The Way of All Flesh

by Samuel Butler.

"On the day of the funeral, however, we had a great excitement; old Mr Pontifex sent round a penny loaf to every inhabitant of the village according to a custom still not uncommon at the beginning of the century; the loaf was called a dole. We had never heard of this custom before, besides, though we had often heard of penny loaves, we had never before seen one; moreover, they were presents to us as inhabitants of the village, and we were treated as grown up people, for our father and mother and the servants had each one loaf sent them, but only one. We had never yet suspected that we were inhabitants at all; finally, the little loaves were new, and we were passionately fond of new bread, which we were seldom or never allowed to have, as it was supposed not to be good for us. Our affection, therefore, for our old friend had to stand against the combined attacks of archaeological interest, the rights of citizenship and property, the pleasantness to the eye and goodness for food of the little loaves themselves, and the sense of importance which was given us by our having been intimate with someone who had actually died. It seemed upon further inquiry that there was little reason to anticipate an early death for anyone of ourselves, and this being so, we rather liked the idea of someone else's being put away into the churchyard; we passed, therefore, in a short time from extreme depression to a no less extreme exultation; a new heaven and a new earth had been revealed to us in our perception of the possibility of benefiting by the death of our friends, and I fear that for some time we took an interest in the health of everyone in the village whose position rendered a repetition of the dole in the least likely."

A little less of a fire hazard

Another pile of articles torn from 12-year-old newspapers found in a folder under my bed- archived here and then tossed on the fireplace:

An article on the industry created around viatical settlements for AIDS patients- suggesting that the business would collapse if the lives of AIDS patients could be prolonged.

An obit of Herbert Huncke: "It was through Mr. Burroughs that Mr. Huncke soon met Mr. Ginsberg, then a Columbia undergraduate, and Mr. Kerouac, a recent Columbia dropout who became so enchanted with Mr. Huncke's repeated use of the carny term ''beat,'' meaning tired and beaten down, that he later used it as his famous label for the Beat Generation. (Mr. Kerouac later clouded things by suggesting it was derived from ''beatific.'')

How Perrier water nearly killed everything on Earth:
AROUND 250 million years ago, something so devastating occurred that about 90 percent of Earth's animal species were wiped out. While the cause of this greatest of all mass extinctions remains uncertain, a new study by biologists and geochemists suggests that a huge upwelling of carbonated water from the depths of the oceans may have played a lethal role.
That mass extinction, at the end of the Permian period, reshuffled Earth's genetic deck, making way for the rise of dinosaurs in the subsequent Mesozoic era and widening the niches available for the mammal-like reptiles destined to become ancestors of the human race.

The bizarre practice of Feng-Shui:
The ancient Chinese craft of feng shui (pronounced fung shway) is the practice of arranging surroundings to promote prosperity and harmony. Here are basic guidelines from Tin Sun, a feng shui master, for assessing the feng shui of an urban apartment.
EXTERIOR:
A building should not have its front door facing oncoming traffic. Cars and lights create negative forces that disturb the peace. There should not be any sharp objects or corners facing a doorwya of a building or apartment. The corners are like arrowheads, shooting negative e4nergy toward the building and its tenants. One should avoid facing glass buildings. The buildings would absorb the negative energies of their surroundings and reflect them back. If a building is on a hill, the back of the building should not be on the lower part of the slope. It would be like a chair without back support - the energy would roll down the hill. It is not advisable to have bridges in close proximity. They create tension and negative forces.
INTERIOR:
An apartment should not be next to or facing an elevator, especially if one hears the mechanics of it. The humming of the elevator machinery disrupts the flow of qi, or life force. When one enters an apartment, the stove should not be visible. It can turn happiness into sorrow because of its concentration of fire, which disturbs the peace of the space. This is a common cause of family problems. An apartment should not be next to or facing a garbage disposal chute, which draws away energy from the apartment. Heavy traffic around the chute also disrupts peace.


The text of Justice Scalia's anti-gay dissenting opinion when the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional Colorado's attempt to nullify civil rights protections for gays (Thomas and Rehnquist joined Scalia)


Obit for Arkansas Democratic Senator J. William Fulbright- full article here: http://www.nytimes.com/1995/02/10/obituaries/j-william-fulbright-senate-giant-is-dead-at-89.html

They asked John Barrymore...

