Daniel > Recent Status Updates

"Pedestrians must be educated to know that automobiles have rights," declared the National Automobile Chamber of Commerce's leader, George Graham. He objected to newspaper coverage that depicted pedestrians as innocent victims of evil motorists when, in his view, "it is a fair question if the driver is actually responsible for more than half the cases."

The first traffic light was installed on Westminster Bridge in London in 1868, to improve the safety of pedestrians. [...] Less than a month after its installation, a gas leak caused it to explode, injuring the policeman operating it, and it was removed soon afterward.

It was unfair to blame reckless drivers for endangering other road users, proponents of the automobile argued, when horses caused far more accidents. The danger posed by motoring was overstated, they maintained, while accidents involving horses were overlooked as being just part of the natural order of things.

A 1667 advertisement: 'All those desirous to pass from London to Bath, or any other place on their Road, let them repair to the Bell Savage on Ludgate Hill in London and the White Lion at Bath, at both which places they may be received in a Stage Coach every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, which performs the whole journey in Three Days (if God permit), and sets forth at five in the morning.'

Huge areas of land are devoted to parking, even as cars sit unused, on average, 95 percent of the time--making cities as much dormitories for cars as habitats for people.

The average speed of cars in central London today is 8 mph, the same as it was for a horse-drawn carriage in the 1890s, belying predictions that cars, taking up less space on the road, would reduce congestion.

There is no such thing as a happy ending. I never met a single one to equal 'Once upon a time.'

'He is readable, I'll give him that - tells a good story, but has a tin ear for language. [...] God knows there are writers who feel that the whole world hangs on what they say. Norman Mailer comes to mind, also Shirley Hazzard and John Updike. But apparently in this case the world really does. How did it happen?'
Roland shrugged. 'He hears the right voices and sings the right songs. Which is to say, ka.'

'These three men - [... names removed because they may be spoilers ...] - had come together, almost magically, to fight for the rose in their old age. Their tale, the gunslinger believed, would make a book in itself, very likely a fine and exciting one.'

You say true, sai King.

Can we expect The Dark Tower book 6.5 some day? I hope so.

Philosophers, for the most part, are constitutionally timid, and dislike the unexpected. Few of them would be genuinely happy as pirates or burglars.

"The sixth Viscount Cronshaw was a man of about fifty, suave in manner, with a handsome, dissolute face. Evidently an elderly roué, with the languid manner of a poseur."

Fifty "elderly"! Hastings is such a boy :)

Have read the first 5 stories, in order of publication. (Uncle Meleager, Article in Question, Practical Joker, Cat in the Bag, and Dragon's Head.) Mostly good - liked the Dragon's Head best.

Will now put the book aside till I've read Unnatural Death and The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club.

Somebody had told me that humble travellers in Holland could doss down in police stations, and it was true. A constable showed me to a cell without a word, and I slept, rugged up to the ears, on a wooden plank hinged to the wall and secured on two chains under a forest of raffish murals and graffiti. They even gave me a bowl of coffee and a quarter-loaf before I set off.

Good characters are much harder to write than villains, as every storyteller knows, and Wodehouse pulled off a double miracle by making us believe that 'mentally negligible' Bertie is a master of the most sparkling style in English literature.

"My name, in case you're interested, is Mulliner."

The girl said hers was Hermione Brimble, and further enquiry elicited the fact that she lived there with her Aunt, Mrs. Willoughby Gudgeon. And Augustus was wondering if he could start calling her Hermione right away, or whether it would be better to wait for a few minutes, when a formidable woman of the heavy-battle-cruiser class came rolling up.

I could ionise one hundred billion trillion hydrogen atoms just with the energy inside a Mars bar.

The lesson of story is that we have no idea how wrong we are.

"'At some level, without our being aware of it, our brains spend all day, every day, drawing upon initial, formative, high school memories.'" [citing _The Popularity Illusion_ by Mitch Prinstein]

I can feel a 'class' action coming on... If the cited idea became well-established, the legal cost of making amends would make the running of a high school or an education system untenable. And rightly so.

And now we're citing a story from the Daily Mail, where what is clearly a self-deprecating joke told by Prince Charles has been clickbaitingly reported as if it was in earnest. This book was doing so well. What happened? For what it's worth, I think the bird gossip is probably more reliable than the Daily Mail.

"Researchers into bird communication have revealed the astonishing fact that not only do ravens listen to the gossip of neighbouring flocks, but they pay especially close attention when it tells of a reversal in another bird's status."

Uh. WTF? Naturally, I checked the endnotes, which cite the book 'Behave' by Robert Sapolsky. It seems well-reviewed. But I'm sceptical we understand bird communication to this level.

As powerful as culture is, it cannot cancel out or transform these deeply embedded primal forces, but only modulate [them]. No matter where we come from, East, West, North or South, Pleistocene winds blow in our subconscious minds, touching almost every part of our modern lives, from our codes of morality to the ways we arrange our furniture.

It was a confusion of ideas between him and one of the lions he was hunting in Kenya that had caused A.B. Spottsworth to make the obituary column. He thought the lion was dead and the lion thought it wasn't.

"... a woman at the mention of whose name the blood-sucking leeches of the Internal Revenue Department were accustomed to raise their filthy hats with a reverent intake of the breath."

Hah. This makes more sense (and is funnier) now that I know something about Wodehouse's troubles with income tax, thanks to Robert McCrum's biography.

This book has 82 pages of notes providing sources for virtually all quotations and claims of fact, but the juiciest gossip--about the sex life of the Wodehouses--is conspicuously absent from them. Looks a bit sus.

In 1901, the bank's ledger reveals that Wodehouse was guilty of late morning attendance some twenty times, a record surpassed by only one other trainee. 'One of the great sights in the City in the years 1901-2,' he wrote later, 'was me rounding into the straight with my coat-tails flying and just making it across the threshold.'

In total, Wodehouse saw his parents for barely six months between the ages three and fifteen, which is by any standards a shattering emotional deprivation. In old age, he remembered: 'We looked upon mother... [as] a stranger.'

A private banker in New York told me the story of the 11-year-old daughter of a real-estate magnate who grew up flying on the family's private jet. For her birthday, the girl asked her father for a ride on a commercial flight.

"But we have our own jet," the magnate told her.

"I know, but I want to ride on a big plane with other people," she said. "I want to see what an airport looks like on the inside."