of such a policy became apparent to me as I sat along the back wall of vault V22 at NSA headquarters with two of the more talented infrastructure analysts, whose workspace was decorated with a seven-foot-tall picture of Star Wars’ famous wookie, Chewbacca. I realized, as one of them was explaining to me the details of his targets’ security routines, that intercepted nudes were a kind of informal office currency, because his buddy kept spinning in his chair to interrupt us with a smile, saying, “Check her out,” to which my instructor would invariably reply “Bonus!” or “Nice!” The unspoken transactional rule seemed to be that if you found a naked photo or video of an attractive target—or someone in communication with a target—you had to show the rest of the boys, at least as long as there weren’t any women around. That was how you knew you could trust each other: you had shared in one another’s crimes.

Bertrand Russell famously said: “It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatsoever for supposing it is true.” [but] Russell’s maxim is the luxury of a technologically advanced society with science, history, journalism, and their infrastructure of truth-seeking, including archival records, digital datasets, high-tech instruments, and communities of editing, fact-checking, and peer review. We children of the Enlightenment embrace the radical creed of universal realism: we hold that all our beliefs should fall within the reality mindset. We care about whether our creation story, our founding legends, our theories of invisible nutrients and germs and forces, our conceptions of the powerful, our suspicions about our enemies, are true or false. That’s because we have the tools to get answers to these questions, or at least to assign them warranted degrees of credence. And we have a technocratic state that should, in theory, put these beliefs into practice. But as desirable as that creed is, it is not the natural human way of believing. In granting an imperialistic mandate to the reality mindset to conquer the universe of belief and push mythology to the margins, we are the weird ones—or, as evolutionary social scientists like to say, the WEIRD ones: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic. At least, the highly educated among us are, in our best moments. The human mind is adapted to understanding remote spheres of existence through a mythology mindset. It’s not because we descended from Pleistocene hunter-gatherers specifically, but because we descended from people who could not or did not sign on to the Enlightenment ideal of universal realism. Submitting all of one’s beliefs to the trials of reason and evidence is an unnatural skill, like literacy and numeracy, and must be instilled and cultivated.

It has been noted in various quarters that the half-illiterate Italian violin maker Antonio Stradivari never recorded the exact plans or dimensions for how to make one of his famous instruments. This might have been a commercial decision (during the earliest years of the 1700s, Stradivari’s violins were in high demand and open to being copied by other luthiers). But it might also have been because, well, Stradivari didn’t know exactly how to record its dimensions, its weight, and its balance. I mean, he knew how to create a violin with his hands and his fingers but maybe not in figures he kept in his head. Today, those violins, named after the Latinized form of his name, Stradivarius, are considered priceless. It is believed there are only around five hundred of them still in existence, some of which have been submitted to the most intense scientific examination in an attempt to reproduce their extraordinary sound quality. But no one has been able to replicate Stradivari’s craftsmanship. They’ve worked out that he used spruce for the top, willow for the internal blocks and linings, and maple for the back, ribs, and neck. They’ve figured out that he also treated the wood with several types of minerals, including potassium borate, sodium and potassium silicate, as well as a handmade varnish that appears to have been composed of gum arabic, honey, and egg white. But they still can’t replicate a Stradivarius. The genius craftsman never once recorded his technique for posterity. Instead, he passed on his knowledge to a number of his apprentices through what the philosopher Michael Polyani called “elbow learning.” This is the process where a protégé is trained in a new art or skill by sitting at the elbow of a master and by learning the craft through doing it, copying it, not simply by reading about it. The apprentices of the great Stradivari didn’t learn their craft from books or manuals but by sitting at his elbow and feeling the wood as he felt it to assess its length, its balance, and its timbre right there in their fingertips. All the learning happened at his elbow, and all the knowledge was contained in his fingers. In his book Personal Knowledge, Polyani wrote, “Practical wisdom is more truly embodied in action than expressed in rules of action.”1 By that he meant that we learn as Stradivari’s protégés did, by feeling the weight of a piece of wood, not by reading the prescribed measurements in a manual. Polyani continues, To learn by example is to submit to authority. You follow your master because you trust his manner of doing things even when you cannot analyze and account in detail for its effectiveness. By watching the master and emulating his efforts in the presence of his example, the apprentice unconsciously picks up the rules of the art, including those which are not explicitly known to the master himself. These hidden rules can be assimilated only by a person who surrenders himself to that extent uncritically to the imitation of another.

Book-writing is the province of specialists, living is the business of us all. Moral life, sentimental life, religious life, whatever is above the terre à terre of mere existing, also consists of illuminations which once departed return no more. A diary, a few old letters, a few sheets containing thoughts or meditations, may keep up the connection between us today and our better selves of the past. I was deeply impressed as a youth by the advice of a spiritual writer to read one's own spiritual notes preferably to even famous works. All saints seem to have done so. The moment we realize that any thought, ours or borrowed, is pregnant enough not to be wasted, or original enough not to be likely to come back again, we must fix it on paper. Our manuscripts should mirror our reading, our meditations, our ideals, and our approach to it in our lives. Anybody who has early taken the habit to record himself in that way knows that the loss of his papers would also mean a loss to his thinking possibilities.

There are tiny mites living in our eyelashes. Hal Roach was a famous director who used to hire drunk and insane people to generate creative ideas. To attract female goats, Billy goats urinate on their own heads. Jewish people do not eat pork. Khazaria was a medieval Turkic kingdom that adopted Judaism as its official religion; it was the only non-Semitic state to become Jewish after Israel. The largest economy in the United States is California. More deer are killed by drivers than by hunters. The automotive center of the world is in Detroit. If the earth were ever to stop spinning, all the oceans would flow to the north and south poles. Around 16 to 20 percent of the terms searched on Google are said to have been never searched before. Bamboo can grow 35 inches per day making it the fastest growing woody plant in the world. The heaviest insect found on the earth is ‘Giant Weta’. It weighs more than a pound and is found in New Zealand. The CIA is expected to release the JFK assassination records to the public no later than 10/26/2017.

