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894f0a5
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Then there would be many long minutes of commercials, mostly for products to keep one's bowels sleek, followed by filmed reports on regional murders, house fires, light airplane crashes, multiple car pile-ups on the Boulder Highway and other bits of local carnage, always with film of mangled vehicles, charred houses, bodies under blankets, and a group of children standing on the fringes, waving happily at the cameras and saying hi to their ..
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Bill Bryson |
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87c6c69
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It was accepted wisdom almost everywhere in the nineteenth century that the poor were poor because they were born to be. Although a few impoverished people might generously be described as undeserving, most were by nature "improvident, reckless and intemperate, and with habitual avidity for sensual gratification," as one government report crisply summarized it. Even Friedrich Engels, a far more sympathetic observer than most, could write in..
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Bill Bryson |
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1918822
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It was always Christmas at my grandparents' house, or Thanksgiving, or the Fourth of July, or somebody's birthday. There was always happiness there.
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Bill Bryson |
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0922c62
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A few months earlier, when a state official named Bud Dwyer was similarly accused of corruption, he called a press conference, pulled out a gun and, as cameras rolled, blew his brains out. This led to an excellent local joke.
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Bill Bryson |
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515c533
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Even a long human life adds up to only about 650,000 hours. And when that modest milestone flashes into view, or at some other point thereabouts, for reasons unknown your atoms will close you down, then silently disassemble and go off to be other things. And that's it for you.
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Bill Bryson |
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25c7e67
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Coming from a country where no one seemed to think it particularly disgraceful that a child with a brain tumour could be sent home to die because his father didn't have the wherewithal to pay a surgeon, or where an insurance company could be permitted by a state insurance commissioner to cancel the policies of its 14,000 sickest patients because it wasn't having a very good year (as happened in California in 1989), it seemed to me admirable..
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Bill Bryson |
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1010400
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Ruskin never escaped his prudish ways or gave any indication of desiring to. After the death of J. M. W. Turner, in 1851, Ruskin was given the job of going through the works left to the nation by the great artist and found several watercolors of a cheerfully erotic nature. Horrified, Ruskin decided that they could only have been drawn "under a certain condition of insanity," and for the good of the nation destroyed almost all of them, robbi..
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Bill Bryson |
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24b5d2a
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In one well-known case, a woman named Martha Robinson was for years beaten and physically misused by a cruel and unstable husband. Eventually, he infected her with gonorrhea and then poisoned her almost to the point of death by slipping antivenereal powders into her food without her knowledge. Her health and spirit broken, she sued for divorce. The judge listened carefully to the arguments, then dismissed the case and sent Mrs. Robinson hom..
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Bill Bryson |
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1b30c71
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The waitress, seeing how much I had left, asked me if I wanted a doggie bag. 'No thank you,' I said through a thin smile, 'I don't believe I could find a dog that would eat it.
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Bill Bryson |
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ff9c67f
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So Whitney's gin not only helped make many people rich on both sides of the Atlantic but also reinvigorated slavery, turned child labor into a necessity, and paved the way for the American Civil War. Perhaps at no other time in history has someone with a simple, well-meaning invention generated more general prosperity, personal disappointment, and inadvertent suffering than Eli Whitney with his gin. That is quite a lot of consequence for a ..
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Bill Bryson |
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6bd1e27
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That a word or phrase hasn't been recorded tells us only that it hasn't been recorded, not that it hasn't existed. The
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Bill Bryson |
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bba146a
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the starling, which was brought to America by one Eugene Schieffelin, a wealthy German emigrant who had the odd, and in the case of starlings regrettable, idea that he should introduce to the American landscape all the birds mentioned in the writings of Shakespeare.
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Bill Bryson |
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037c08e
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One planet, one experiment15.' If this book has a lesson, it is that we are awfully lucky to be here - and by 'we' I mean every living thing. To attain any kind of life at all in this universe of ours appears to be quite an achievement. As humans we are doubly lucky, of course. We enjoy not only the privilege of existence, but also the singular ability to appreciate it and even, in a multitude of ways, to make it better. It is a trick we ha..
