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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 58e86d0 | One French clergyman recommended thrusting a red-hot poker up what Bondeson genteelly refers to as "the rear passage." A French physician invented a set of nipple pincers specifically for the purpose of reanimation. Another invented a bagpipelike contraption for administering tobacco enemas, which he demonstrated enthusiastically on cadavers in the morgues of Paris." | Mary Roach | ||
| 5aa6bcc | The staff played hot potato with my call until someone could locate the Person in Charge of Lying to the Press. The PCLP said that the room that houses the base archives is locked. And that only the curator would have a key. And that Holloman currently has no curator. Evidently the new curator's first task would be to find a way to open the archives. | Mary Roach | ||
| d0cd3f8 | That was the mindset that propelled one of the AMRL's least popular liquid diets into a long and lucrative career as Carnation Instant Breakfast. | Mary Roach | ||
| 4148a99 | Not a single one was shipped to the field. Why? Because the National Defense Research Committee had been working on a far more lasting and penetrative weapon for use against the Japanese. Seventeen days before the second and final Final Report on Who, Me? was released, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. O | Mary Roach | ||
| 10d0536 | It takes a certain kind of mind to interpret smidgens of fecal matter found in underwear as an ectoplasmic calling card rather than an ordinary by-product of a minor lapse in hygiene. It takes, I would think, a mildly psychotic kind of mind. Crawford's | Mary Roach | ||
| 267461e | Your genes want you to get pregnant, and hormones are their magic wand. | Mary Roach | ||
| 46fe5b8 | The torpedo launch console has big square plastic buttons--Flood Tube, Open Shuttle, Ready to Fire--that flash red or green, like something Q would have built into James Bond's Aston Martin. The missile compartment has similarly retro-looking panels of buttons. They provided the setup for one of the more quotable things Murray said to me--a line that, were fewer precautions in place, could have joined "Houston, we've had a problem" or "Watc.. | Mary Roach | ||
| b470cfc | What does this tell us about sharks? Should women be worried? Hard to say. How crazy are sharks for seal meat? Do dead groupers smell like used tampons? Unknown. I'd stay in my deck chair, if I were menstruating you. | Mary Roach | ||
| 0822029 | What sort of person experimentally infests a child with maggots? A confident sort, certainly. A maverick. Someone comfortable with the unpretty facts of biology. Someone who is perhaps himself an unpretty fact of biology. | mary-roach science | Mary Roach | |
| 7225990 | Anything perceived as a threat trips the amygdala--the brain's hand-wringing sentry--to set in motion the biochemical cascade known as the fight-or-flight response. Bruce Siddle, who consults in this area and sits on the board of Strategic Operations, prefers the term "survival stress response." Whatever you wish to call it, here is a nice, concise summary, courtesy of Siddle: "You become fast, strong, and dumb." Our hardwired survival stra.. | Mary Roach | ||
| e962404 | Sunlight triggers a cutoff of melatonin, bringing on wakefulness. (Indoor light--particularly the light from tablets and smartphones--can also suppress melatonin, but nowhere near as dramatically as sunlight.) This is why night shift workers who drive home in the morning through sunlight and then struggle to fall asleep may find relief by buying amber-lensed Bono-style glasses that block the sun's blue light wavelengths. NSMRL | Mary Roach | ||
| 053779d | Genetic differences in thermoregulation--efficient/inefficient, left side/right side, you name it--are surprisingly large and well worth paying attention to, given our seemingly permanent posture of fighting extremism in the Middle East. Dianna | Mary Roach | ||
| 8b7ba2b | Whenever Mark takes over the explaining, Brockhoff drops back and takes out her phone. She does not seem rude, just grindingly busy and determined to stay on top of her day. I see her come and go in my peripheral vision, pacing, answering email. She gives the impression of someone for whom idleness is almost physically unbearable. She is gorgeous, articulate, fast-moving, powerful. Lesser humans left blinking in her wake. Brockhoff | Mary Roach | ||
| ee2e6df | The other way to train medics is to have them practice a skill so many times that it becomes automatic. So when the prefrontal cortex goes AWOL, when reasoning drops away, muscle memory, one hopes, will persist. | Mary Roach | ||
| d27595a | The technical term for fuckin' tunnel vision is attentional narrowing. It's another prehistorically helpful but now potentially disastrous feature of the survival stress response. One focuses on the threat to the exclusion of almost everything else. Bruce Siddle tells a story about a doctor who had some fun with an anxious intern. He sent him across the emergency room to sew up a car crash victim's lacerations. The intern was so intent on h.. | Mary Roach | ||
| fceb41d | Only as a warrior can one withstand the path of knowledge . . .. | Carlos Castaneda | ||
| 8452c6b | I could see exactly what must have happened. Insert a liberal dose of mixed spirits in a normally abstemious man, and he becomes a force. He does not stand around, twiddling his fingers and stammering. He acts. I | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| e16dee3 | I did not rush in with the vim I would have displayed a year or so earlier, before Life had made me the grim, suspicious man I am to-day: | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| 1370df4 | Fascination exists only in the imagination of the fascinated. | humour wodehouse | P.G. Wodehouse | |
| ba9ac51 | It is madness to come to country houses without one's bottle of Mickey Finns. | uncle-fred | P.G. Wodehouse | |
| 46d95cc | He was always inclined to read a fictitious sombreness into things when the shadows began to creep over the world and it was still too early for a cocktail. | humor | P.G. Wodehouse | |
