Between 1872 and 1902, American wheat production increased by 700 percent. In the same period, British wheat production fell by more than 40 percent.
A lot of people conclude from this that the FBI and its agents are dangerously inept.
To this day, I remain impressed by the ability of Britons of all ages and social backgrounds to get genuinely excited by the prospect of a hot beverage.
What was overlooked in all this was how microscopically small the risk from passive smoking actually is. A rate of 1 in 30,000 sounds reasonably severe, but it doesn’t actually amount to much. Eating one pork chop a week is statistically more likely to give you cancer than sitting routinely in a roomful of smokers.
The one positive to come out of the experience is that opioid fatalities have led to a rise in organ donations.16 In 2000, according to the Washington Post, fewer than 150 organ donors were opioid addicts; today the number is over 3,500.
Goodness knows what this is meant to suggest – I suppose that this is some sort of Hall of the People – but the effect is that it looks as if two dozen citizens of various ages are about to commit mass suicide.
There is a lot of salt in the sea- enough to bury every bit of land on the planet to a depth of about five hundred feet. p280.
There was something so marvelously innocent, so irretrievably lost, about the world back then. You could see it in the easy, confident gait and sun-drenched smiles of the vacationers in every photograph. These people were happy. I don’t mean they were happy. They were happy. They were living at a good time in a lucky country and they knew it. They had good jobs, good homes, good families, good prospects, good vacations in cheerful, sunny places.
Viennese physicist Ernst Mach, for whom is named the speed of sound.
I read once that the furthest distance the average American will walk without getting into a car is six hundred feet, and I fear the modern British have become much the same, except that on the way back to the car the British will drop some litter and get a tattoo.
What a joy it is to arrive after dark at a snug-looking house, its windows filled with welcoming light, and know that it is yours and that inside is your family.
If you took all the young men in southern England with those caps and that slouch and collected them all together in one room, you still wouldn’t have enough IQ points to make a halfwit.
Since 2008, 150 local papers have closed in England, including some once major ones like the Surrey Herald and Reading Post. That’s not good. Without local newspapers there’s no one to tell you when somebody’s been fined for having rats in their kitchens.
A study in New Zealand of diabetic patients in 2016 found that the proportion suffering severe complications was 40 percent lower among patients treated by doctors rated high for compassion.
Their wives, lavishly rouged and powdered, looked as if they had just come from a coffin fitting.
There is something in what he said. English is a merry confusion of quirks and irregularities that often seem willfully at odds with logic and common sense.
Then, having nothing better to do, I leafed through the index and amused myself, in a very low-key way, by looking for ridiculous names, of which Australia has a respectable plenitude. I am thus able to report that the following are all real places: Wee Waa, Poowong, Burrumbuttock, Suggan Buggan, Boomahnoomoonah, Waaia, Mullumbimby, Ewlyamartup, Jiggalong, and the supremely satisfying Tittybong.
Every tree wore a thick cloak of white, every stump and boulder a jaunty snowy cap, and there was that perfect, immense stillness that you get nowhere else but in a big woods after a heavy snowfall.
A third, and for a brief time comparatively popular candidate for Shakespearean authorship, was Christopher Marlowe. He was the right age, just two months older than Shakespeare, had the requisite talent, and would certainly have had ample leisure after 1593, assuming he wasn’t too dead to work.
The liver was long thought to be the seat of courage, which is why a cowardly person was deemed “lily-livered.