Jim > Recent Status Updates

In about two hours....they emptied 342 chests of tea into Boston Harbor. The cool-headedness impressed everyone. As a Council member reported to Lord Dartmouth, "Perhaps never was more work of the like kind done in so little time and with so little confusion."

The most essential right of a British subject was to be represented in the body that taxed him. The Stamp Act--which ignored the crushing debt under which Massachusetts labored, having defended the king's dominions ( in the French and Indian War)--was onerous. It was precedent-setting. And it was wrong.

Wondering about the Tomkey family had made me feel generous, but now I would have to shift gears and find pleasure in hating them. The only alternative was to do as my mother had instructed and take a good look at myself. This was an old trick, designed to turn one's hatred inward...

"You know, when I imagined the old gods, as a child, I thought of you as grand immortals, above the petty worries that plagued your worshipers. I thought you were bigger than us. But you're not. You're just as fickle and wanting as the humans you disdain."

My name is Addie LaRue, she thinks to herself as she walks.
Three hundred years, and some part of her is still afraid of forgetting. There have been times, of course, when she wished her memory more fickle, when she would have given anything to welcome madness, and disappear. It is the kinder road, to lose yourself.

In the blink of an eye he became a huge eagle. Odin screeched as he flapped his wings, and the mountain doors opened, and he rose into the skies.

"Here's my only problem. When television, I mean, these people," he said. "I mean, Katy hasn't even looked up once at me..."
How did he know my name?...
"I'm tweeting what you're saying!" I yelled back.
Trump considered my excuse for a moment and nodded approvingly.
" I hope so," he said. "I think you do a good job, by the way Katy."

During that time, Paddy had come to realize how privileged her position in Room 39 with Ian Fleming had been. There, she'd been privy to decisions with momentous consequences, and was encouraged to debate and discuss them with Godfrey and Fleming.

His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful!--Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes...his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.

...perhaps they were projections into a three-dimensional universe of four-or five-dimensional beings whose intangibility was due somehow to their having more dimensions than we could see or understand.

"I don't give third chances, Mr. Hotchkiss," Travers murmured.....He twitched the knife. The severed half-ear landed directly in front of Cal's eyes.

Strangers found New Orleans a threatening city--particularly Southern strangers, who were disturbed by how little was done to keep the races apart. Free Negroes and slaves were allowed to gather in large numbers in the public squares, and they were known sometimes to mock and taunt white passersby. That was unheard of anywhere else in...the South.

Fred Rosewater, snorting with incredulity, turned to the advertising section of the paper...
Male preparatory school teacher badly needs course in manners from stern instructress, preferably a horse-lover of German or Scandinavian extraction...Will travel anywhere in US.

Throughout the South, the Ku Klux Klan singled out blacks who had learned to read and write, calling them 'uppity.' A Georgia freedwoman...told how the Klan attacked a black schoolteacher's father. '(They) took every book they had and threw them into the fire, and said they would dare any other n----- to have a book in his house,' said Caroline Smith.
The Klan also torched countless schools...

The long-impending catastrophe has come at last. I hardly know what to write about it. The captain is gone. He may come back to us again alive...
---from "The Captain of the Pole Star" by A. Conan Doyle

She rose, opened the window, and leaned out to look. But there was nothing to see except the silent, dark city with its tangled network of streets stretching out in all directions, and its thousands of street lights mere yellow pinpricks in the universal blackness.
Maria felt a sudden fear of the city, quickly drew in her head, and closed the window.

Today, four-fifths of Greece is barren: in early times...the mountain slopes were well-forested, a rich source of timber and of game...It is a fair inference that rainfall was both heavier and less catastrophic, and that therefore there was more and better pasture-land than there is now....it seems clear that Greece was practically self-supporting as far as primary goods are concerned.

"...Think about it,"Kizzy said. "AIs can't be any smarter than the people who create them. We can code in all the crazy maths and theories we want, but we can't make an AI do things that we don't understand ourselves..."

We wait for the magical moment---sometime in the future---when everything will be as we want it to be.

"Soon from over the hill....Cochise approached....He was rather tall, over six feet, with broad shoulders, and impressed me as a wonderfully strong man, of much endurance, accustomed to command and to expect instant and implicit obedience.... He seemed to me in this first meeting the greatest Indian I had ever seen."

"....Don't tell me you can't find anything to occupy yourself with, or anyone for that matter." Mirabel continues before Zachery can protest the statement, "To think if you'd picked up a different library book you wouldn't be here right now..."

The prevailing color of life in America is a dull, dark green called olive drab. That color is always respectable and always important. Most other colors risk being unpatriotic.
It is this special America...which is the real America for me.

Stalin was incensed with the French government, which had caved in so completely to Hitler, and wanted to see it punished after the war....Roosevelt warned him that that was a sticking point with Churchill, who thought France should be allowed to once again become a great nation after the war.

L&L Tavern...
3207 N. Clark St., Chicago, IL...
This is the only known location where evidence suggests that both John Wayne Gacy and serial killer/cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer scouted for possible victims. Maybe not the best choice for a first date, all things considered.

It's a floater, alien fauna, kept illegally. S45 taught me all about them...
It's pale, like a white man drained of all blood. It has elongated limbs, claws for grasping prey, long, sharp homodont teeth....

....Then one day just afore Christmas these here machines just started tearing up our fields. They had forgot about us, you see. We threw rocks but it didn't do no good, and about midnight one come right through the house...
from "The Hero As Werwolf" by Gene Wolfe

They eat in silence...until every morsel is gone. Lydia thanks the girls, and her spoken gratitude feels entirely insufficient, because what she really needs to say is that the food, yes, but also their kindness, their humanity, their very existence, has nourished some withered, essential part of herself.

Many runaway slaves did eventually find their way to Nassau. And blacks formed a substantial minority in a number of pirate crews based on New Providence. In fact, blacks, who usually feared a return to slavery even more than they feared death, were often far more willing than white pirates to fight and die in defense of their ships and freedom.

The article quoted a new study claiming that far from there having been two smartly booted Gestapo agents on every corner, as in the movies, Nazi investigations almost always began with spontaneous tip-offs from civilian informants--the eyes and ears of fascism. These indics (short for indicateurs) were more familiarly known as mouches, flies...

...the last three decades have seen a remarkable explosion of fossil evidence that should have settled forever any question of our prehuman origins.
Foremost among this evidence is, of course, the famous Lucy fossil, a prehuman form that its discoverers enthusiastically placed at the base of the human family tree. But the evidence also includes more than a dozen distinct species...