|
48ec90c
|
If there's one thing the AT teaches, it is low-level ecstasy--something we could all do with more of in our lives.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
0bd2a1a
|
The indigestible parts of giant squid, in particular their beaks, accumulate in sperm whales' stomachs into the substance known as ambergris, which is used as a fixative in perfumes. The next time you spray on Chanel Number 5 (assuming you do), you may wish to reflect that you are dousing yourself in distillate of unseen sea monster.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
057733d
|
Imagine trying to live in a world dominated by dihydrogen oxide, a compound that has no taste or smell and is so variable in its properties that it is generally benign but at other times swiftly lethal. Depending on its state, it can scald you or freeze you. In the presence of certain organic molecules it can form carbonic acids so nasty that they can strip the leaves from trees and eat the faces off statuary. In bulk, when agitated, it can..
|
|
humor
water
|
Bill Bryson |
|
adc05b8
|
You can get some sense of the immaterial quality of clouds by strolling through fog--which is, after all, nothing more than a cloud that lacks the will to fly.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
8164d2c
|
Since the dawn of time, several billion human (or humanlike) beings have lived, each contributing a little genetic variability to the total human stock. Out of this vast number, the whole of our understanding of human prehistory is based on the remains, often exceedingly fragmentary, of perhaps five thousand individuals. You could fit it all into the back of a pickup truck if you didn't mind how much you jumbled everything up, Ian Tattersal..
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
29ba178
|
Prohibition may be the greatest gift any government ever gave its citizens. A barrel of beer cost $4 to make and sold for $55. A case of spiritous liquor cost $20 to produce and earned $90--and all this without taxes.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
b61acff
|
Even with the benefit of steroids most modern players still couldn't hit as many home runs as Babe Ruth hit on hotdogs.
|
|
performance-enhancing-drugs
euros
|
Bill Bryson |
|
816964d
|
Widespread commercial distribution of ice was so new that 300 tons of the precious commodity melted at one port while customs officials tried to figure out how to classify it.
|
|
innovation
government
|
Bill Bryson |
|
ddbe262
|
Everyone has a supremely low moment somewhere along the AT, usually when the urge to quit the trail becomes almost overpowering. The irony of my moment was that I wanted to get back on the trail and didn't know how. I hadn't lost just Katz, my boon companion, but my whole sense of connectedness to the trail. I had lost my momentum, my feeling of purpose. In the most literal way I needed to find my feet again.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
300efe8
|
I love everything about motels. I can't help myself. I still get excited every time I slip a key into a motel room door and fling it open.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
8a0bfa6
|
Marrying cousins was astoundingly common into the nineteenth century, and nowhere is this better illustrated than with the Darwins and their cousins the Wedgwoods (of pottery fame). Charles married his first cousin Emma Wedgwood, daughter of his beloved Uncle Josiah. Darwin's sister Caroline, meanwhile, married Josiah Wedgwood III, Emma's brother and the Darwin siblings' joint first cousin. Another of Emma's brothers, Henry, married not a D..
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
9d15339
|
Out of the thirty thousand types of edible plants thought to exist on Earth, just eleven--corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, cassava, sorghum, millet, beans, barley, rye, and oats--account for 93 percent of all that humans eat,
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
6be0b40
|
Much as I hate to stand out in a crowd, I have this terrible occasional compulsion to make myself a source of merriment for the world, and I had come close to sealing new heights with a Russian hat. Now, clearly, that would be unnecessary.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
385f872
|
Take a moment from time to time to remember that you are alive. I know this sounds a trifle obvious, but it is amazing how little time we take to remark upon this singular and gratifying fact. By most astounding stroke of luck and infinitesimal portion of all the matter in the universe came together to create you and for the tiniest moment in the great span of eternity you have the incomparable privilege to exist. For endless eons there was..
