I could be dead in a minute,” he said grimly, then clutched my forearm. “Look, if I get shot, do me a favor. Call my brother and tell him there’s $10,000 buried in a coffee can under his front lawn.” “You buried $10,000 under your brother’s front lawn?” “No, of course not, but he’s a little prick and it would serve him right. Let’s go.
On the fourth night, just as I was facing the dismal prospect of finishing my only book and thereafter having nothing to do in the evenings but lie in the half light and listen to Katz snore, I was delighted, thrilled, sublimely gratified to find that some earlier user had left a Graham Greene paperback. If there’s one thing the AT teaches, it is low level ecstasy, something we can all do with more of in our lives.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That is unquestionably the most astounding thing about us – that we are just a collection of inert components, the same stuff you would find in a pile of dirt. I’ve said it before in another book, but I believe it’s worth repeating: the only thing special about the elements that make you is that they make you. That is the miracle of life.
Rome was as wonderful as I had hoped it would be, certainly a step up from Peoria.
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.
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.
Describing his experience with the sting of an extremely toxic jellyfish, he did something you don’t often see a scientist do: he shivered.
I had never really stopped to consider what an extraordinary thing the Royal National Lifeboat Institution is. Think about it. A troubled ship calls for help, and eight people – teachers, plumbers, the guy who runs the pub – drop everything and put to sea, whatever the weather, asking no questions, imperilling their own lives, to try to help strangers. Is there anything more brave and noble than that?
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.
An increase of only a degree or so in body temperature has been shown to slow the replication rate of viruses by a factor of two hundred – an astonishing increase in self-defense from only a very modest rise in warmth.
Whatever else it may be, at the level of chemistry life is curiously mundane: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, a little calcium, a dash of sulfur, a light dusting of other very ordinary elements – nothing you wouldn’t find in any ordinary drugstore – and that’s all you need. The only thing special about the atoms that make you is that they make you. That is of course the miracle of life.
1905. In that year, Einstein published three papers that revolutionized physics. In the same year he was turned down for two teaching jobs.
Vitamin B proved to be not one vitamin but several, which is why we have B1, B2, and so on. To add to the confusion, Vitamin K has nothing to do with an alphabetical sequence. It was called K because its Danish discoverer, Henrik Dam, dubbed it “koagulations viatmin” for its role in blood clotting.
In countless small ways the world around us grows gradually shittier. Well, I don’t like it at all.
It seems madness to think that a society would rate marginal economic growth above a livable earth, but there you are. I had always assumed the reason to build a bigger economy was to make the world a better place. In fact, it appears, the reason to build a bigger economy is, well, to build a bigger economy.
When they aren’t being incompetent, city officials like to relax with a little corruption.