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The Serbs, through their own pirates, the "Black Hand" terrorist group, had started the holocaust of the Great War. The Great War of the Titans-reduced at last to its original struggle, among the Balkan pygmies-would end, finally, on Serbia's own bloodstained soil.

Richard Feynman died in 1988, after a decade-long battle with cancer. He kept on doing science right up to the end. At one point someone had asked him how much he worked each week. He responded that he really couldn't tell, because he never knew when he was working and when he was playing.

....suddenly they were passing through the hamlet of Vermilion. It wasn't much, just a few clapboard houses and closed-up stores. The only place that was lit up with activity was a little dump called Cootie's Bar, and Dan noted that the four pickup trucks parked around the place all had shotguns or rifles racked in the rear windows.

Moshe....was born in northern Alaska; his parents had been among the victims of the Third Diaspora, moved by the Soviets in their effort to demolish forever the Israeli state and Judaism.

Early in the nineteenth century, a Tasmanian newspaper grimly announced that "the number of rats leaving the convict ship now tied up in the Bay has to be seen to be believed." Today, Old World rats infest Australia's ports and waterways and have even left the immediate vicinity of humanity to go wild in the bush, reverting to a way of life they have practiced little in thousands of years.

Danforth was a great reader of bizarre material, and had talked a good deal of Poe. I was interested myself because of the antarctic scene of Poe's only long story -- the disturbing and enigmatical "Arthur Gordon Pym."

As we burst into the room, the Count turned his face...his eyes flashed red with devilish passion... and the white sharp teeth, behind the full lips of the blood-dripping mouth, champed together like those of a wild beast.

Despite massive US aid to halt communism..., for the French it was ultimately an unwinnable war...On 7 May 1954, after a 57-day siege, more than 10,000 starving French troops surrendered to the Viet Minh at Dien Bien Phu. This defeat brought an end to the French colonial adventure in Indochina.

I knew Ray Bradbury for the last thirty years of his life, and I was so lucky. He was funny and gentle and always ( even at the end, when he was so old he was blind and wheelchair-bound, even then ) enthusiastic. He cared, completely and utterly, about things...He cared about books. He cared about stories.

..."Do you know how Russia resolved the crisis of radioactive milk after the ( Chernobyl ) accident? They mixed radioactive milk with clean milk. Then they raised the permissible level of radioactivity in milk to the norm of nuclear waste and in this way saved the state nearly two billion rubles. Wasn't that clever?"

It never got any farther. There was a too bright flash and I saw the horizon drop away as the ship's tail pitched down-then clipped the ground, and we were rolling, horribly, pieces of people and ship scattering.

In our City Hall, it's always difficult to tell if people are working, on vacation, retired, or even dead or alive. And it's made little difference. The work level has been about the same.
There have been documented cases of aldermen's young nephews being hired as city inspectors and immediately vanishing, not to be seen again until they showed up for their retirement party.

To those unfortunate enough to live in its path, the expedition ( of Henry Morton Stanley ) felt like an invading army, for it sometimes held women and children hostage until local chiefs supplied food....One member of the expedition packed the severed head of an African in a box of salt and sent it to be stuffed and mounted by his Piccadilly taxidermist.

Man had long since outgrown Earth, and while he viewed his birthplace with an almost religious devotion, he had moved his government lock, stock, and barrel to the Deluros system, which was more centrally located and had one of those rare worlds that possessed Earthlike conditions while boasting ten times its surface area.

(Karl ) Reichart proposed a notion that even he could barely believe--that parts of the ears of mammals are the same thing as parts of the jaws of reptiles. Things get more difficult when we realize that Reichart proposed this several decades before Darwin propounded his notion of a family tree for life...

It is possible that the percentage of honest and competent whores is higher than that of plumbers and much higher than that of lawyers. And enormously higher than that of professors.--from "The Notebooks of Lazarus Long" by Robert A, Heinlein.

The tractor progressed to the Illinois town where Lieutenant Dahlquist had been born, while the dirge continued. There it placed the casket on a pedestal, inside a barrier marking the distance of safe approach.--from "The Long Watch" by Robert A. Heinlein

I had never seen starving people before, and I prayed to God that I might never see any again unless I had the means wherewith to fill their bellies; and as I watched them I did not wonder that they ate Kapars...

The robot nodded its basketball head. "By default, I will call you ma'am and you sir. However, if you prefer, I can address you any way you like."
Don grinned. "I am the Great and Powerful Oz."

....indeed, I had once witnessed one of his strange seizures, and I had been appalled at the writhings, howlings, and yammerings of the wretch, who had groveled on the earth like a wounded snake gibbering terrible curses and black blasphemies...---from "Dig Me no Grave" by Robert E. Howard

Arnie Fowler, the Cincinnati pitcher, waited for the Germans with two dozen grenades. "I was so accurate with the grenades, I thought the Germans would never get within fifty yards of me...."

Kane didn't say anything for a while, but closed his eyes, breathing in the steam from his freshly poured cup, before draining it with a gulp and a gasp. He opened his eyes.
"Thanks for making coffee."

....he liked cats for themselves, quite aside from their neat shipboard habits, their ready adaptability to changing acceleration, and their usefulness in keeping the ship free of those other creatures that go wherever man goes.

" A few years back, a well-documented genetics study showed that one out of two hundred men in the world carry the same unique Y chromosome, a set of distinct markers that trace their roots to Mongolia. That number climbed to one out of ten in regions that were once part of the ancient Mongol Empire. The report concluded that this Super-Y chromosome came down from one individual..." "Genghis Khan?"...."Who else?..."

Ann Rutledge died on August 25th, 1835. She was twenty-two years old. Abe didn't take it well.... For the next two days, Jack Armstrong and the Clary's Grove Boys kept watch over him ( Lincoln ) in round-the-clock shifts. They stripped him of his pocketknife and carpentry tools; took away his flintlock rifle. They even confiscated his belt for fear that he would hang himself with it.

Plenty of time to make his morning run up to Lew's Doughnuts for a couple of sinkers. Lew's coffee was terrible, but he was the king of doughnuts. He....still sold the pure product.

...the boy grabbed the man's legs crying out, "Ave Maria Purisma! Per Dios, salva mi vida!" "I begged the man to spare him...," Sgt. Bryan said. "The man looked at me and put his hand on his pistol, so I passed on. Just as I did so, he blew out the boy's brains."

....Santa Anna had a final discussion with Castrillon over a midnight meal of chicken. Castrillon pressed him to wait and spare Mexican lives. "What are the lives of soldiers more than so many chickens?" he said. "I tell you, the Alamo must fall, and my orders must be obeyed at all hazards."

In another episode, McCoy explains to Spock, "Medical men are trained in logic."
And the wry Spock feigns surprise as he suggests, " Trained? Judging from you, I would have guessed it was trial and error."

...Franklin Roosevelt's observations..."The real truth... is...that a financial element in the larger centers has owned the government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson..."