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FOR SOME TIME, I have believed that everyone should be allowed to have, say, ten things that they dislike without having to justify or explain to anyone why they don't like them. Reflex loathings, I call them. Mine are: Power walkers. Those vibrating things restaurants give you to let you know when a table is ready. Television programs in which people bid on the contents of locked garages. All pigeons everywhere, at all times. Lawyers, too...
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Bill Bryson |
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2e115bf
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So why, you are bound to ask at some point in your life, do microbes so often want to hurt us? What possible satisfaction could there be to a microbe in having us grow feverish or chilled, or disfigured with sores, or above all deceased? A dead host, after all, is hardly going to provide long-term hospitality.
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Bill Bryson |
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9fb888a
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Even Scientific American entered the fray with an article proposing that the person portrayed in the famous Martin Droeshout engraving might actually be--I weep to say it--Elizabeth I.
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Bill Bryson |
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8fe0677
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Survival on Earth is a surprisingly tricky business. Of the billions and billions of species of living thing that have existed since the dawn of time, most--99.99 percent--are no longer around. Life on Earth, you see, is not only brief but dismayingly tenuous. It is a curious feature of our existence that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it.
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Bill Bryson |
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3c238f4
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I was particularly taken with an article about a pub called the White Post on Rimpton Hill on the Dorset-Somerset border. The county boundary runs right through the middle of the bar. In former times when Dorset and Somerset had different licensing laws, people had to move from one side of the room to the other at 10 pm in order to continue drinking legally until 10.30. I don't know why but this made me feel a pang of nostalgia for the way ..
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Bill Bryson |
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e20f397
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Durham Cathedral, like all great buildings of antiquity, is essentially just a giant pile of rubble held in place by two thin layers of dressed stone. But--and here is the truly remarkable thing--because that gloopy mortar was contained between two impermeable outer layers, air couldn't get to it, so it took a very long time--forty years to be precise--to dry out. As it dried, the whole structure gently settled, which meant that the cathedr..
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Bill Bryson |
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The hardest part was coming to terms with the constant dispiriting discovery that there is always more hill.
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Bill Bryson |
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bafbbcf
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Because bread was so important, the laws governing its purity were strict and the punishment severe. A baker who cheated his customers could be fined PS10 per loaf sold, or made to do a month's hard labor in prison. For a time, transportation to Australia was seriously considered for malfeasant bakers. This was a matter of real concern for bakers because every loaf of bread loses weight in baking through evaporation, so it is easy to blunde..
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history
trivia
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Bill Bryson |
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714b4ac
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Part of the reason people could eat so well was that many foods that we now think of as delicacies were plenteous then. Lobsters bred in such abundance around Britain's coastline that they were fed to prisoners and orphans or ground up for fertilizer.
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lobsters
scarcity
trivia
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Bill Bryson |
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0e0f90a
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The Reverend Sydney Smith, though a man of the cloth, caught the spirit of the age by declining to say grace. 'With the ravenous orgasm upon you, it seems impertinent to interpose a religious sentiment,' he explained. 'It is a confusion of purpose to mutter out praises from a mouth that waters.
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Bill Bryson |
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f8ff0e7
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England?" she said with unreserved amazement. "Why do you live in England?" "Because it is nothing like Indianapolis"
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Bill Bryson |
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c7a6d72
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Is that dog shit on the bottom of your shoe?' I sat up a fraction. 'What?' 'Is that dog shit on the bottom of your shoe?' 'I don't know, the lab report's not back yet,' I replied drily. 'I'm serious, is that dog shit?' 'How should I know?' Katz leaned far enough forward to give it a good look and a cautious sniff. 'It dog shit,' he announced with an odd tone of satisfaction. 'Well, keep quiet about it or everybody'll want some.' 'Go and c..
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Bill Bryson |
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Physicists are notoriously scornful of scientists from other fields. When the great Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli's wife left him for a chemist, he was staggered with disbelief. 'Had she taken a bullfighter13 I would have understood,' he remarked in wonder to a friend. 'But a chemist ...
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Bill Bryson |
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While working at a sawmill, he slipped and fell against the whirring blade, which tore through his upper body at the shoulder, creating a hole so large that his internal organs were exposed--one witness claimed he could see the poor man's beating heart--and leaving his arm attached by just a few strands of glistening sinew. The millworkers bound the injuries as best they could and carried Lindbergh home, where he lay in silent agony for thr..
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Bill Bryson |
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4703329
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Of course, you'll have to fly to the refugee camp at Dadaab," Will observed thoughtfully at one point. He glanced at me. "To avoid the bandits," he explained. Dan and Nick nodded gravely. "I beg your pardon?" I said, taking a sudden interest. "It's bandit country all round there," Will said. "Where?" I asked, peering at the map for the first time. "Oh, just there," Will said, waving a hand vaguely across most of east Africa. "But you'll be..
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Bill Bryson |
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6c7ace9
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It was so bad, it was worth more than we paid.
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tourist-trap
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Bill Bryson |
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d483c0b
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Jesus, I smell like Jeffrey Dahmer's refrigerator.
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Bill Bryson |
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bec21ef
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To be fair, English is full of booby traps for the unwary foreigner. Any language where the unassuming word fly signifies an annoying insect, a means of travel, and a critical part of a gentleman's apparel is clearly asking to be mangled.
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Bill Bryson |
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e18e79c
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So what is your star sign?' Said Mary Ellen 'Cunnilingus' Katz answered looking profoundly unhappy.
