January 2011
45 posts
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“The man who was just released from the mental institution, he wants to give you a drug overdose, then stick a metal rod into your head and put you naked into a rusty tank of water.”
“No, I don’t want to. I’d rather not. I’m just saying I can.”
h: if my ovaries had a face they'd look like this >=O
m: if your ovaries had a face that would be terrifying
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One minute he was happily playing games with his sister in their parents’ home. The next, the 18-month-old boy had plunged 80ft from the seventh-floor apartment.
But astonishingly, the toddler landed with barely a scratch – after bouncing off a cafe awning and into the arms of a passing doctor.
Before his extraordinary fall, the boy had apparently climbed through a window and on to a...
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“I don’t want the world to give me anything for my books, except money to save me...”
– George Eliot
Last month, 43 whimsical snippets of text like the above passage were stenciled onto city streets, tracing the smoldering saga of a man with a yen for a woman who only has eyes for — the moon. Depending upon which paths readers choose to follow, one can enjoy 16 different story combinations, four endings, and hike nearly four miles up and down San Francisco’s hills and flats.
The...
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In 1902, a six-man expedition made up of Swiss, Austrians, and Britons made the first serious summit attempt on K2. Among them was the English climber and occultist Aleister Crowley, who a few years later would assume the name “666,”and whose wild-haired antics earned him the title “Wickedest Man in the World” in the British press and a place years after his death on the cover of the Beatles’...
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“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.… We look for the sermon in the...”
– Joan Didion, The White Album
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Brian Wilson seemed to be filled with secret fear. One night at the house, it began to surface. Marilyn sat nervously painting her fingernails as Brian stalked up and down, his face tight and his eyes small and red.
“What’s the matter, Brian? You’re really strung out,” a friend asked.
“Yeah, I’m really strung out. Look, I mean I really feel strange. A...
Wild crows can recognise individual human faces and hold a grudge for years against people who have treated them badly. This ability – which may also exist in other wild animals – highlights how carefully some animals monitor the humans with whom they share living space.
Field biologists have observed that crows seem to recognise them, and a few researchers have even gone to the extreme of...
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“In truth, he was devastated. When Catherine and Linda visited him at the house, he cried as he told them how sure he felt that “River Deep, Mountain High” would be a big hit. “It was the only time I ever saw him really depressed,” Catherine recalls. “He said, ‘I was sure people would love it; I just don’t understand it.’ More than upset, he...
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The momentous event happened at 7.15 a.m. local time on the last day of June 1908. At that precise moment, an object brighter than the morning sun ripped through the atmosphere over Siberia. A trainload of passengers on the trans-Siberian railway stared in horror at the towering pillar of flame roared through the clear blue skies at a phenomenal velocity of around one mile per second. The sonic...
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