[I]n the years that followed the persecutions, Christianity came to see itself, with great pride, as a persecuted Church. Its greatest heroes were not those who did good deeds but those who died in the most painful way. If you were willing to die an excruciating end in the arena then, whatever your previous holiness or lack thereof, you went straight to heaven: martyrdom wiped out all sins on the point of death. As well as getting there faster, martyrs enjoyed preferential terms in paradise, getting to wear the much-desired martyr’s crown. Tempting celestial terms were offered: it was said that the scripture promised ‘multiplication, even to a hundred times, of brothers, children, parents, land and homes’. Precisely how this celestial sum had been calculated is not clear but the general principle was: those who died early, publicly and painfully would be best rewarded. In many of the martyr tales the driving force is less that the Romans want to kill – and more that the Christians want to die. Why wouldn’t they? Paradoxically, martyrdom held considerable benefits for those willing to take it on. One was its egalitarian entry qualifications. As George Bernard Shaw acidly observed over a millennium later, martyrdom is the only way a man can become famous without ability. More than that, in a socially and sexually unequal era it was a way in which women and even slaves might shine. Unlike most positions of power in the highly socially stratified late Roman Empire, this was a glory that was open to all, regardless of rank, education, wealth or sex. The sociologist Rodney Stark has pointed out that – provided you believe in its promised rewards – martyrdom is a perfectly rational choice. A martyr could begin the day of their death as one of the lowliest people in the empire and end it as one of the most exalted in heaven. So tempting were these rewards that pious Christians born outside times of persecution were wont to express disappointment at being denied the opportunity of an agonizing death. When the later Emperor Julian pointedly avoided executing Christians in his reign, one Christian writer far from being grateful, sourly recorded that Julian had ‘begrudged the honour of martyrdom to our combatants’.

The Poet" The riches of the poet are equal to his poetry His power is his left hand It is idle weak and precious His poverty is his wealth, a wealth which may destroy him like Midas Because it is that laziness which is a form of impatience And this he may be destroyed by the gold of the light which never was On land or sea. He may be drunken to death, draining the casks of excess That extreme form of success. He may suffer Narcissus' destiny Unable to live except with the image which is infatuation Love, blind, adoring, overflowing Unable to respond to anything which does not bring love quickly or immediately. ...The poet must be innocent and ignorant But he cannot be innocent since stupidity is not his strong point Therefore Cocteau said, "What would I not give To have the poems of my youth withdrawn from existence? I would give to Satan my immortal soul." This metaphor is wrong, for it is his immortal soul which he wished to redeem, Lifting it and sifting it, free and white, from the actuality of youth's banality, vulgarity, pomp and affectation of his early works of poetry. So too in the same way a Famous American Poet When fame at last had come to him sought out the fifty copies of his first book of poems which had been privately printed by himself at his own expense. He succeeded in securing 48 of the 50 copies, burned them And learned then how the last copies were extant, As the law of the land required, stashed away in the national capital, at the Library of Congress. Therefore he went to Washington, therefore he took out the last two copies Placed them in his pocket, planned to depart Only to be halted and apprehended. Since he was the author, Since they were his books and his property he was reproached But forgiven. But the two copies were taken away from him Thus setting a national precedent. For neither amnesty nor forgiveness is bestowed upon poets, poetry and poems, For William James, the lovable genius of Harvard spoke the terrifying truth: "Your friends may forget, God may forgive you, But the brain cells record your acts for the rest of eternity." What a terrifying thing to say! This is the endless doom, without remedy, of poetry. This is also the joy everlasting of poetry. Delmore Schwartz

The single book that has influenced me most is probably the last book in the world that anybody is gonna want to read: Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. This book is dense, difficult, long, full of blood and guts. It wasn’t written, as Thucydides himself attests at the start, to be easy or fun. But it is loaded with hardcore, timeless truths and the story it tells ought to be required reading for every citizen in a democracy. Thucydides was an Athenian general who was beaten and disgraced in a battle early in the 27-year conflagration that came to be called the Peloponnesian War. He decided to drop out of the fighting and dedicate himself to recording, in all the detail he could manage, this conflict, which, he felt certain, would turn out to be the greatest and most significant war ever fought up to that time. He did just that. Have you heard of Pericles’ Funeral Oration? Thucydides was there for it. He transcribed it. He was there for the debates in the Athenian assembly over the treatment of the island of Melos, the famous Melian Dialogue. If he wasn’t there for the defeat of the Athenian fleet at Syracuse or the betrayal of Athens by Alcibiades, he knew people who were there and he went to extremes to record what they told him.Thucydides, like all the Greeks of his era, was unencumbered by Christian theology, or Marxist dogma, or Freudian psychology, or any of the other “isms” that attempt to convince us that man is basically good, or perhaps perfectible. He saw things as they were, in my opinion. It’s a dark vision but tremendously bracing and empowering because it’s true. On the island of Corcyra, a great naval power in its day, one faction of citizens trapped their neighbors and fellow Corcyreans in a temple. They slaughtered the prisoners’ children outside before their eyes and when the captives gave themselves up based on pledges of clemency and oaths sworn before the gods, the captors massacred them as well. This was not a war of nation versus nation, this was brother against brother in the most civilized cities on earth. To read Thucydides is to see our own world in microcosm. It’s the study of how democracies destroy themselves by breaking down into warring factions, the Few versus the Many. Hoi polloi in Greek means “the many.” Oligoi means “the few.” I can’t recommend Thucydides for fun, but if you want to expose yourself to a towering intellect writing on the deepest stuff imaginable, give it a try.

inbox. It was from Ogden Morrow. The subject line read “We Can Dance If We Want To.” There was no text in the body of the e-mail. Just a file attachment—an invitation to one of the most exclusive gatherings in the OASIS: Ogden Morrow’s birthday party. In the real world, Morrow almost never made public appearances, and in the OASIS, he came out of hiding only once a year, to host this event. The invitation featured a photo of Morrow’s world-famous avatar, the Great and Powerful Og. The gray-bearded wizard was hunched over an elaborate DJ mixing board, one headphone pressed to his ear, biting his lower lip in auditory ecstasy as his fingers scratched ancient vinyl on a set of silver turntables. His record crate bore a DON’T PANIC sticker and an anti-Sixer logo—a yellow number six with a red circle-and-slash over it. The text at the bottom read Ogden Morrow’s ’80s Dance Party in celebration of his 73rd birthday! Tonight—10pm OST at the Distracted Globe ADMIT ONE I was flabbergasted. Ogden Morrow had actually taken the time to invite me to his birthday party. It felt like the greatest honor I’d ever received. I called Art3mis, and she confirmed that she’d received the same e-mail. She said she couldn’t pass up an invitation from Og himself