"Did Hamlet sleep with his mother?"
"Only in the Chicago company," he replied

Nepenthe

From South Wind by Norman Douglas
Worldly-wise, indolent, good-natured and, like most
Southerners, a thorough-going pagan, Don Francesco
was deservedly popular as ecclesiastic. Women adored
him ; he adored women. He passed for an unrivalled
preacher ; his golden eloquence made converts every-
where, greatly to the annoyance of the parroco, the
parish priest, who was doubtless sounder on the Trinity
but a shocking bad orator and altogether deficient in
humanity, and who nearly had a fit, they said, when the
other was created Monsignor. Don Francesco was a
fisher of men, and of women. He fished ad maiorem Dei
gloriam, and for the fun of the thing. It was his way of
taking exercise, he once confessed to his friend Keith ;
he was too fat to run about like other people — he could
only talk. He fished among natives, and among foreigners.

Foreigners were hard to catch, on Nepenthe. They
came and went in such breathless succession. Of the
permanent residents only the Duchess, always of High
Church leanings, had of late yielded to his blandish-
ments. She was fairly hooked. Madame Steynlin, a
lady of Dutch extraction whose hats were proverbial,
was uncompromisingly Lutheran. The men were past
redemption, all save the Commissioner who, however,
was under bad influences and an incurable wobbler, any-
how. Eames, the scholar, cared for nothing but his
books. Keith, a rich eccentric who owned one of the
finest villas and gardens on the place, only came to the
island for a few weeks every year. He knew too much,
and had travelled too far, to be anything but a hopeless
unbeliever ; besides, he was a particular friend of his,
with whom he agreed, in his heart of hearts, on every
subject. The frequenters of the Club were mostly
drunkards, derelicts, crooks, or faddists — not worth
catching.

and

"that little place all by itself fascinated her. Bitterly she regrets her choice. She has discovered the drawbacks of a promontory. My Dear Duchess, never live on a promontory! It has fearful inconveniences; you are overlooked by everybody. All the island knows what you do and who visits you and when and why..."

and


Concerning the life and martyrdom of Saint Dodekanus:
He had entered the land of the Crotalophoboi, cannibals and
necromancers who dwelt in a region so hot, and with light so dazzling,
that their eyes grew on the soles of their feet. Here he laboured for
eighty years, redeeming them to Christianity from their magical and
bloodthirsty practices. In recompense whereof they captured him at the
patriarchal age of 132, or thereabouts, and bound him with ropes
between two flat boards of palmwood. Thus they kept the prisoner,
feeding him abundantly, until that old equinoctial feast drew near. On
the evening of that day they sawed the whole, superstitiously, into
twelve separate pieces, one for each month of the year; and devoured of the saint what was to their liking.

Lytton Strachey

I'm loving his "Elizabeth and Essex":
No human creature can ever hope to be truly just; but there are degrees in mortal fallibility, and for countless ages the justice of mankind was the sport of fear, folly, and superstition. In the England of Elizabeth there was a particular influence at work which, in certain crucial cases, turned the administration of justice into a mockery. It was virtually impossible for anyone accused of High Treason—the gravest offence known to the law—to be acquitted. The reason for this was plain; but it was a reason not of justice but expediency. Upon the life of Elizabeth hung the whole structure of the State. . . . Her own personal fearlessness added to the peril. She refused, she said, to mistrust the love of her subjects; she was singularly free of access; and she appeared in public with a totally inadequate guard. In such a situation, only one course of action seemed to be possible: every other consideration must be subordinated to the supreme necessity of preserving the Queen's life. . . . It was futile to talk of justice; for justice involves, by its very nature, uncertainty; and the Government could take no risks. The old saw was reversed; it was better that ten innocent men should suffer than that one guilty man should escape. To arouse suspicion became in itself a crime.
It was in the collection of evidence that the mingled atrocity and absurdity of the system became most obvious. Not only was the fabric of a case often built up on the allegations of the hired creatures of the Government, but the existence of the rack gave a preposterous twist to the words of every witness. Torture was constantly used; but whether, in any particular instance, it was used or not, the consequences were identical. The threat of it, the hint of it, the mere knowledge in the mind of a witness that it might at any moment be applied to him—those were differences merely of degree; always, the fatal compulsion was there, inextricably confusing truth and falsehood. What shred of credibility could adhere to testimony obtained in such circumstances—from a man, in prison, alone, suddenly confronted by a group of hostile and skilful examiners, plied with leading questions, and terrified by the imminent possibility of extreme physical pain? Who could disentangle among his statements the parts of veracity and fear, the desire to placate his questioners, the instinct to incriminate others, the impulse to avoid, by some random affirmation, the dislocation of an arm or a leg? Only one thing was plain about such evidence: it would always be possible to give to it whatever interpretation the prosecutors might desire. The Government could prove anything.