The couch used by Sigmund Freud during psychoanalytic sessions. “I have found little that is good about human beings,” he wrote. “In my experience most of them are trash.”
Author: Greg Ross
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Winona Ryder and Uma Thurman have the same godfather.
Timothy Leary.
A Field of Flames
Here’s one explanation for crop circles:
This English woodcut pamphlet was published in 1678. It tells of a farmer who swore he would rather have the devil mow his field than pay the high price demanded by a laborer.
According to the pamphlet, that night his field appeared to be in flames, and the next morning it was found to be mowed to supernatural perfection.
Maybe so, but if that’s what causes these things, the devil’s been getting awfully fancy lately:
Unquote
“The mathematical sciences particularly exhibit order, symmetry, and limitation; and these are the greatest forms of the beautiful.” — Aristotle
Magazine Readability
Number of years of formal education required to understand selected magazines, according to the Gunning-Fog readability index:
- Atlantic Monthly: 12
- TIME, Harper’s: 11
- Newsweek: 10
- Reader’s Digest: 9
- Ladies’ Home Journal: 8
- True Confessions: 7
- comic books: 6
In a Word
tomomania
n. irrational predilection for performing surgery
Cecil Rhodes’ Secret Ambition
Now remembered chiefly for establishing Rhodes scholarships, South African diamond magnate Cecil Rhodes left an alarming provision in his will — he hoped to take over the world:
To and for the establishment, promotion and development of a Secret Society, the true aim and object whereof shall be for the extension of British rule throughout the world, the perfecting of a system of emigration from the United Kingdom, and of colonisation by British subjects of all lands where the means of livelihood are attainable by energy, labour and enterprise, and especially the occupation by British settlers of the entire Continent of Africa, the Holy Land, the Valley of the Euphrates, the Islands of Cyprus and Candia, the whole of South America, the Islands of the Pacific not heretofore possessed by Great Britain, the whole of the Malay Archipelago, the seaboard of China and Japan, the ultimate recovery of the United States of America as an integral part of the British Empire, the inauguration of a system of Colonial representation in the Imperial Parliament which may tend to weld together the disjointed members of the Empire and, finally, the foundation of so great a Power as to render wars impossible and promote the best interests of humanity.
“I contend that we (the British) are the finest race in the world,” he once wrote, “and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race.”
A Mathematical Palindrome
111111111 x 111111111 = 12345678987654321
Magic Epitaph
Shall we all die?
We shall die all;
All die shall we —
Die all we shall.
— Epitaph, St. Winwalloe’s churchyard, Gunwalloe, Cornwall
Unquote
“One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries.” — A.A. Milne