To our amazement Jimmy received a letter, dated August 20, 1963, from Bertrand Russell, the world-famous philosopher and peace activist, saying “I have recently finished your remarkable book The American Resolution” and “have been greatly impressed with its power and insight.” The letter goes on to ask for Jimmy’s views on whether American whites “will understand the negro [sic] revolt because “the survival of mankind may well follow or fail to follow from political and social behavior of Americans in the next decades.” On September 5 Jimmy wrote back a lengthy reply saying among other things that “so far, with the exception of the students, there has been no social force in the white population which the Negroes can respect and a handful of liberals joining in a demonstration doesn’t change this one bit.” Russell replied on September 18 with more questions that Jimmy answered in an even longer letter dated December 22. Meanwhile, Russell had sent a telegram to the November 21 Town Hall meeting in New York City at which Jimmy was scheduled to speak, warning Negroes not to resort to violence. In response Jimmy said at the meeting that “I too would like to hope that the issues of our revolt might be resolved by peaceful means,” but “the issues and grievances were too deeply imbedded in the American system and the American peoples so that the very things Russell warned against might just have to take place if the Negroes in the U.S.A. are ever to walk the streets as free men.” In his December 22 letter Jimmy repeats what he said at the meeting and then patiently explains to Russell that what has historically been considered democracy in the United States has actually been fascism for millions of Negroes. The letter concludes: I believe that it is your responsibility as I believe that it is my responsibility to recognize and record this, so that in the future words do not confuse the struggle but help to clarify it. This is what I think philosophers should make clear. Because even though Negroes in the United States still think they are struggling for democracy, in fact democracy is what they are struggling against. This exchange between Jimmy and Russell has to be seen to be believed. In a way it epitomizes the 1960s—Jimmy Boggs, the Alabama-born autoworker, explaining the responsibility of philosophers to The Earl Russell, O.M., F.R.S., in his time probably the West’s best-known philosopher. Within the next few years The American Revolution was translated and published in French, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, Catalan, and Portuguese. To this day it remains a page-turner for grassroots activists because it is so personal and yet political, so down to earth and yet visionary.

decided to move to London while the house was being emptied. At first I stayed in a hotel – the Inn On The Park, the location for the famous story about me ringing the Rocket office and demanding they do something about the wind outside that was keeping me awake. This is obviously the ideal moment to state once and for all that this story is a complete urban myth, that I was never crazy enough to ask my record company to do something about the weather; that I was simply disturbed by the wind and wanted to change rooms to somewhere quieter. Unfortunately, I can’t tell you that, because the story is completely true. I absolutely was crazy and deluded enough to ring the international manager of Rocket, Robert Key, and ask him to do something about the wind outside my hotel room. I certainly didn’t want to change rooms. It was 11 a.m., I’d been up all night and there were drugs everywhere: the last thing I needed was the hotel staff bustling in to help me move to a different floor. I angrily outlined the situation to Robert. To his lasting credit, he gave my request very short shrift. On the other end of the phone, I heard the muffled sound of Robert, with his hand over the receiver, telling the rest of the office, ‘Oh God, she’s finally lost it.’ Then he spoke to me again. ‘Elton, are you fucking insane? Now get off the phone and go back to bed.

Evidently Nehru, though a nationalist at the political level, was intellectually and emotionally drawn to the Indus civilization by his regard for internationalism, secularism, art, technology and modernity. By contrast, Nehru’s political rival, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, neither visited Mohenjo-daro nor commented on the significance of the Indus civilization. Nor did Nehru’s mentor, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, India’s greatest nationalist leader. In Jinnah’s case, this silence is puzzling, given that the Indus valley lies in Pakistan and, moreover, Jinnah himself was born in Karachi, in the province of Sindh, not so far from Mohenjo-daro. In Gandhi’s case, the silence is even more puzzling. Not only was Gandhi, too, an Indus dweller, so to speak, having been born in Gujarat, in Saurashtra, but he must surely also have become aware in the 1930s of the Indus civilization as the potential origin of Hinduism, plus the astonishing revelation that it apparently functioned without resort to military violence. Yet, there is not a single comment on the Indus civilization in the one hundred large volumes of the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi. The nearest he comes to commenting is a touching remark recorded by the Mahatma’s secretary when the two of them visited the site of Marshall’s famous excavations at Taxila, in northern Punjab, in 1938. On being shown a pair of heavy silver ancient anklets by the curator of the Taxila archaeological museum, ‘Gandhiji with a deep sigh remarked: “Just like what my mother used to wear.

After three weeks of lectures and receptions in New York, Einstein paid a visit to Washington. For reasons fathomable only by those who live in that capital, the Senate decided to debate the theory of relativity. Among the leaders asserting that it was incomprehensible were Pennsylvania Republican Boies Penrose, famous for once uttering that “public office is the last refuge of a scoundrel,” and Mississippi Democrat John Sharp Williams, who retired a year later, saying, “I’d rather be a dog and bay at the moon than stay in the Senate another six years.” On the House side of the Capitol, Representative J. J. Kindred of New York proposed placing an explanation of Einstein’s theories in the Congressional Record. David Walsh of Massachusetts rose to object. Did Kindred understand the theory? “I have been earnestly busy with this theory for three weeks,” he replied, “and am beginning to see some light.” But what relevance, he was asked, did it have to the business of Congress? “It may bear upon the legislation of the future as to general relations with the cosmos.” Such discourse made it inevitable that, when Einstein went with a group to the White House on April 25, President Warren G. Harding would be faced with the question of whether he understood relativity. As the group posed for cameras, President Harding smiled and confessed that he did not comprehend the theory at all. The Washington Post carried a cartoon showing him puzzling over a paper titled “Theory of Relativity” while Einstein puzzled over one on the “Theory of Normalcy,” which was the name Harding gave to his governing philosophy. The New York Times ran a page 1 headline: “Einstein Idea Puzzles Harding, He Admits.

For the lady’s husband to become actively jealous was considered both doltish and dishonorable, a breach of the spirit of courtesy. Yet the record suggests that this was a fairly common occurrence and one of the occupational hazards of being a troubadour. The most famous crime passionnel of the epoch was the murder of Guilhem de Cabestanh, a troubadour knight whose love for the Lady Seremonda aroused the jealousy of her husband, Raimon de Castel-Roussillon. The story goes that Raimon killed Guilhem while he was out hunting, removed the heart from the body, and had it served to his wife for dinner, cooked and seasoned with pepper. Then comes the great confrontation: “And when the lady had eaten of it, RAimon de Castel-Roussillon said unto her: “Know you of what you have eaten?’ And she said, ‘I know not, save that the taste thereof is good and savoury.’ Then he said to her that that she had eaten of was in very truth the head of SIr Guilhem of Cabestanh, and caused the head to be brought before her, that she might the more readily believe it. And when the lady had seen and heard this, she straightway fell into a swoon, and when she was recovered of it, she spake and said: “Of a truth, my Lord, such good meat have you given me that never more will I eat of other.” THen he, hearing this, ran upon her with his sword and would have struck at her head, but the lady ran to a balcony, and cast herself down, and so died.” ...the story is probably apocryphal… grisly details...borrowed from an ancient legend...the Middle Ages believed it and drew the intended moral conclusion-that husbands should leave well enough alone. Raimon was held up to scorn while Guilhem became one of the great heroes of the troubadour epoch.