|
|
living
life
inspirational
|
Bill Bryson |
|
0c381a4
|
America's industrial success produced a roll call of financial magnificence: Rockefellers, Morgans, Astors, Mellons, Fricks, Carnegies, Goulds, du Ponts, Belmonts, Harrimans, Huntingtons, Vanderbilts, and many more based in dynastic wealth of essentially inexhaustible proportions. John D. Rockefeller made $1 billion a year, measured in today's money, and paid no income tax. No one did, for income tax did not yet exist in America. Congress t..
|
|
money
wealth
parties
new-york
|
Bill Bryson |
|
8cc07b5
|
According to Time Out magazine, at any given moment there are 600,000 people on the Underground, making it both a larger and more interesting place than Oslo.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
053cf4b
|
For a long time it was assumed that anything so miraculously energetic as radioactivity must be beneficial. For years, manufacturers of toothpaste and laxatives put radioactive thorium in their products, and at least until the late 1920s the Glen Springs Hotel in the Finger Lakes region of New York (and doubtless others as well) featured with pride the therapeutic effects of its 'Radio-active mineral springs27'. It wasn't banned in consumer..
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
1ea204b
|
The real significance of Magellan's voyage was not that it was the first to circumnavigate the planet, but that it was the first to realize just how big that planet was.
|
|
history
magellan
globe
|
Bill Bryson |
|
2374905
|
Just a month after the completion of the Declaration of Independence, at a time when he delegates might have been expected to occupy themselves with more pressing concerns -like how they were going to win the war and escape hanging- Congress quite extraordinarily found time to debate business for a motto for the new nation. (Their choice, E Pluribus Unum, "One from Many", was taken from, of all places, a recipe for salad in an early poem by..
|
|
humor
language
|
Bill Bryson |
|
0525af0
|
From almost nothing, France in four years built up an aircraft industry that employed nearly 200,000 people and produced some 70,000 planes. Britain built 55,000 planes, Germany 48,000, and Italy 20,000 - quite an advance bearing in mind that only a few years earlier the entire world aviation industry consisted of two brothers in a bicycle shop in Ohio.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
debf5e0
|
I wondered idly what the builders of Stonehenge would have created if they'd had bulldozers and big trucks for moving materials and computers to help them design. What would they have created if they had had all the tools we have? Then I crested the brow of the hill with a view down to the visitor center, with its cafe and gift shop, its land trains and giant parking lot, and realized I was almost certainly looking at it.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
fa5ce04
|
It was a lot more fun to get famous than to be famous.
|
|
solitude
fame
humility
popularity
|
Bill Bryson |
|
90337c2
|
The romance of travel wasn't always terribly evident to those who were actually experiencing it.
|
|
travel
wonderlust
|
Bill Bryson |
|
a5758ce
|
The core of a neutron star is so dense that a single spoonful of matter from it would weigh more than 500 billion kilograms.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
4d9f876
|
There is no question that a Neanderthal could easily beat us up. So, too, presumably could their women, which may be why we are only 2 percent Neanderthal instead of 50 percent. Those bitches were too scary for us.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
2b6c3c1
|
Italians are entirely without any commitment to order. They live their lives in a kind of pandemonium, which I find very attractive.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
fc12d6e
|
It's interesting that Melburnians don't tell jokes about Sydney. They tell jokes about their beloved footy. To wit: A man arriving for the Grand Final in Melbourne is surprised to find the seat beside his empty. Tickets for the Grand Final are sold out weeks in advance and empty seats unknown. So he says to the man on the other side of the seat: 'Excuse me, do you know why there is no one in this seat?' 'It was my wife's,' answers the secon..
