Jon Carroll reports on his summer reading—<I>Agincourt: Henry V and the Battle That Made England,</I>—and proves yet again that he can turn out better stuff daily than most of us can hope for in a lifetime.
One of the weirdest musical phenomena that I know of is the symbiotic relationship between really bad music, mostly classic rock schlock, played at maximum volume, and professional sporting events. I mean have you ever been to an NFL game where you didn’t hear Ozzy Osbourne’s "Crazy Train"? And let's not even discuss the NBA where the prospect of being exposed to more Kelly Clarkson or the All American Rejects keeps me from even thinking of attending.
"Leeds Memory Group researchers say they have gone some way to recreating the sensation [of deja vu] in the lab using hypnosis."
I've never been a huge New York Dolls fan, but I like the energy of this single—and I love the cameo by the Flying Spaghetti Monster at the end of the clip.
And a bottle, too. Wayne Curtis considers <I>The History of the New World in 10 Cocktails</I>.
"What is the greatest possible area for a sofa <B>S</B> that can be moved around a right-angled corner in a hallway of unit width? It's assumed only that <B>S</B> is a connected region of the plane."
The law of unintended consequences, that is. It seems that, as the Mega Lo Marts introduce auto-scanning checkout kiosks to feed customers through more "efficiently," people are buying fewer of those impulsive point-of-purchase items.
Up at 9am. No shower, no shave. Coffee. I sat down on my orange couch, opened the laptop and got to it. One more day of "Recommended Components."
Fans of <I>Sandman</I> will recognize this outbreak as one of the points of departure for the story arc begun in issue #1. What they may not realize is that Neil Gaiman wasn't making up the Sleeping Sickness: there really was an outbreak of <I>Encephalitis lethargica</I> from 1916 through the '20s.
George Saunders checks out the motherland.