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Bill Bryson |
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52441be
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How do migrating birds know which one to follow? What if the lead bird just wants to be alone?
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Bill Bryson |
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8956acf
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It sometimes occurs to me that the British have more heritage than is good for them. In a country where there is so astonishingly much of everything, it is easy to look on it as a kind of inexhaustible resource.
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Bill Bryson |
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11916e7
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I often use alcohol as an artificial check on my skills.
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false-humility
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Bill Bryson |
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b6bac28
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When Daniel Boone is uneasy, you know it's time to watch your step.
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Bill Bryson |
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0f078d1
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It is an intoxicating experience to taste Coca-Cola as if for the first time and to be conveyed to the very brink of orgasm by white bread. Makes all the discomfort worthwhile, if you ask me.
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Bill Bryson |
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5b03ad3
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Imagine having a city full of things that no other city had.
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urban-sprawl
cities
urban-life
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Bill Bryson |
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0c32190
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The National Park Service actually has something of a tradition of making things extinct.
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Bill Bryson |
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6a486a2
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Pennsylvania one year paid out $90,000 in bounties for the killing of 130,000 owls and hawks to save the state's farmers a slightly less than whopping $1,875 in estimated livestock losses. (It is not very often, after all, that an owl carries off a cow.)
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Bill Bryson |
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3894b2a
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The fact is that the British have a totally private sense of distance. This is most visibly seen in the shared pretense that Britain is a lonely island in the middle of an empty green sea. Of course, the British are all aware, in an abstract sort of way, that there is a substantial landmass called Europe nearby and that from time to time it is necessary to go over there to give old Jerry a drubbing or have a holiday in the sun, but it's not..
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Bill Bryson |
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6c83008
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There is a phenomenon called Trail Magic, known and spoken of with reverence by everyone who hikes the trail, which holds that often when things look darkest some little piece of serendipity comes along to put you back on a heavenly plane.
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Bill Bryson |
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7933d87
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we all recognize a likeness of Shakespeare the instant we see one, and yet we don't really know what he looked like. It is like this with nearly every aspect of his life and character: He is at once the best known and least known of figures.
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shakespeare
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Bill Bryson |
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7bb3ad4
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Rome was as wonderful as I had hoped it would be, certainly a step up from Peoria.
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Bill Bryson |
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2c00cf6
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Oh, go on' you prod encouragingly. 'Well, just a small one then,' they say and dartingly take a small one, and then get a look as if they have just done something terribly devilish. All this is completely alien to the American mind. To an American the whole purpose of living, the one constant confirmation of continued existence, is to cram as much sensual pleasure as possible into one's mouth more or less continuously. Gratification, instan..
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Bill Bryson |
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af38264
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We clambered for hours up vast, perpendicular slopes, over clattering scree and lumpy tussocks, round towering citadels of rock, and emerged at length into a cold, bleak, lofty nether world so remote and forbidding that even the sheep were startled to see us.
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Bill Bryson |
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a9dcf9b
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Describing his experience with the sting of an extremely toxic jellyfish, he did something you don't often see a scientist do: he shivered.
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emotion
testimony
perspective
vulnerability
sin
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Bill Bryson |
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c9c7e3c
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The way I see it, there are three reasons never to be unhappy. First, you were born. This in itself is a remarkable achievement.
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Bill Bryson |
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2e6330b
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As the physicist Paul Davies puts it, 'If everything needs everything else, how did the communities of molecules ever arise in the first place?' It is rather as if all the ingredients in your kitchen somehow got together and baked themselves into a cake - but a cake that could moreover divide when necessary to produce more cakes. It is little wonder that we call it the miracle of life. It is also little wonder that we have barely begun to u..
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science
chemistry
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Bill Bryson |
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bfa148c
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We live in a world that has practically no appreciation for quality, tradition, or classiness, and in which people who can't spell even common words get to decide what survives. That
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Bill Bryson |
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He wrote authoritatively on magnetism, tides and the motions of the planets, and fondly on the effects of opium.
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Bill Bryson |
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a5878d4
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There are loads of people like us. We are all here because we like it here or are married to Britons or both. If I may say so, you are a little more cosmopolitan, possibly even a little more dynamic and productive, sometimes even more adorable and gorgeous, because we are here with you. If you think the only people you should have in your country are the people you produce yourselves, you are an idiot. And,
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Bill Bryson |
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2a498af
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As a student, frustrated by the limitations of conventional mathematics, he invented an entirely new form, the calculus, but then told no-one about it for twenty-seven years5.
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Bill Bryson |
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357458d
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Until almost the 20th century, Central Park was home to a shepherd and a flock of 200 sheep.
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Bill Bryson |
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ecdef31
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Incidentally, the long-held idea that spices were used to mask rotting food doesn't stand up to much scrutiny. The only people who could afford most spices were the ones least likely to have bad meat, and anyway spices were too valuable to be used as a mask.
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spicy-food
spices
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Bill Bryson |
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bb81c18
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The dining table was a plain board called by that name. It was hung on the wall when not in use, and was perched on the diners' knees when food was served. Over time, the word board came to signify not just the dining surface but the meal itself, which is where the board comes from in room and board. It also explains why lodgers are called boarders.
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Bill Bryson |
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56ad836
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To be sure, Wegener made mistakes. He asserted that Greenland is drifting west at about 1.6 kilometres a year, a clear nonsense. (Its more like a centimetre.)
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Bill Bryson |