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9c103a3
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That is the great thing about being a foreigner--that you get to spend your life with a whole new set of cultural attachments in addition to the ones you inherited at birth.
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Bill Bryson |
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527f69e
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Bobcats--admittedly much smaller creatures than mountain lions--are known to exist in considerable numbers and yet are so shy and furtive that you would never guess their existence. Many
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Bill Bryson |
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6e7edd1
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I also learned that about ten thousand containers fall off ships each year. Sometimes after a period of years the container doors pop open and the contents float to the surface.
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Bill Bryson |
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4d9059d
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Mispronouncing "buoy." The thing that floats in a navigation channel is not a "boo-ee." It's a "boy." Think about it. Would you call something that floats "boo-ee-ant"? Also, in a similar vein, pronouncing Brett Favre's last name as if the "r" comes before the "v." It doesn't, so stop it. Hotel"
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Bill Bryson |
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b506e40
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What if we are all getting stupid at more or less the same rate and we don't realize it because we are all declining together? You might argue that we'd see a general fall in IQ scores, but what if it's not the kind of deterioration that shows up in IQ tests? What if it were reflected in just, say, poor judgment or diminished taste? We
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Bill Bryson |
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67d2e40
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Twice I flushed grouse, always a terrifying experience: an instantaneous explosion from the undergrowth at your feet, like balled socks fired from a gun, followed by drifting feathers and a lingering residue of fussy, bitching noise. I
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Bill Bryson |
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f2b7027
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The disputes are entertainingly surveyed in Charles Elliott's The Potting-Shed Papers.
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Bill Bryson |
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You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight," he would say. "I saw a car with the license plate ARW 357. Can you imagine? Of all the millions of license plates in the state, what was the chance that I would see that particular one tonight? Amazing!"His point, of course, was that it is easy to make any banal situation seem extraordinary if you treat it as fateful. So it is possible that the events and conditions that led to the r..
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Bill Bryson |
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a9448cf
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Nothing--and I mean really, absolutely nothing--is more extraordinary in Britain than the beauty of the countryside. Nowhere in the world is there a landscape that has been more intensively utilized--more mined, farmed, quarried, covered with cities and clanging factories, threaded with motorways and railroad tracks--and yet remains so comprehensively and reliably lovely over most of its extent. It is the happiest accident in history. In te..
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Bill Bryson |
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f578ddb
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It took Read some twenty years of searching to nail the matter down, but thanks to his efforts we now know that OK first appeared in print in the Boston Morning Post on 23 March 1839, as a jocular abbreviation for 'Oll Korrect'. At
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Bill Bryson |
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7bc5776
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Nothing - and I mean, really, absolutely nothing - is more extraordinary in Britain than the beauty of the countryside. Nowhere in the world is there a landscape that has been more intensively utilized - more mined, farmed, quarried, covered with cities and clanging factories, threaded with motorways and railway lines - and yet remains so comprehensively and reliably lovely over most of its extent. It is the happiest accident in history. In..
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Bill Bryson |
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bc0cb0b
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Television didn't attract much public notice until Bell Telephone demonstrated its new system in New York in April 1927. Shown on a screen two inches high by three inches wide--roughly the dimensions of a modern credit card--the broadcast consisted of a brief speech of encouragement from Washington by Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, followed by some entertainment from the AT&T studio in Whippany, New Jersey--a vaudeville comic who fir..
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Bill Bryson |
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c9df8b6
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Furthermore, they must learn not to make the elementary mistake of assuming that because a word contains a negative suffix or prefix it is necessarily a negative word. In-, for instance, almost always implies negation but not with invaluable, while -less is equally negative, as a rule, but not with priceless.
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Bill Bryson |
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b370d8a
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there are three things you just can't do in life. You can't beat the phone company, you can't make a waiter see you until he's ready to see you, and you can't go home again.
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Bill Bryson |
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f7b06d5
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Advertising was already a well-established phenomenon by the turn of the twentieth century. Newspapers had begun carrying ads as far back as the early 1700s, and magazines soon followed. (Benjamin Franklin has the distinction of having run the first magazine ad, seeking the whereabouts of a runaway slave, in 1741.)6
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Bill Bryson |
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Queen Elizabeth, in a much-cited quote, faithfully bathed once a month "whether she needs it or no."
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Bill Bryson |
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Extraordinarily, Heaviside didn't bother to patent his invention. The patent was filed instead by AT&T, which had nothing to do with the discovery but nonetheless went on to become one of the largest corporations in the world thanks in large part to its unrivaled lead in long-distance telephony.
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Bill Bryson |
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The upshot of all this is that we live in a universe whose age we can't quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances we don't altogether know, filled with matter we can't identify, operating in conformance with physical laws whose properties we don't truly understand.
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Bill Bryson |
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9317077
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In the first few days, I failed to distinguish between collar and color, khaki and car key, letters and lettuce, bed and bared, karma and calmer. Needing
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Bill Bryson |
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6326a29
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It is a challenge to believe that there was ever a time that airline food was exciting, when stewardesses were happy to see you, when flying was such an occasion that you wore your finest clothes. I
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Bill Bryson |
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Water is strange stuff. It is formless and transparent, and yet we long to be beside it. It has no taste and yet we love the taste of it. We will travel great distances and pay small fortunes to see it in sunshine. And even though we know it is dangerous and drowns tens of thousands of people every year, we can't wait to frolic in it.