| 34ec299 | Mere surprise, however, was never enough to prevent Psmith talking. He | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| 3f6c8c4 | Into the emotional scene which followed I need not go in detail. You will have witnessed much the same sort of thing in the pictures, when the United States Marines arrive in the nick of time to relieve the beleaguered garrison. I may sum it up by saying that he fawned upon me. | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| 14c46e1 | In a cozy corner of the electric flame department of the infernal regions there stands a little silver gridiron. It is the private property of his Satanic majesty, and is reserved exclusively for the man who invented amateur theatricals. | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| eddd14f | He had that extra four or five inches of neck which disqualifies a man for high honors in the beauty competition | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| 97b9f85 | distance lends enchantment to the view, | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| 446c956 | The water as a topic of conversation dried up. | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| be71dea | His spirit was willing, but his will was not spirited. | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| 05d138f | Bertie,' he said, 'I want your advice.' 'Carry on.' 'At least, not your advice, because that wouldn't be much good to anybody. I mean, you're a pretty consummate old ass, aren't you? Not that I want to hurt your feelings, of course. | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| 6971f1c | London was too big to be angry with. It took no notice of him. It did not care whether he was glad to be there or sorry, and there was no means of making it care. That is the peculiarity of London. There is a sort of cold unfriendliness about it. A city like New York makes the new arrival feel at home in half an hour; but London is a specialist in what Psmith in his letter had called the Distant Stare. You have to buy London's good-will. | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| 7e259ed | Blandings Castle is not for the weak. | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| 2fe29ec | Hear him now as he toils. He has a long garden-implement in his hand, and he is sending up the death-rate in slug circles with a devastating rapidity. "Ta-ra-ra boom-de-ay Ta-ra-ra BOOM--" And the boom is a death-knell. As it rings softly out on the pleasant spring air, another stout slug has made the Great Change." | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| 7f1403b | Too often on such occasions one feels, as I feel so strongly with regard to poor old Stilton, that the kindly thing to do would be to seize the prospective bridegroom's trousers in one's teeth and draw him back from danger, as faithful dogs do to their masters on the edge of precipices on dark nights.' 'Yes, | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| aebf986 | If you are ignorant of Lora Delane Porter's books that is your affair. Perhaps you are more to be pitied than censured. Nature probably gave you the wrong shape of forehead. Mrs. Porter herself would have put it down to some atavistic tendency or pre-natal influence. She put most things down to that. She blamed nearly all the defects of the modern world, from weak intellects to in-growing toe-nails, on long-dead ladies and gentlemen who, sa.. | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| 46cf926 | All his life he had had a horror of definite appointments. An invitation to tea a week ahead had been enough to poison life for him. He was one of those young men whose souls revolt at the thought of planning out any definite step. He could do things on the spur of the moment, but plans made him lose his nerve. | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| ad804ae | All political meetings are very much alike. Somebody gets up and introduces the speaker of the evening, and then the speaker of the evening says at great length what he thinks of the scandalous manner in which the Government is behaving or the iniquitous goings-on of the Opposition. From time to time confederates in the audience rise and ask carefully rehearsed questions, and are answered fully and satisfactorily by the orator. When a genui.. | political-meeting | P.G. Wodehouse | |
| cef6762 | The voice of a donkey braying in the neighbouring meadow seemed like the mocking laughter of demons. | humour laughter spats | P.G. Wodehouse | |
| 60ab1ed | You two fit like pork and beans. | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| 9d98f42 | Hallo, Bertie." "Hallo, old turnip. Where have you been all this while?" "Oh, here and there! Ripping weather we're having, Bertie." "Not bad." "I see the Bank Rate is down again." "No, really?" "Disturbing news from Lower Silesia, what?" "Oh, dashed!" | jeeves | P G Wodehouse | |
| 0635495 | He looked at me like Lillian Gish coming out of a swoon. "Is this Bertie Wooster talking?" he said, pained. "Yes, it jolly well is!" | jeeves | P G Wodehouse | |
| 4e9421a | Bertie, it is imperative that you marry." "But, dash it all..." | jeeves | P G Wodehouse | |
| 005a083 | I want to see the manager." "Is there anything I could do, sir?" Archie looked at him doubtfully. "Well, as a matter of fact, my dear old desk-clerk," he said, "I want to kick up a fearful row, and it hardly seems fair to lug you into it. Why you, I mean to say? The blighter whose head I want on a charger is the bally manager." | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| 22c97ea | she would be in much the same position as one of those monarchs or dictators who wake up one morning to find that the populace has risen against them and is saying it with bombs. | P.G. Wodehouse | ||
| 2b0ad28 | He was one of those supercilious striplings who give you the impression that you went to the wrong school and that your clothes don't fit. "This is Oswald," said Bingo. "What," I replied cordially, "could be sweeter? How are you?" "Oh, all right," said the kid. "Nice place, this." "Oh, all right," said the kid. "Having a good time fishing?" "Oh, all right," said the kid. Young Bingo led me off to commune apart. | jeeves | P G Wodehouse |