Darwin’s Hopes Shattered However, although evolutionists have been making strenuous efforts to find fossils since the middle of the nineteenth century all over the world, no transitional forms have yet been uncovered. All of the fossils, contrary to the evolutionists' expectations, show that life appeared on Earth all of a sudden and fully-formed. One famous British paleontologist, Derek V. Ager, admits this fact, even though he is an evolutionist: The point emerges that if we examine the fossil record in detail, whether at the level of orders or of species, we find – over and over again – not gradual evolution, but the sudden explosion of one group at the expense of another. This means that in the fossil record, all living species suddenly emerge as fully formed, without any intermediate forms in between. This is just the opposite of Darwin's assumptions. Also, this is very strong evidence that all living things are created. The only explanation of a living species emerging suddenly and complete in every detail without any evolutionary ancestor is that it was created. This fact is admitted also by the widely known evolutionist biologist Douglas Futuyma: Creation and evolution, between them, exhaust the possible explanations for the origin of living things. Organisms either appeared on the earth fully developed or they did not. If they did not, they must have developed from pre-existing species by some process of modification. If they did appear in a fully developed state, they must indeed have been created by some omnipotent intelligence. Fossils show that living beings emerged fully developed and in a perfect state on the Earth. That means that "the origin of species," contrary to Darwin's supposition, is not evolution, but creation.

He called back with an incredible report: there were people lined up around the store already. Wow, I thought. Wow! Wow didn’t begin to cover it. People lined up on two floors of the store to talk to Chris and get their books signed, hours before he was even scheduled to arrive. Chris was overwhelmed when he got there, and so was I. The week before, he’d been just another guy walking down the street. Now, all of a sudden he was famous. Except he was still the same Chris Kyle, humble and a bit abashed, ready to shake hands and pose for a picture, and always, at heart, a good ol’ boy. “I’m so nervous,” confided one of the people on the line as he approached Chris. “I’ve been waiting for three hours just to see you.” “Oh, I’m sorry,” said Chris. “Waitin’ all that time and come to find out there’s just another redneck up here.” The man laughed, and so did Chris. It was something he’d repeat, in different variations, countless times that night and over the coming weeks. We stayed for three or four hours that first night, far beyond what had been advertised, with Chris signing each book, shaking each hand, and genuinely grateful for each person who came. For their part, they were anxious not just to meet him but to thank him for his service to our country-and by extension, the service of every military member whom they couldn’t personally thank. From the moment the book was published, Chris became the son, the brother, the nephew, the cousin, the kid down the street whom they couldn’t personally thank. In a way, his outstanding military record was beside the point-he was a living, breathing patriot who had done his duty and come home safe to his wife and kids. Thanking him was people’s way of thanking everyone in uniform. And, of course, the book was an interesting read. It quickly became a commercial success beyond anyone’s wildest dreams, including the publisher’s. The hardcover debuted at number two on the New York Times bestseller list, then rose to number one and stayed there for more than two months. It’s remained a fixture on the bestseller lists ever since, and has been translated into twenty-four languages worldwide. It was a good read, and it had a profound effect on a lot of people. A lot of the people who bought it weren’t big book readers, but they ended up engrossed. A friend of ours told us that he’d started reading the book one night while he was taking a bath with his wife. She left, went to bed, and fell asleep. She woke up at three or four and went into the bathroom. Her husband was still there, in the cold water, reading. The funny thing is, Chris still could not have cared less about all the sales. He’d done his assignment, turned it in, and got his grade. Done deal.

We are conscious of only a tiny fraction of the information that our brains process in each moment.1 Although we continually notice changes in our experience—in thought, mood, perception, behavior, etc.—we are utterly unaware of the neurophysiological events that produce them. In fact, we can be very poor witnesses to experience itself. By merely glancing at your face or listening to your tone of voice, others are often more aware of your state of mind and motivations than you are. I generally start each day with a cup of coffee or tea—sometimes two. This morning, it was coffee (two). Why not tea? I am in no position to know. I wanted coffee more than I wanted tea today, and I was free to have what I wanted. Did I consciously choose coffee over tea? No. The choice was made for me by events in my brain that I, as the conscious witness of my thoughts and actions, could not inspect or influence. Could I have “changed my mind” and switched to tea before the coffee drinker in me could get his bearings? Yes, but this impulse would also have been the product of unconscious causes. Why didn’t it arise this morning? Why might it arise in the future? I cannot know. The intention to do one thing and not another does not originate in consciousness—rather, it appears in consciousness, as does any thought or impulse that might oppose it. The physiologist Benjamin Libet famously used EEG to show that activity in the brain’s motor cortex can be detected some 300 milliseconds before a person feels that he has decided to move.2 Another lab extended this work using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI): Subjects were asked to press one of two buttons while watching a “clock” composed of a random sequence of letters appearing on a screen. They reported which letter was visible at the moment they decided to press one button or the other. The experimenters found two brain regions that contained information about which button subjects would press a full 7 to 10 seconds before the decision was consciously made.3 More recently, direct recordings from the cortex showed that the activity of merely 256 neurons was sufficient to predict with 80 percent accuracy a person’s decision to move 700 milliseconds before he became aware of it.4 These findings are difficult to reconcile with the sense that we are the conscious authors of our actions. One fact now seems indisputable: Some moments before you are aware of what you will do next—a time in which you subjectively appear to have complete freedom to behave however you please—your brain has already determined what you will do. You then become conscious of this “decision” and believe that you are in the process of making it. The distinction between “higher” and “lower” systems in the brain offers no relief: I, as the conscious witness of my experience, no more initiate events in my prefrontal cortex than I cause my heart to beat. There will always be some delay between the first neurophysiological events that kindle my next conscious thought and the thought itself. And even if there weren’t—even if all mental states were truly coincident with their underlying brain states—I cannot decide what I will next think or intend until a thought or intention arises. What will my next mental state be? I do not know—it just happens. Where is the freedom in that?

