News of the Weird: Woman with Perfect Memory Baffles Scientists

And today's prize for most egregious comma abuse goes to... the author of CNN's "Age of information overload" article, for the following sentence:

"Alan Staples Jr., 23, a Lawrence, Kansas, businessman, likes the idea of online books so much that he's even willing to pay a few pennies a page just to avoid a library."

(inspired by my Darwinian Medicine readings for last week)

Luke 12:22 And he said unto his disciples, Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat; neither for the body, what ye shall put on.

Luke 12:23 The life is more than meat, and the body is more than raiment.

Luke 12:24 Consider the ravens: for they neither ( Read more... )

News of the weird: The government of Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, has just - and I couldn't make this up if I tried - kidnapped itself.

( Horny Pope Benedict. )

Ok. This is bugging me. I can't find La Force prison. At all. No map from the 18th or 19th century seems to have it. I have browsed dozens upon dozens of maps from 1716 to 1877 on the web. I have scruitinized my own map, which in the eighth plan by N. de Fer dating from 1705. I've found all the streets that bound it, and several old mansions that ( Read more... )

Got to play P.I. today for half an hour when someone needed to be urgently located in Paris. Yeeaah.

The phone rings. I pick it up. On the other line, a pre-recorded sales pitch starts playing:

"Would you like to know more about our affordable cash burial plan?"

Geez, who died and gave them my phone number?

So I was re-reading "Monday Starts on Saturday" just now and suddenly realized something about Harry Potter. Several somethings, actually.

( Musings on Harry Potter and random Monday spoilers )

OMG, holy fuck.

Holy.

Fuck.

I swear I had no idea. I solemnly swear. Everyone who wanted to read a brand-new translation of "Monday starts on Saturday", guess what?

It's out!!The translator is Andrew Bromfield. I know the bloke's work. He translates Viktor Pelevin, another genius of modern Russian fiction. He does a rather sucky job of it, but ( Read more... )