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
b04b1a5
|
FOR WARREN G. HARDING, the summer of 1927 was not a good one, which was perhaps a little surprising since he had been dead for nearly four years by then.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
509dcbb
|
This is a world where things move at their own pace, including a tiny lift Fortey and I shared with a scholarly looking elderly man with whom Fortey chatted genially and familiarly as we proceeded upwards at about the rate that sediments are laid down. When the man departed, Fortey said to me: "That was a very nice chap named Norman who's spent forty-two years studying one species of plant, St. John's wort. He retired in 1989, but he still ..
|
|
science
research
|
Bill Bryson |
|
a9393a4
|
From a selection of his other works, we might think him variously courtly, cerebral, metaphysical, melancholic, Machiavellian, neurotic, lighthearted, loving, and much more. Shakespeare was of course all these things--as a writer. We hardly know what he was as a person.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
d32ea09
|
Spectators could, for an additional fee, sit on the stage--something not permitted at the Globe. With stage seating, audience members could show off their finery to maximum effect, and the practice was lucrative; but it contained an obvious risk of distraction. Stephen Greenblatt relates an occasion in which a nobleman who had secured a perch on the stage spied a friend entering across the way and strode through the performance to greet him..
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
501908e
|
Nothing gives the English more pleasure, in a quiet but determined sort of way, than to do things oddly.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
d39f6b0
|
Life in Australia would go on, and I would hear nothing, because once you leave Australia, Australia ceases to be.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
05b92ca
|
Second, you are alive. For the tiniest moment in the span of eternity you have the miraculous privilege to exist.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
2164900
|
I can never understand why Londoners fail to see that they live in the most wonderful city in the world. It is, if you ask me, far more beautiful and interesting than Paris and more lively than anywhere but New York--and even New York can't touch it in lots of important ways. It has more history, finer parks, a livelier and more varied press, better theaters, more numerous orchestras and museums, leafier squares, safer streets, and more cou..
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
eb6398f
|
as the biologist J. B. S. Haldane once famously observed: "The universe is not only queerer than we suppose; it is queerer than we can suppose." The"
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
3494add
|
As a rule, you knew it was time to eat when you could hear potatoes exploding in the oven. Happily, all this suited my father. His palate only responded to two tastes - burned and ice cream - so everything suited him so long as it was sufficiently dark and not startlingly flavorful. Theirs truly was a marriage made in heaven, for no one could burn food like my mother or eat it like my Dad.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
6e70078
|
Eenie, meenie, minie, mo" is based on a counting system that predates the Roman occupation of Britain, that may even be pre-Celtic. If so, it is a rare surviving link with the very distant past. It not only gives us a fragmentary image of how children were being amused at the time Stonehenge was built, but tells us something about how their elders counted and thought and ordered their speech."
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
29dd66a
|
It is easy to overlook this thought that life just is. As humans we are inclined to feel that life must have a point. We have plans and aspirations and desires. We want to take constant advantage of all the intoxicating existence we've been endowed with. But what's life to a lichen? Yet its impulse to exist, to be, is every bit as strong as ours - arguably even stronger. If I were told that I had to spend decades being a furry growth on a r..
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
e8749d0
|
Now as I stood on the roof of my house, taking in this unexpected view, it struck me how rather glorious it was that in two thousand years of human activity the only thing that had stirred the notice of the outside world even briefly was the finding of a Roman phallic pendant. The rest was just centuries of people quietly going about their daily business - eating, sleeping, having sex, endeavoring to be amused- and it occurred to me, with t..
|
|
sex
history
sleeping
|
Bill Bryson |
|
2bb6e58
|
Mrs Loudon was even more successful than her husband thanks to a single work, Practical Instructions in Gardening for Ladies, published in 1841, which proved to be magnificently timely. It was the first book of any type ever to encourage women of elevated classes to get their hands dirty and even to take on a faint glow of perspiration. This was novel almost to the point of eroticism. Gardening for Ladies bravely insisted that women could m..
|
|
humor
|
Bill Bryson |
|
222c215
|
I would rather have bowel surgery in the woods with a stick. If you are not stung or pronged to death in some unexpected manner, you may be fatally chomped by sharks or crocodiles, or carried helplessly out to sea by irresistible currents, or left to stagger to an unhappy death in the baking outback.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
7416b70
|
On average the total walking of an American these days--that's walking of all types: from car to office, from office to car, around the supermarket and shopping malls--adds up to 1.4 miles a week, barely 350 yards a day. That's ridiculous.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |
|
2e568b9
|
The rooms were small and airless and cramped. 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.
|
|
|
Bill Bryson |