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I might not be the first person in history to touch both ends of the Bryson Line, but I was certainly the first to do it and know he had done it. So
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Bill Bryson |
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What an interesting and exciting thought. We may be only one of millions of advanced civilizations. Unfortunately, space being spacious, the average distance between any two of these civilizations is reckoned to be at least two hundred light-years, which is a great deal more than merely saying it makes it sound.
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Bill Bryson |
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Goodness knows what the world is coming to when park rangers carry service revolvers.
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Bill Bryson |
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So you've nearly done it, huh?" I said, a trifle inanely but just trying to make conversation. "Yes" said the girl. She said it slowly, as two syllables, as if it hadn't previously occurred to her. There was something serenely mindless in her manner. "Did you ever feel like giving up?" The girl thought for a moment. "No," she said simply. "Really?" I found this amazing. "Did you never think, 'Jeez, this is too much. I don't know that I wan..
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Bill Bryson |
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We were received with warmth and bustling kindliness by the proprietor....She called us "you boys" and acted as if she had been expecting us for days, possibly years. "Goodness me, just look at you boys!" she clucked in astonishment and delight. "You look as if you've been wrestling bears!" I suppose we must have looked a sight. Katz was liberally covered in blood from his fraught stumble through the woods, and there was tiredness all over ..
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Bill Bryson |
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In 1986, The Economist assembled a list of English terms that had become more or less universal. They were: airport, passport, hotel, telephone, bar, soda, cigarette, sport, golf, tennis, stop, O.K., weekend, jeans, know-how, sex appeal, and no problem.
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Bill Bryson |
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To make matters worse, somebody in our group was making the most dreadful silent farts. Fortunately, it was me, so I wasn't nearly as bothered as the others.
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Bill Bryson |
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Partly for this reason Sir Thomas Gresham had recently built the Royal Exchange, the most fabulous commercial building of its day. (Gresham is traditionally associated with Gresham's law--that bad money drives out good--which he may or may not actually have formulated.) Modeled on the Bourse in Antwerp, the Exchange contained 150 small shops, making it one of the world's first shopping malls, but its primary purpose and virtue was that for ..
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Bill Bryson |
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What a joy walking is. All the cares of life, all the hopeless, inept fuckwits that God has strewn along the Bill Bryson Highway of Life, suddenly seem far away and harmless, and the world becomes tranquil and welcoming and good.
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Bill Bryson |
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satisfyingly dizzying
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Bill Bryson |
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his facetious grace in writing," and much else."
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Bill Bryson |
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There is still quite a lot of life out there, but it is mostly very small. According to a wildlife census by an ecologist at the University of Illinois named V. E. Shelford, a typical ten-square-mile block of eastern American forest holds almost 300,000 mammals--220,000 mice and other small rodents, 63,500 squirrels and chipmunks, 470 deer, 30 foxes, and 5 black bears.
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Bill Bryson |
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BEFORE HE CAME INTO a lot of money in 1839, Richard Plantagenet Temple Nugent Brydges Chandos Grenville, second Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, led a largely uneventful life.
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Bill Bryson |
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The reason the Forest Service builds these roads, quite apart from the deep pleasure of doing noisy things in the woods with big yellow machines, is to allow private timber companies to get to previously inaccessible stands of trees. Of the Forest Service's 150 million acres of loggable land, about two-thirds is held in store for the future. The remaining one-third--49 million acres, or an area roughly twice the size of Ohio--is available f..
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Bill Bryson |
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his house at Stowe, in Buckinghamshire, had nine of the first flush toilets in England),
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Bill Bryson |
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Although nothing is known about the origin of the painting or where it was for much of the time before it came into the Chandos family in 1747, it has been said for a long time to be of William Shakespeare.
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Bill Bryson |
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In 1856, shortly before his death, Lord Ellesmere gave the painting to the new National Portrait Gallery in London as its founding work. As the gallery's first acquisition, it has a certain sentimental prestige, but almost at once its authenticity was doubted.
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Bill Bryson |
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Dr. Tarnya Cooper, curator of sixteenth-century portraits at the gallery, told me one day when I set off to find out what we could know and reasonably assume about the most venerated figure of the English language.
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Bill Bryson |
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Well, the earring tells us he was bohemian," she explained. "An earring on a man meant the same then as it does now--that the wearer was a little more fashionably racy than the average person. Drake and Raleigh were both painted with earrings. It was their way of announcing that they were of an adventurous disposition."
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Bill Bryson |
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It was painted by someone who knew how to prime a canvas, so he'd had some training, but it is quite workaday and not well lighted. The main thing is that if it is Shakespeare, it is the only portrait known that might have been done from life, so this would be what William Shakespeare really looked like--if it is William Shakespeare.
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Bill Bryson |
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If the Chandos portrait is not genuine, then we are left with two other possible likenesses to help us decide what William Shakespeare looked like. The first is the copperplate engraving that appeared as the frontispiece of the collected works of Shakespeare in 1623--the famous First Folio.
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Bill Bryson |
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It has sometimes been said that prudery reached such a height in the nineteenth century that people took to dressing their piano legs in little skirts lest they rouse anyone to untimely passion. Thomas
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Bill Bryson |
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I had no idea that the Scottish so loathed the English that their favorite team in the world is whichever one is presently playing England.
