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