In the early 1680s, at just about the time that Edmond Halley and his friends Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke were settling down in a London coffee house and embarking on the casual wager that would result eventually in Isaac Newton’s Principia, Hemy Cavendish’s weighing of the Earth, and many of the other inspired and commendable undertakings that have occupied us for much of the past four hundred pages, a rather less desirable milestone was being passed on the island of Mauritius, far out in the Indian Ocean some eight hundred miles off the east coast of Madagascar. There, some forgotten sailor or sailor’s pet was harrying to death the last of the dodos, the famously flightless bird whose dim but trusting nature and lack of leggy zip made it a rather irresistible target for bored young tars on shore leave. Millions of years of peaceful isolation had not prepared it for the erratic and deeply unnerving behavior of human beings. We don’t know precisely the circumstances, or even year, attending the last moments of the last dodo, so we don’t know which arrived first a world that contained a Principia or one that had no dodos, but we do know that they happened at more or less the same time. You would be hard pressed, I would submit to find a better pairing of occurrences to illustrate the divine and felonious nature of the human being-a species of organism that is capable of unpicking the deepest secrets of the heavens while at the same time pounding into extinction, for no purpose at all, a creature that never did us any harm and wasn’t even remotely capable of understanding what we were doing to it as we did it. Indeed, dodos were so spectacularly short on insight it is reported, that if you wished to find all the dodos in a vicinity you had only to catch one and set it to squawking, and all the others would waddle along to see what was up. The indignities to the poor dodo didn’t end quite there. In 1755, some seventy years after the last dodo’s death, the director of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford decided that the institution’s stuffed dodo was becoming unpleasantly musty and ordered it tossed on a bonfire. This was a surprising decision as it was by this time the only dodo in existence, stuffed or otherwise. A passing employee, aghast tried to rescue the bird but could save only its head and part of one limb. As a result of this and other departures from common sense, we are not now entirely sure what a living dodo was like. We possess much less information than most people suppose-a handful of crude descriptions by "unscientific voyagers, three or four oil paintings, and a few scattered osseous fragments," in the somewhat aggrieved words of the nineteenth century naturalist H. E. Strickland. As Strickland wistfully observed, we have more physical evidence of some ancient sea monsters and lumbering saurapods than we do of a bird that lived into modern times and required nothing of us to survive except our absence. So what is known of the dodo is this: it lived on Mauritius, was plump but not tasty, and was the biggest-ever member of the pigeon family, though by quite what margin is unknown as its weight was never accurately recorded. Extrapolations from Strickland’s "osseous fragments" and the Ashmolean’s modest remains show that it was a little over two and a half feet tall and about the same distance from beak tip to backside. Being flightless, it nested on the ground, leaving its eggs and chicks tragically easy prey for pigs, dogs, and monkeys brought to the island by outsiders. It was probably extinct by 1683 and was most certainly gone by 1693. Beyond that we know almost nothing except of course that we will not see its like again. We know nothing of its reproductive habits and diet, where it ranged, what sounds it made in tranquility or alarm. We don’t possess a single dodo egg. From beginning to end our acquaintance with animate dodos lasted just seventy years.

Chinese officials needed something better suited for all that paperwork. They needed paper. According to official records, they got it in 105 AD, when a eunuch named Cai Lun, the emperor’s “officer in charge of tools and weapons,” ground up mulberry bark, rags, and fish nets; dipped a screen into the mash; then let the mash dry on the screen. People loved paper, and Cai became rich and famous. (For a while, anyway. Eventually, Cai was accused of falsifying some financial paperwork, so he took a bath, put on his fanciest clothes, drank poison, and died.)

One other named Kinsey pedophile was Rex King, an American serial child rapist also known as “Mr. Braun,” “Mr. Green,” and “Mr. X.” The “king” of child molesters is on record as raping at least eight hundred children, the youngest two months of age. Kinsey met King in about 1943 when King demonstrated his instant-orgasm ability for Kinsey and Pomeroy.84 Kinsey’s mentor, the famous sexologist, Robert Dickenson, MD, had “trained” King to keep child sex-abuse records.

What’s fascinating is that most guards in the Stanford Prison Experiment remained hesitant to apply ‘tough’ tactics at all, even under mounting pressure. Two-thirds refused to take part in the sadistic games. One-third treated the prisoners with kindness, to Zimbardo and his team’s frustration. One of the guards resigned the Sunday before the experiment started, saying he couldn’t go along with the instructions. Most of the subjects stuck it out because Zimbardo paid well. They earned $15 a day–equivalent to about $100 now–but didn’t get the money until afterwards. Guards and prisoners alike feared that if they didn’t play along in Zimbardo’s dramatic production, they wouldn’t get paid. But money was not enough incentive for one prisoner, who got so fed up after the first day that he wanted to quit. This was prisoner number 8612, twenty-two-year-old Douglas Korpi, who broke down on day two (‘I mean, Jesus Christ […] I just can’t take it anymore!’21). His breakdown would feature in all the documentaries and become the most famous recording from the whole Stanford Prison Experiment. A journalist looked him up in the summer of 2017.22 Korpi told him the breakdown had been faked–play-acted from start to finish. Not that he’d ever made a secret of this. In fact, he told several people after the experiment ended: Zimbardo, for example, who ignored him, and a documentary filmmaker, who edited it out of his movie.

Epstein also channeled funds from his famous friends like Bill Gates to the lab. In another email, the lab’s then–director of development and strategy, Peter Cohen, wrote, “This is a $2M gift from Bill Gates directed by Jeffrey Epstein. For gift recording purposes, we will not be mentioning Jeffrey’s name as the impetus for this gift.” (Gates’s rep denied Epstein had anything to do with the donation.) What did these men get from their associations with Epstein?

Speaking at the Chaos Communication Congress, an annual computer hacker conference held in Berlin, Germany, Tobias Engel, founder of Sternraute, and Karsten Nohl, chief scientist for Security Research Labs, explained that they could not only locate cell-phone callers anywhere in the world, they could also listen in on their phone conversations. And if they couldn’t listen in real time, they could record the encrypted calls and texts for later decryption.

From the late eighteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century an influx of dilletantes, academics, artists, writers, travellers and eccentrics descended unto the barren plains of Greece to pick over the marble bones of the past in the hope of finding some meaningful connection with Homer and Thucydides. The Levantine Lunatics, as Lord Byron termed them, many of them British, but also Germans, French and other Westerners, went on to paint, record and loot the past. Marbles, such as those made famous by Lord Elgin, pilfered or otherwise from classical sites, made their way into the country houses and museums of Europe. Byron, although critical of his contemporaries, was in many ways one of them, the difference being that he made a point of appreciating the here and now, the reality of the Oriental present as opposed to the classical past, and embracing the people who lived there even if they were regarded as debased specimens by his fellow travellers.

AMELIA EARHART began planning her round-the-world flight in 1936. She would not be the first to circumnavigate the globe—six male pilots had done so before her; however, if she was successful, her equatorial flight route would be in the record books as the longest: 29,000 miles (47,000 km). She never made it. Her achievement, instead, was to become the world’s most-famous missing person after she disappeared over the Pacific Ocean in 1937, with no trace of her aircraft found.

