I couldn’t help but smile when I read this article about Harry Meadows, a 87-year-old who inadvertently killed 3 fellow residents of his care home. Am I a bad person?
In 1961, 87-year-old Harry Meadows, a resident at the Haslemere Home for the Elderly in Great Yarmouth, England, achieved late-in-life notoriety when he accidentally killed another 3 residents of his care home by dressing up as the grim reaper and peering through the residents’ lounge window whilst holding a scythe.
[via Reddit]
From an article in The New York Times on President Obama’s upcoming biography by David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker.
An earlier version of this post misquoted Mr. Remnick on his comparison between the book and a New Yorker article he had previously written. He said the book would not be a “pumped up” version of the article; he did not say that it would not be a “pimped out” version of the article.
Link.
I had blogged previously about the last statements given by death row inmates, who were about to be executed.
Here is another list of last statements of executed prisoners, released by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. The statements are as gut wrenching as ever – offering us a rare, but harrowing glimpse into the minds of these condemned souls.
[via Buzzfeed]
Fascinating entry on Wikipedia about the killer whales of Eden, known for co-operating with whalers to kill whales of other species, especially baleen whales.
They were seen near the port of Eden in southeastern Australia between 1840 and 1930. A pod of killer whales, which included amongst its members a distinctive male called Old Tom, would assist whalers in hunting baleen whales.
Old Tom’s role was commonly to alert the human whalers to the presence of a baleen whale in the bay by breaching or tailslapping at the mouth of the Kiah River, where the Davidson family had their tiny cottages. This role endeared him to the whalers and led to the idea that he was "leader of the pack," although such a role was more likely taken by a female (as is typical among killer whales). After the harpooning, some of the killer whales would even grab the ropes in their teeth and aid the whalers in hauling.
The whalers rewarded the pod by allowing them to eat the tongue and lips of the harpooned whales before hauling their bounty ashore.
A compilation of the strangest items left by guests in hotel rooms.
[via Metafilter]
It’s a difficult read. Last words of Death Row inmates who are about to be executed.
"It was done out of fear, stupidity and immaturity. It wasn’t until I got locked up and saw the newspaper; I saw his face and smile and I realized I had killed a good man."
—Johnathan Moore, executed in Texas on Jan. 17, 2007
A good many of these individuals are contrite, some are at peace with God, but most seem to have grimly accepted the inevitable.
Mary Beard, the controversial Professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge, informs us in this Guardian article that ancient Romans had (gasp!) a sense of humor, after all.
She discovered this fact after reading Philogelos, or The Laughter Lover, a Greek book written sometime during the third or fourth century AD. The 260 odd jokes in the book made fun of doctors, foreigners, eggheads, bad breath, baldness and slavery. Hmmm. Not really that different from us.
Telling a joke to one of her graduate classes, in which an absent-minded professor is asked by a friend to bring back two 15-year-old slave boys from his trip abroad, and replies "fine, and if I can’t find two 15-year-olds I will bring you one 30-year-old," she found they "chortled no end".
"They thought it was a sex joke, equivalent to someone being asked for two 30-year-old women, and being told okay, I’ll bring you one 60-year-old. But I suspect it’s a joke about numbers – are numbers real? If so two 15-year-olds should be like one 30-year-old – it’s about the strange unnaturalness of the number system."
Yeah, right. Everyone knows how much those ancient Romans obsessed over young boys.
According to an article on Ohio.com, the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles rejected 1,574 requests for vanity plates during the past two years.
Though the vanity plates don’t come cheap (an extra $35 for every year they are used), tens of thousands of eager Ohio car owners religiously apply for them each year.
Snip from the article:
Some of the rejections are no-brainers. The F-word, in all its glorious combinations, variations, permutations and amalgamations, could fill a couple of phone-book pages all by itself.
Similarly, a horde of people wanted to tell us who or what ”sucks” — everything from Michigan to SUVs to work to the Florida Gators to the cold. Forget it. The BMV has decreed that nothing shall suck.
Other drivers would sentence people or entire groups to a permanent home in what the Greeks referred to as Hades. Can we all agree that’s probably not the best sentiment to express within easy view of youthful eyes?
But some of the rejected combinations seem awfully mild — TUSH, for instance, or DEEPDO or IGOTGAS.
The complete list of rejected plates is right here in a PDF format (NSFW, if you are a prude).
The Flickr Commons project was launched to share the photo collections of the world’s leading cultural heritage institutions with the general public.
Institutions, such as the The Library of Congress, The Smithsonian Institution, and The National Maritime Museum have already contributed thousands of priceless digitized images to the project.
The NYPL, with an initial contribution of 1,300 copyright-free images, is the latest institution to join the project.
The collection may seem abysmally small, especially when compared to the 640,000 images already available on NYPL’s Digital Gallery, but the venerable institution has promised to add more images to the pool.
You can browse or search the NYPL photo sets here.
International photojournalist and author, Jason P. Howe, recollects his tragic love-affair with Marylin, a 22 year old girl whom he met in civil war-torn Colombia.
Unbeknownst to him, the beguiling Marylin was, in fact, an assassin for the AUC, a private militia of the wealthy, secretly supported by the government and military to counter insurgent terrorist groups in the country.
The young couple soon found themselves getting extremely close to each other, but things really changed after that. Marylin confessed her darkest secret to Howe, one day. She told him that circumstances had forced her to become an assassin, an act, she said, was prompted more by fear than choice.
In the beginning, her visits to my hotel room – usually armed with a pistol – did not disturb me greatly. At first, I don’t think the real implications of what Marylin was doing had filtered through the surreal haze. I was young and living out a great adventure. This was surely the closest I would ever get to someone who was truly and totally involved and immersed in this conflict. The woman I had only recently begun sleeping with was a hired killer and there was a gun on my bedside table.
Watching her take the pistol from her belt, unbutton her jeans and slip into bed I somehow couldn’t quite equate the woman in my arms with the bodies I had seen in the local morgue, their heads shattered by gunshots at close range, murders she confessed to having committed. High on a combination of the heady tropical climate, local rum, grade A çocaine and in the arms of nubile 22-year-old, fantasy and reality became blurred. It felt like I was living in a Quentin Tarantino movie
If all this reads like steamy pulp fiction, there is more. Their love story is set to become a become a major Hollywood motion picture, soon. Hopefully, Tarantino won’t be directing.
Link to the article in The Independent.
As part of an unique experiment, Ilya Shnaydman, a super-geeky resident of Philadelphia, mailed a letter to his girlfriend in NY. Instead of putting a stamp on the envelope, Ilya taped 39 cents in loose change (plus 5 cents as a tip to postal worker) in its place.
You will have to visit his blog to know whether the letter reached his girlfriend or was returned back to him.
I really wouldn’t recommend trying this, as the Postal Service is quite overwhelmed already.
Image Credit: Barack Obama
Thank you America ! You have made me proud. It’s still a long road ahead, but, when we have hope, we have everything.
The ship breaking yards in Alang, India, and in Chittagong, Bangladesh, are where more than half of the world’s old ships, oil tankers and ocean liners go to be beached like huge whales, stripped, cut into pieces, and cannibalized for iron and steel to be used in building new ships.
These hell holes are not just a killing ground for old vessels; thousands of hapless, but able-bodied young men have lost their lives doing back-breaking work in one of most hazardous working conditions in the world. Not only do they have to work without any basic safety equipment, they have to also endure prolonged exposure to toxic chemicals and waste matter during the course of work. Lung cancer and asbestosis is quite common among these poor souls.
Visit this link to see some haunting photographs of decaying ships and desperate men, and also some information about them compiled from various sources.
