Down Home Shakedown. (via Metafilter)


"Among others of my class I talked to were: a boatbuilder of rural Icelandic parentage; a Native American professor of clinical psychology; a maker of artisan goat cheese (tubs of which she brought); a high Anglican priest and AIDS activist; an historian who wants to write a series of 14th century murder mysteries; a banker who's led financial congresses in Afghanistan as the only woman (they give you the abbiyah on the plane, before you disembark), and who's off to see South Georgia and Easter Islands; a lawyer who's negotiated the return of antiquities from a great museum here to Turkey (only to see them pillaged), and who is a certain late tycoon's dog's guardian (a woof in chancery!); and a daughter (also reuning here) who has masters' degrees in both marine biology and in East Asian civilization, and who's writing a doctoral dissertation on the eco-cultural history of whaling in Japan. She was once on nightwatch in the Arctic Ocean when she felt a deep shaking in her blood, and turned to see a great blue whale arising." --
nineweaving (via crowleycrow)


Harry Potter and the Abortion Battlefield.


"In one inglorious incident, owners of the Bol'shaya sovetskaya entsiklopediya--the Large Soviet Encyclopedia of 1949--were mailed instructions to razor out a full-page portrait and two pages of text extolling the life and accomplishments of Lavrenti Beria, the Communist Party secret police chief who was purged and executed in 1953, and to paste in their place two pages of text and a one-page spread of photographs devoted to a discussion of the Bering Sea." --A Splendor of Letters


Momus remembers The Little Red Schoolbook.


"His only bark, to where the giant brood,
Press'd by th' enormous weight of Sicily,
Lie gasping; whence Typhœus pours on high
The fiery volumes of tempestuous flame.
Where erst the sire of men and gods in wrath
planted the race of apes; fit successors..."

--Royston's Lycophron


Smelly Cat.