Once, while leaving a nightclub, a famous musician plucked twenty young girls off the dance floor and had them sit in a room next to his recording studio until five in the morning. He took their phones, made them sign NDAs, and put them all together, out of the way, to wait till he was done playing his new album for some friends. Then they would all party, he said. A guy I know was there, and as he was leaving, he saw the girls crowded together. He said the room looked like the DMV. I pictured the girls exhausted, with no internet or cameras or texts to distract themselves. A little drunk. I saw their push-up bras, their curls falling flat under the fluorescent lights. Why do you think they waited in that room, Steve? Maybe many years from now, maybe next week, those girls will suddenly feel upset at something and not know why. Where is this reaction coming from? They really won’t know, they won’t be able to place it, but it will be because of the way they let themselves sit in that room. The way they put on their makeup and dressed themselves up. They’ll feel small and blame no one but themselves. I so desperately craved men’s validation that I accepted it even when it came wrapped in disrespect. I was those girls in that room, waiting, trading my body and measuring my self-worth in a value system that revolves around men and their desire.

2:32. six hundred three thousand five hundred fifty. Add to this the underage and elderly men, the women of all ages, and the Levites, and the total number of Israelites must approach two million. It has been calculated that by these numbers, marching eight across, when the first Israelites reach Mount Sinai, half of them would still be in Egypt! The extraordinary size of this population is a famous old problem in traditional and critical biblical scholarship. The numbers appear far too high; but they do not appear to be entirely invented either, because what would be the motive for contriving them in all of this tribe-by-tribe detail for the first four chapters of Numbers? Some suggest that the word for "thousand" here means rather a "clan," but that is not correct (see the comment on Num 3:43). One possibility is that these are the numbers from the census that is attributed to King David (2 Samuel 24; see the comment in Exod 30:12). (There are just three censuses in the Tanak, the two censuses of Moses and the census of David.) Coming centuries later, in a period in which Israel is settled in the land, the numbers are more understandable in the Davidic era (though they are questionably high even for that period). In this scenario, the records here would have come from old documents among the archives which would have come to be mixed in with documents that were used as sources for the Torah.

First published in 2020 this book contains over 560 easily readable compact entries in systematic order augmented by an extensive bibliography, an alphabetical list of countries and locations of individuals final resting places (where known) and a day and month list in consecutive order of when an individual died. It details the deaths of individuals, who died too early and often in tragic circumstances, from film, literature, music, theatre, and television, and the achievements they left behind. In addition, some ordinary people who died in bizarre, freak, or strange circumstances are also included. It does not matter if they were famous or just celebrated by a few individuals, all the people in this book left behind family, friends and in some instances devotees who idolised them. Our heartfelt thoughts and sympathies go out to all those affected by each persons death. Whether you are concerned about yourself, a loved one, a friend, or a work colleague there are many helplines and support groups that offer confidential non-judgemental help, guidance and advice on mental health problems (such as anxiety, bereavement, depression, despair, distress, stress, substance abuse, suicidal feelings, and trauma). Support can be by phone, email, face-to-face counselling, courses, and self-help groups. Details can be found online or at your local health care organisation. There are many conspiracy theories, rumours, cover-ups, allegations, sensationalism, and myths about the cause of some individual’s deaths. Only the facts known at the time of writing are included in this book. Some important information is deliberately kept secret or undisclosed. Sometimes not until 20 or even 30 years later are full details of an accident or incident released or in some cases found during extensive research. Similarly, unsolved murders can be reinvestigated years later if new information becomes known. In some cases, 50 years on there are those who continue to investigate what they consider are alleged cover-ups. The first name in an entry is that by which a person was generally known. Where relevant their real name is included in brackets. Date of Death | In the entry detailing the date an individual died their age at the time of their death is recorded in brackets. Final Resting Place | Where known details of a persons final resting place are included. “Unknown” | Used when there is insufficient evidence available to the authorities to establish whether an individuals’ death was due to suicide, accident or caused by another. Statistics The following statistics are derived from the 579 individual “cause of death” entries included in this publication. The top five causes of death are, Heart attack/failure 88 (15.2%) Cancer 55 (9.5%) Fatal injuries (plane crash) 43 (7.4%) Fatal injuries (vehicle crash/collision) 39 (6.7%) Asphyxiation (Suicide) 23 (4%). extract from 'Untimely and Tragic Deaths of the Renowned, The Celebrated, The Iconic

For the time being, however, his bent was literary and religious rather than balletic. He loved, and what seventh grader doesn’t, the abstracter foxtrots and more metaphysical twists of a Dostoevsky, a Gide, a Mailer. He longed for the experience of some vivider pain than the mere daily hollowness knotted into his tight young belly, and no weekly stomp-and-holler of group therapy with other jejune eleven-year-olds was going to get him his stripes in the major leagues of suffering, crime, and resurrection. Only a bona-fide crime would do that, and of all the crimes available murder certainly carried the most prestige, as no less an authority than Loretta Couplard was ready to attest, Loretta Couplard being not only the director and co-owner of the Lowen School but the author, as well, of two nationally televised scripts, both about famous murders of the 20th Century. They’d even done a unit in social studies on the topic: A History of Crime in Urban America. The first of Loretta’s murders was a comedy involving Pauline Campbell, R.N., of Ann Arbor, Michigan, circa 1951, whose skull had been smashed by three drunken teenagers. They had meant to knock her unconscious so they could screw her, which was 1951 in a nutshell. The eighteen-year-olds, Bill Morey and Max Pell, got life; Dave Royal (Loretta’s hero) was a year younger and got off with twenty-two years. Her second murder was tragic in tone and consequently inspired more respect, though not among the critics, unfortunately. Possibly because her heroine, also a Pauline (Pauline Wichura), though more interesting and complicated had also been more famous in her own day and ever since. Which made the competition, one best-selling novel and a serious film biography, considerably stiffen Miss Wichura had been a welfare worker in Atlanta, Georgia, very much into environment and the population problem, this being the immediate pre-Regents period when anyone and everyone was legitimately starting to fret. Pauline decided to do something, viz., reduce the population herself and in the fairest way possible. So whenever any of the families she visited produced one child above the three she’d fixed, rather generously, as the upward limit, she found some unobtrusive way of thinning that family back to the preferred maximal size. Between 1989 and 1993 Pauline’s journals (Random House, 1994) record twenty-six murders, plus an additional fourteen failed attempts. In addition she had the highest welfare department record in the U.S. for abortions and sterilizations among the families whom she advised. “Which proves, I think,” Little Mister Kissy Lips had explained one day after school to his friend Jack, “that a murder doesn’t have to be of someone famous to be a form of idealism.” But of course idealism was only half the story: the other half was curiosity. And beyond idealism and curiosity there was probably even another half, the basic childhood need to grow up and kill someone.

For most of recorded Western history, there have been two competing views of the shape of history. The first is inherited from the Ancient Greeks, reaching its most famous form in Polybius (200 BC–118 BC): the idea that civilisations rise and fall in cycles like the seasons. The Anacyclosis was developed from Plato (428 BC–348 BC) and Aristotle (384 BC–322 BC) but finalised by Polybius in The Histories.[18] It held that there are three types of governmental constitutions—monarchy, aristocracy, democracy—which each degenerate into a tyrannous form before giving way to the next in sequence as pictured below.