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Bill Bryson |
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f1f5739
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there any evidence that Henry ever uttered the other famous remark attributed to him: "I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death." Indeed, there is no evidence that Henry ever said anything of substance or found space in his head for a single original thought. He"
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Bill Bryson |
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e00e3a6
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He had been born Thomas Pain, though upon arrival in America he whimsically changed the spelling to Paine, and he was about as unlikely a figure to change the course of history as you could imagine. A tumbledown drunk, coarse of manner, blotchy-faced and almost wholly lacking in acquaintance with the virtues of soap and water--"so neglectful in his person that he is generally the most abominably dirty being upon the face of the earth," in t..
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Bill Bryson |
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70fe299
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For reasons that are still poorly understood, at depths beyond about 30 metres nitrogen becomes a powerful intoxicant. Under its influence divers had been known to offer their air hoses to passing fish or to decide to try to have a smoke break. It
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Bill Bryson |
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a645620
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Until 1916, New Hampshire had a stream called the Quohquinapassakessamanagnog, but then the cheerless bureaucrats at the Board on Geographic Names in Washington, D.C., arbitrarily changed it to Beaver Creek. In
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Bill Bryson |
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4b8dbc1
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The price paid was PS700 - which historians are always obliged to qualify with the phrase 'a considerable amount of money in those days'. However, no price is relevant when the prize is priceless.
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Bill Bryson |
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9ec919a
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was headed for Nebraska. Now there's a sentence you don't want to have to say too often if you can possibly help it. Nebraska must be the most unexciting of all the states. Compared with it, Iowa is paradise. Iowa at least is fertile and green and has a hill. Nebraska is like a 75,000-square-mile bare patch.
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Bill Bryson |
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193d917
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Nor, strictly speaking, is it correct to call them Puritans. They were Separatists, so called because they had left the Church of England. Puritans were those who remained in the Anglican Church but wished to purify it. They wouldn't arrive in America for another decade,
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Bill Bryson |
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4eb421c
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camouflage (rather oddly from camouflet, meaning "to blow smoke up someone's nose," a pastime that appears on the linguistic evidence to be specific to the French),"
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Bill Bryson |
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ec07b2d
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The exhibition for which it was conceived was the dream of a civil servant named Henry Cole, whose other principal claim to history's attention is as the inventor of the Christmas card
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Bill Bryson |
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ae8e04f
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I drove on into Des Moines and it looked very large and handsome in the afternoon sunshine. The golden dome of the state capitol building gleamed. Every yard was dark with trees. People were out cutting the grass or riding bikes. I could see why strangers came in off the interstate looking for hamburgers and gasoline and stayed forever. There was just something about it that looked friendly and decent and nice. I could live here, I thought,..
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Bill Bryson |
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ccd4309
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Coming in to land at the recently opened Boston Airport (on the site of the present Logan Airport), he raced across Boston Harbor just above the water line, then at the last possible instant shot straight up into the sky to the point where it looked as if his plane must surely stall, then nonchalantly rolled to one side in a graceful arc and made a pinpoint landing, coming to a halt just before the doors of the hangar set aside for his arri..
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Bill Bryson |
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331e065
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Chicago was to corruption what Pittsburgh was to steel or Hollywood to motion pictures. It refined and cultivated it, and embraced it without embarrassment.
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Bill Bryson |
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I bought a morning newspaper and found my way into a cafe. It always amazes me how seldom visitors bother with local papers. Personally I can think of nothing more exciting--certainly nothing you could do in a public place with a cup of coffee--than to read newspapers from a part of the world you know almost nothing about.
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Bill Bryson |
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63bb564
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For much the same reason, early owners discovered that if they charged odd amounts like 49 cents or 99 cents the cashier would very probably have to open the drawer to extract a penny change, obviating the possibility of the dreaded unrecorded transaction. Only later did it dawn on merchants that $1.99 had the odd subliminal quality of seeming markedly cheaper than $2.)
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Bill Bryson |
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894bc9d
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the Pilgrims didn't have to learn Algonquian for the happy and convenient reason that Samoset and Squanto spoke English--Samoset only a little, but Squanto with total assurance (and some Spanish into the bargain).
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Bill Bryson |
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2727d3c
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But Pauline would not take advice, She lit a match, it was so nice! It crackled so, it burned so clear,-- Exactly like the picture here She jumped for joy and ran about, And was too pleased to put it out. Now see! Oh see! What a dreadful thing The fire has caught her apron-string; Her apron burns, her arms, her hair; She burns all over, everywhere.