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Bill Bryson |
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At a minimum the name should puzzle foreigners--this is a basic requirement of most British institutions--and ideally it should excite long and inconclusive debate, defy all logical explanation, and evoke images that border on the surreal. Among
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Bill Bryson |
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An expedition was organized at once, but despite the most scrupulous searching no one could find the Cape Arid colony. Subsequent searches came up equally empty-handed. Almost half a century later, when word got out that a team of American scientists was planning to search for the ant, almost certainly with the kind of high-tech gadgetry that would make the Australians look amateurish and underorganized, government scientists in Canberra de..
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Bill Bryson |
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HAD TO GO to America for a while to give some talks. Going to America always does me good. It's where I'm from, after all. There's baseball on the TV, people are friendly and upbeat, they don't obsess about the weather except when there is weather worth obsessing about, you can have all the ice cubes you want. Above all, visiting America gives me perspective. Consider
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Bill Bryson |
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At the turn of the century, New York had more speakers of German than anywhere in the world except Vienna and Berlin, more Irish than anywhere but Dublin, more Russians than in Kiev, more Italians than in Milan or Naples. In 1890 the United States had 800 German newspapers and as late as the outbreak of World War I Baltimore alone had four elementary schools teaching in German only.
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Bill Bryson |
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He had experiences as rich and memorable as any young man has ever enjoyed, and was moved by none of them.
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Bill Bryson |
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which state, very baldly, that a thing moves in the direction in which it is pushed; that it will keep moving in a straight line until some other force acts to slow or deflect it; and that every action has an opposite and equal reaction)
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Bill Bryson |
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I took a big draft of my beer, warmed by my reminiscences, and quietly delighted at the thought that my schooldays were forever behind me, that never again for as long as I lived would I have to bevel an edge or elucidate the principles of the Volstead Act in not less than 250 words or give even a mouse-sized shit about which far-flung countries produce jute and what they do with it. It is a thought that never fails to cheer me. In
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Bill Bryson |
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All that is missing to connect her with Shakespeare is anything to connect her with Shakespeare.
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Bill Bryson |
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get a peek at them was seldom matched by more engaging qualities, like respect. "I'm afraid we always used to adopt--let's say a patronizing attitude toward her," Crick later recalled. Two of these men were from a competing institution and the third was more or less openly siding with them. It should hardly come as a surprise that she kept her results locked away. That Wilkins and Franklin did not get along was a fact that Watson and Crick ..
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Bill Bryson |
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The New York Times, with what was threatening to become a customary lack of prescience, forecast that it would never be a serious competitor for radio because "people must sit and keep their eyes glued on a screen; the average American family hasn't time for it."34"
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Bill Bryson |
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Simeon Potter notes that when James II first saw St. Paul's Cathedral he called it amusing, awful, and artificial, and meant that it was pleasing to look at, deserving of awe, and full of skillful artifice.
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Bill Bryson |
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But Welsh spellings are as nothing compared with Irish Gaelic, a language in which spelling and pronunciation give the impression of having been devised by separate committees, meeting in separate rooms, while implacably divided over some deep semantic issue. Try pronouncing geimhreadh, Gaelic for "winter," and you will probably come up with something like "gem-reed-uh." It is in fact "gyeeryee." Beaudhchais ("thank you") is "bekkas" and O ..
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Bill Bryson |
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The Seaman's Practice,
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Bill Bryson |
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Our carelessness is all the more alarming since the discovery that many other ailments may be bacterial in origin. The process of discovery began in 1983 when Barry Marshall, a doctor in Perth, Western Australia, found that many stomach cancers and most stomach ulcers are caused by a bacterium called Helicobacter pylori.
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Bill Bryson |
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There is simply no compelling reason we know of to explain why human brains got large,' says Tattersall. Huge brains are demanding organs: they make up only 2 per cent of the body's mass, but devour 20 per cent of its energy42. They are also comparatively picky in what they use as fuel. If you never ate another morsel of fat, your brain would not complain because it won't touch the stuff. It wants glucose instead, and lots of it, even if it..
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Bill Bryson |
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acute, chronic. These two are sometimes confused, which is a little odd as their meanings are sharply opposed. Chronic pertains to lingering conditions, ones that are not easily overcome. Acute refers to those that come to a sudden crisis and require immediate attention. People in the Third World may suffer from a chronic shortage of food. In a bad year, their plight may become acute.
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Bill Bryson |
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Well, one school of thought says it was actually cool then because the sun was much weaker.' (I later learned that biologists, when they are feeling jocose, refer to this as 'the Chinese restaurant problem' - because we had a dim sun.)
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Bill Bryson |
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There is energy of all sorts flowing through our world; it is not hard to imagine new ways in which that energy can do the work of humanity, new ways to align our needs and the planet's behaviours.
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Bill Bryson |
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For a time it was highly fashionable to build a hermitage and install in it a live-in hermit. At Painshill in Surrey, one man signed a contract to live seven years in picturesque seclusion, observing a monastic silence, for PS100 a year, but was fired after just three weeks when he was spotted drinking in the local pub. An estate owner in Lancashire promised PS50 a year for life to anyone who would pass seven years in an underground dwellin..
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Bill Bryson |
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Your bed alone, if it is averagely clean, averagely old, averagely dimensioned, and turned averagely often (which is to say almost never) is likely to be home to some two million tiny bed mites, too small to be seen with the naked eye but unquestionably there. It has been calculated that if your pillow is six years old (which is the average age for a pillow), one-tenth of its weight will be made up of sloughed skin, living and dead mites, a..
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Bill Bryson |
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cosmological constant to his theory, at the Lowell Observatory in
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Bill Bryson |