Crow had few peers in the years before…before his transition. But of that latter—change—sufficient has already been recorded elsewhere. A one-time writer of macabre short stories, he occasionally chronicled his own adventures; at other times such work was undertaken by his lifelong friend Henri-Laurent de Marigny (son of Etienne, the world-famous New Orleans mystic), while others of his adventures were reported by mere acquaintances. All of the Titus Crow adventures, in short story or novelette form, are here collected in one volume. They are presented chronologically, as best as may be determined, and along with The Burrowers Beneath and the “post-transition” novels, they complete the Crow canon. In addition to the tales in which Titus Crow is a primary actor, there are three other closely related stories: The Mirror of Nitocris, the one and only personal chronicle of Crow’s apprentice and fellow traveller, de Marigny; Inception, in which Crow plays only a cameo role; and lastly The Black Recalled, in which nothing of Crow appears at all! …Or does it? Only one thing remains to be said. In the light of Titus Crow’s fascination and lifelong affair with matters of dark concern, much of this volume is naturally taken up with narratives of relentless horror. Therefore—it is not a book for the squeamish. You have been warned!

He spent the last four years of his life there engaged in practice of Zazen (meditation), painting, and joining tea ceremonies and poetry gatherings with the domain’s elite. Many of Musashi’s famous ink paintings were created during this period of intense personal reflection. By this time, Japan had become politically stable and war was now a distant memory. Musashi, being among the last generations who had personally experienced conflict, sensed that samurai were losing their sense of identity. He resolved to make a pilgrimage to Reigandō Cave43 in 1643 and started writing Gorin-no-sho there, hoping to preserve for posterity his Way, and what he believed to be the very essence of warriorship. A year later he fell ill, and the domain elders encouraged him to return to Kumamoto to be cared for. He continued working on his treatise for five or six months. On the twelfth day of the fifth month of 1645, he passed the not quite finished manuscript to his student Magonojō. He gave away all his worldly possessions, and then wrote Dokkōdō, a brief list of twenty-one precepts that summed up his principles shaped over a lifetime of austere training. He died on the nineteenth day of the fifth month of 1645. It is said that he had taken ill with “dysphagia,” which suggests perhaps that he had terminal stomach cancer. Some say he died of lung cancer. In Bukōden, it is recorded that Musashi was laid in his coffin dressed in full armor and with all his weapons. It evokes a powerful image of a man who had dedicated his whole life to understanding the mind of combat and strategy. As testament once again to the conspiracy theories surrounding Musashi’s life, I am reminded of a bizarre book titled Was Musashi Murdered and Other Questions of Japanese History by Fudo Yamato (Zensho Communications, 1987). In it the author postulates that Musashi’s death was actually assassination through poisoning. The author argues that Musashi and many of his contemporaries such as the priest Takuan, Hosokawa Tadaoki (Tadatoshi’s father) who was suspected of “Christian sympathies,” and even Yagyū Munenori were all viewed with suspicion by the shogunate. He goes so far as to hypothesize that the phrase found at the end of Musashi’s Combat Strategy in 35 Articles “Should there be any entries you are unsure of, please allow me to explain in person…” was actually interpreted by the government as a call for those with anti-shogunate sentiments to gather in order to hatch a seditious plot (p. 20). This is why, Fudo Yamato argues, Musashi and these other notable men of his age all died mysteriously at around the same time.

One other thing about the Trump team was just how incredibly wealthy it was. It was flush with billionaires, multi-millionaires – oh, and a smattering of generals. It was the richest group ever assembled. The joke was you either needed to have bread or braid to get into a Trump cabinet. Presumably the military men were the poorest of those who sat round the famous table, but it should be recorded that none of them was caught up in any of these scandals.

You're calling me shallow? So you know so much about this, huh? Which restaurants have you worked in?" He held his hands out. "Where are your scars?" I stiffened. I shouldn't have to pour out any of my pain for him to take me seriously. "I don't have to have worked in a restaurant to know what makes cooking really good," I snapped. He folded his arms like a sulky fourteen-year-old. "Then educate me." That clearly wasn't an invitation, but screw it. I stood up and planted my hands on the table. "Caring. I don't mean for the details. I mean caring for the person who's going to eat it. Giving them a little piece of what you love the most." I jabbed my finger at my plate. "All of these dishes, they're just about showing off." He rubbed his forearm hard, his face stony. "But I won Fire on High. I'm kind of a big deal, in case you didn't know. I think it's OK for me to show off." I held up a finger. "You won one competition," I said slowly, contempt sneaking into my voice. "This year. Can you name the person who won two years ago? Three? Unless you take this seriously, your book will gather dust in a remainder pile somewhere, a historical record of a leprechaun in a stupid bandanna who was famous for a hot second." The stone in his expression crumbled away. Bright green eyes flashed, hands clenched. His mouth opened and closed, and finally he hissed, "Who the fuck are you to tell me that? You're nobody. You can't even get your own name on a book. Who gives a shit what you think?" My voice shot high with anger. "I'm the woman who has to clean up your mess, you entitled, arrogant brat." It was quiet. Not the silence of people eating delicious food. It was post-atomic-bomb explosion quiet.

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Roger Bannister is famous as the first person to run a mile in under 4 minutes. But his world record only lasted 46 days. Once he showed it could be done, lots of others followed. Ten years later Jim Ryun ran a 3:59 mile as a high school junior.

I applied at Tower Records on Sunset Boulevard after my band broke up. I really wanted to work there because it involved the love of my life, music. It was also located on the world famous Sunset Strip, a place I dreamed of going to ever since I was a teenager in the 80's to become a rock star.

Paris Hilton came in the store occasionally and one day asked me for the song, "Bette Davis Eyes". I found it for her and she proceeded to the front to pay and as the cashier was ringing her up, she was putting on blush. I guess because there was a slew a paparazzi photographers in the parking lot waiting for her to leave the store. It was insane. What is she famous for anyway? I didn't get it then and I still don't get it now. I guess it doesn't matter what I think, I'm just a broke bum living in his van and she's a bazillionaire that people want to take a picture of, I guess she wins!

If this book were just about nostalgia, or highlights from my career, it would just reinforce a version of the story I never found particularly interesting. The trophies, the scoring titles, the Stanley Cups—that’s all in the history books now. But like that famous photo, or the statue outside the TD Garden, they don’t tell you much. They don’t speak to values or to motivation. They don’t explain inspiration, or add asterisks for the people who helped me (or pushed me). They record, in the simplest way, what happened on the ice, not how I got there, or who I met along the way and what I learned from them.