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Bill Bryson |
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f9a0b75
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And there you have the difference between the Midwest and the West, ladies and gentlemen. People in the Midwest are nice.
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Bill Bryson |
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4cb70d8
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Columbus never found Antilla or anything else he was looking for. His epochal voyage of 1492 was almost the last thing--indeed almost the only thing--that went right in his life. Within eight years, he would find himself summarily relieved of his post as Admiral of the Ocean Sea, returned to Spain in chains, and allowed to sink into such profound obscurity that we don't know for sure where he is buried. To achieve such a precipitous fall in..
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Bill Bryson |
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Indeed, it has been suggested that there isn't a single bit of any of us - not so much as a stray molecule - that was part of us nine years ago.
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Bill Bryson |
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In fact, if you are in a partnership now with someone from your own race and country, the chances are excellent that you are at some level related.
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Bill Bryson |
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If talking pictures could be said to have a father, it was Lee De Forest, a brilliant but erratic inventor of electrical devices of all types. (He had 216 patents.) In 1907, while searching for ways to boost telephone signals, De Forest invented something called the thermionic triode detector. De Forest's patent described it as "a System for Amplifying Feeble Electric Currents" and it would play a pivotal role in the development of broadcas..
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Bill Bryson |
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c61b3c8
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Filming was done outside San Antonio, Texas. The scale of the production was vast and complex. Whole battlefields were scrupulously re-created on the plains of Texas. Wellman deployed as many as five thousand extras and sixty airplanes in some scenes--an enormous logistical exercise. The army sent its best aviators from Selfridge Field in Michigan--the very men with whom Lindbergh had just flown to Ottawa--and stunt fliers were used for the..
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Bill Bryson |
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Bow was originally billed as the "Brooklyn Bonfire," then as the "Hottest Jazz Baby in Films," but in 1927 she became, and would forevermore remain, the "It Girl." "It" was first a two-part article and then a novel by a flame-haired English novelist named Elinor Glyn, who was known for writing juicy romances in which the main characters did a lot of undulating ("she undulated round and all over him, twined about him like a serpent") and for..
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Bill Bryson |
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08b9afc
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a basic unit of measure in chemistry, which was named for Avogadro long after his death. It is the number of molecules found in 2.016 grams of hydrogen gas (or an equal volume of any other gas). Its value is placed at 6.0221367 x 1023, which is an enormously large number. Chemistry students have long amused themselves by computing just how large a number it is, so I can report that it is equivalent to the number of popcorn kernels needed to..
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Bill Bryson |
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ede65ed
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Can we "belong anywhere?" Should we try?"
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Bill Bryson |
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Once there were many more in like vein--e.g., tuifu ("the ultimate in fuckups), tarfu ("things are really fucked up"), fubar ("fucked up beyond all recognition"), and fubid ("fuck you, buddy, I'm detached")."
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Bill Bryson |
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1e12ecb
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There are really only two ways to get hit on the head by a parking barrier. One is to stand underneath a raised barrier and purposely allow it to fall on you. That is the easy way, obviously. The other method--and this is where a little diminished mental capacity can go a long way--is to forget the barrier you have just seen rise, step into the space it has vacated and stand with lips pursed while considering your next move, and then be tak..
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Bill Bryson |
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200cb17
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The positive side of thinking you are about to die is that it does make you glad of the little life that is left to you.
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Bill Bryson |
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66a184d
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if we wished to find a modern-day model for British and American speech of the late eighteenth century, we could probably do no better than Yosemite Sam.
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Bill Bryson |
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34cd817
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In six years, Hoover circled the globe five times. He lived through the Boxer Rebellion in China, hacked through the jungles of Borneo, rode camels across the red emptiness of Western Australia, rubbed shoulders with Wyatt Earp and Jack London in a Klondike saloon, camped beside the Great Pyramids of Egypt. He had experiences as rich and memorable as any young man has ever enjoyed, and was moved by none of them. In
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Bill Bryson |
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662a4c3
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The country accepted it not only willingly, but almost absent-mindedly.
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Bill Bryson |