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Bill Bryson |
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12e1310
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I didn't ask for twenty quarter-pound cheeseburgers, I asked for four quarter-pound cheeseburgers five times." "Same thing," he said. "It's not the same thing at all. You can't be this stupid." Two"
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Bill Bryson |
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Does anyone really need 50 percent more of plenty? The
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Bill Bryson |
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It turned out that under the western United States there was a huge cauldron of magma, a colossal volcanic hot spot, which erupted cataclysmically every 600,000 years or so. The last such eruption was just over 600,000 years ago. The hot spot is still there. These days we call it Yellowstone National Park. We
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Bill Bryson |
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Or look at the old money, with its florins and half crowns and thrupenny bits, and imagine what it was like in the days when people had to add tuppence ha'penny to one shilling four nibblings or whatever. With
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Bill Bryson |
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Thanks to years of travel at other people's expense, I have a lifetime supply of soaps, small bottles of shampoo, aromatic lotions, sewing kits, and shoe mitts. I have over eleven hundred shower caps and require now only a reason to use them. I am so well prepared financially that I have money in a range
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Bill Bryson |
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But compared with much of the rest of the world, Europe is a beacon of enlightenment. Among the many amazing and depressing facts in his book, Roberts gives a list of all the aquatic life incidentally killed--the bycatch, as it is known--by a fishing boat in the Pacific Ocean in the process of legally catching 211 mahi-mahi. Among the aquatic animals hauled aboard and tossed back dead after a single sweep were: 488 turtles 455 stingrays and..
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Bill Bryson |
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f0a0b18
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Once, aeons ago, the Appalachians were of a scale and majesty to rival the Himalayas--piercing, snow-peaked, pushing breathtakingly through the clouds to heights of four miles or more. New Hampshire's Mount Washington is still an imposing presence, but the stony mass that rises from the New England woods today represents, at most, the stubby bottom one-third of what was ten million years ago. That the Appalachian Mountains present so much m..
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Bill Bryson |
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a73d9d5
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Then much later--about four or five years ago--I was on a long flight across the Pacific, staring idly out the window at moonlit ocean, when it occurred to me with a certain uncomfortable forcefulness that I didn't know the first thing about the only planet I was ever going to live on. I had no idea, for example, why the oceans were salty but the Great Lakes weren't. Didn't have the faintest idea. I didn't know if the oceans were growing mo..
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Bill Bryson |
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Among the genetic gifts the Neanderthals passed on to us, it seems, is red hair, bless them.
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Bill Bryson |
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They were most peculiar. And they eat pizza pie." "For breakfast?" "No, for lunch and dinner. But it's not a pie at all, it's a kind of bread with tomato sauce and cheese on it." "Sounds dreadful."
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Bill Bryson |
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Moda chasto kazhetsia chem-to sovershenno neponiatnym. Esli rassmotret' bol'shinstvo istoricheskikh periodov, mozhet pokazat'sia, chto tsel'iu mody bylo sdelat' vneshnost' kak mozhno bolee smeshnoi; chem neudobnei, tem luchshe. Esli kto-to nadeval nepraktichnye veshchi, on tem samym pokazyval, chto emu net neobkhodimosti rabotat' fizicheski.
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Bill Bryson |
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Consider that in Britain the Royal Mail delivers the post, not the mail, while in America the Postal Service delivers the mail, not the post. These
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Bill Bryson |
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48310a5
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the atoms that so liberally and congenially flock together to form living things on Earth are exactly the same atoms that decline to do it elsewhere.
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Bill Bryson |
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transits of Venus, as they are known, are an irregular occurrence. They come in pairs eight years apart, but then are absent for a century or more,
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Bill Bryson |
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Mrs. Mendeleyev hitchhiked with young Dmitri four thousand miles to St. Petersburg--that's equivalent to travelling from London to Equatorial Guinea--and deposited him at the Institute of Pedagogy.
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Bill Bryson |
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Mendeleyev was said to have modelled the table on the card game solitaire.
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Bill Bryson |
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1 per cent of the dancing static you see is accounted for by this ancient remnant of the Big Bang.
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Bill Bryson |
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It is remarkable to think that we have had electric lights and telephones for about as long as we have known that germs kill people.
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Bill Bryson |
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For almost four billion years life had dawdled along without any detectable ambitions in the direction of complexity, and then suddenly, in the space of just five or ten million years, it had created all the basic body designs still in use today.
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Bill Bryson |
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he sees our lineal success as a fortunate fluke: "Wind back the tape of life to the early days of the Burgess Shale; let it play again from an identical starting point, and the chance becomes vanishingly small that anything like human intelligence would grace the replay." Gould"
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Bill Bryson |
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They are, reluctantly or enthusiastically, accepting the idea that humans are as much an accident of nature as a product of orderly development." But"
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Bill Bryson |
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With their radio telescopes they can capture wisps of radiation so preposterously faint that the total amount of energy collected from outside the solar system by all of them together since collecting began (in 1951) is 'less than the energy of a single snowflake striking the ground'2, in the words of Carl Sagan. In
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Bill Bryson |
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The point to remember, of course, when considering the universe at large is that we don't actually know what is in our own solar system. Now,
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Bill Bryson |