The daughter of renowned Admiral Garrick Versio of the Imperial Security Bureau and famous artist Zeehay Versio may be a traitor to the glorious Empire,” holojournalist Alton Kastle stated, with just the right amount of horror in his smooth voice. “Captain Iden Versio has been recorded as spouting lies about the Empire and inciting violence, denouncing the brave subjects of the Death Star battle station who lost their lives while she survived. This is not in keeping with the behavior of the highly decorated captain hitherto, but the words are damning. “She is slated for an immediate court-martial. Hero of the Empire Admiral Nasha Garvan will prosecute, while the specialized legal-analyst droid HM-12 will provide proper defense as required by Imperial Navy law.

Research from Brunel University shows that chess students who trained with coaches increased on average 168 points in their national ratings versus those who didn’t. Though long hours of deliberate practice are unavoidable in the cognitively complex arena of chess, the presence of a coach for mentorship gives players a clear advantage. Chess prodigy Joshua Waitzkin (the subject of the film Searching for Bobby Fischer) for example, accelerated his career when national chess master Bruce Pandolfini discovered him playing chess in Washington Square Park in New York as a boy. Pandolfini coached young Waitzkin one on one, and the boy won a slew of chess championships, setting a world record at an implausibly young age. Business research backs this up, too. Analysis shows that entrepreneurs who have mentors end up raising seven times as much capital for their businesses, and experience 3.5 times faster growth than those without mentors. And in fact, of the companies surveyed, few managed to scale a profitable business model without a mentor’s aid. Even Steve Jobs, the famously visionary and dictatorial founder of Apple, relied on mentors, such as former football coach and Intuit CEO Bill Campbell, to keep himself sharp. SO, DATA INDICATES THAT those who train with successful people who’ve “been there” tend to achieve success faster. The winning formula, it seems, is to seek out the world’s best and convince them to coach us. Except there’s one small wrinkle. That’s not quite true. We just held up Justin Bieber as an example of great, rapid-mentorship success. But since his rapid rise, he’s gotten into an increasing amount of trouble. Fights. DUIs. Resisting arrest. Drugs. At least one story about egging someone’s house. It appears that Bieber started unraveling nearly as quickly as he rocketed to Billboard number one. OK, first of all, Bieber’s young. He’s acting like the rock star he is. But his mentor, Usher, also got to Billboard number one at age 18, and he managed to dominate pop music for a decade without DUIs or egg-vandalism incidents. Could it be that Bieber missed something in the mentorship process? History, it turns out, is full of people who’ve been lucky enough to have amazing mentors and have stumbled anyway.

In other Celtic lands, destruction of the ancient bardic orders meant the loss of history and myth as well as of poetry. But not in Ireland -- at least, not entirely. There, the melding of the Christian and the pagan began early, during the great period of Celtic monasticism. Irish monks of that period provided most of our written records of Celtic mythology. In continental Europe, evidence of Celtic beliefs is found only in sculpture; in Britain, it is found only in a few verbal shards and the occasional inscribed statue; but in Ireland we find entire epics, whole chants and songs, lengthy narratives. In the curvilinear script for which they are justly famous, Irish monks wrote down the stories, poems, place-names, and other lore of their pagan ancestors before it disappeared in the mists of history.

Eric Liddell, the Olympic runner who was portrayed in the movie Chariots of Fire, famously said, "I feel like God made me for a purpose, but he also made me fast! And when I run I feel His pleasure." I started thinking that my ability to hike was a gift and a divine responsibility. The farther I walked, the weaker I felt, the more I relied on my faith, and the more I felt God's presence.

More daring, though, was Jung’s uninhibited interest in spiritualism, which by this time had become a controversial topic on both sides of the Atlantic, ever since 1848, when the Fox sisters of Hydesville, New York, discovered they could communicate with the spirit of a dead man. Soon after this, mediums, table turning, floating tambourines, ectoplasmic limbs, and a variety of other otherworldly phenomena became the focus of an international craze; the flood of disincarnate appearances led one investigator to speak of an “invasion of the spirit people.”7 Colorful characters like the Russian medium and mystic Helena Petrovna Blavatsky were involved, but also scientists and philosophers like William James, Oliver Lodge, William Crookes, and Frederick Myers. It is difficult for us today to realize that at the time, many of the most famous men and women in the world were involved in spiritualism, to one degree or another. Thomas Edison, for example, who joined Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society, hoped to be able to record spirits on his “Spirit Phone.” Yet, for all this, the reductionist thought that dominates the academic world today was already securely in place, and Jung was risking his future career by openly advocating the unbiased study of the paranormal.

Hillary served as a U.S. senator from New York but did not propose a single important piece of legislation; her record is literally a blank slate. Liberal blogger Markos Moulitsas admits that she “doesn’t have a single memorable policy or legislative accomplishment to her name.”2 Despite traveling millions of miles as secretary of state, Hillary negotiated no treaties, secured no agreements, prevented no conflicts—in short, she accomplished nothing. Lack of accomplishment is one thing; deceit is quite another. Everyone who has followed her career knows that Hillary is dishonest to the core, a “congenital liar” as columnist William Safire once put it. The writer Christopher Hitchens titled his book about the Clintons No One Left to Lie To. Even Hollywood mogul David Geffen, an avid progressive, said a few years ago of the Clintons, “Everybody in politics lies but they do it with such ease, it’s troubling.”3 She said her mother named her after the famed climber Sir Edmund Hillary, until someone pointed out that Hillary was born in 1947 and her “namesake” only became famous in 1953. On the campaign trail in 2008, Hillary said she had attempted as a young woman to have applied to join the Marines but they wouldn’t take her because she was a woman and wore glasses. In fact, Hillary at this stage of life detested the Marines and would never have wanted to join. She also said a senior professor at Harvard Law School discouraged her from going there by saying, “We don’t need any more women.”4 If this incident actually occurred one might expect Hillary to have identified the professor. Certainly it would be interesting to get his side of the story. But she never has, suggesting it’s another made-up episode.

There should be a Web site that records all the risks a person has taken, all the famous people they’ve met, all their gnarly trips and bad decisions. Like a Web site that ranks who’s lived the most.” “Isn’t that called Facebook?

For the record, sports cars have ridiculously small trunks. I know that for a fact, since I found myself stuffed into one.

Please welcome our hometown girl, a Winsor Cougar, a world-famous recording artist. Please welcome Chanin Anne.

During World War Two, BBC News was broadcast to Nazi-occupied Europe. Each news programme opened with a live broadcast of Big Ben tolling the hour – the magical sound of freedom. Ingenious German physicists found a way to determine the weather conditions in London based on tiny differences in the tone of the broadcast ding-dongs. This information offered invaluable help to the Luftwaffe. When the British Secret Service discovered this, they replaced the live broadcast with a set recording of the famous clock.