How to upset an Italian Politician

A funny story of revenge

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Shakespeare's Pulp Fiction

Two passages of William Shakespeare's Pulp Fiction:

ACT I SCENE 2. A road, morning. Enter a carriage, with JULES and VINCENT, murderers.

J: And know'st thou what the French name cottage pie?
V: Say they not cottage pie, in their own tongue?
J: But nay, their tongues, for speech and taste alike
Are strange to ours, with their own history:
Gaul knoweth not a cottage from a house.
V: What say they then, pray?
J: Hachis Parmentier.
V: Hachis Parmentier! What name they cream?
J: Cream is but cream, only they say le crème.
V: What do they name black pudding?
J: I know not;
I visited no inn it could be bought.


...


J: My pardon; did I break thy concentration?
Continue! Ah, but now thy tongue is still.
Allow me then to offer a response.
Describe Marsellus Wallace to me, pray.
B: What?
J: What country dost thou hail from?
B: What?
J: How passing strange, for I have traveled far,
And never have I heard tell of this What.
What language speak they in the land of What?
B: What?
J: The Queen's own English, base knave, dost thou speak it?
B: Aye!
J: Then hearken to my words and answer them!
Describe to me Marsellus Wallace!
B: What?
JULES presses his knife to BRETT's throat
J: Speak 'What' again! Thou cur, cry 'What' again!
I dare thee utter 'What' again but once!
I dare thee twice and spit upon thy name!
Now, paint for me a portraiture in words,
If thou hast any in thy head but 'What',
Of Marsellus Wallace!
B: He is dark.
J: Aye, and what more?
B: His head is shaven bald.
J: Has he the semblance of a harlot?
B: What?
JULES strikes and BRETT cries out
J: Has he the semblance of a harlot?
B: Nay!
J: Then why didst thou attempt to bed him thus?
B: I did not!
J: Aye, thou didst! O, aye, thou didst!
Thou hoped to rape him like a chattel whore,
And sooth, Lord Wallace is displeased to bed
With anyone but she to whom he wed.

Source

Up and Then Down

The longest smoke break of Nicholas White’s life began at around eleven o’clock on a Friday night in October, 1999. White, a thirty-four-year-old production manager at Business Week, working late on a special supplement, had just watched the Braves beat the Mets on a television in the office pantry. Now he wanted a cigarette. He told a colleague he’d be right back and, leaving behind his jacket, headed downstairs.

The magazine’s offices were on the forty-third floor of the McGraw-Hill Building, an unadorned tower added to Rockefeller Center in 1972. When White finished his cigarette, he returned to the lobby and, waved along by a janitor buffing the terrazzo floors, got into Car No. 30 and pressed the button marked 43. The car accelerated. It was an express elevator, with no stops below the thirty-ninth floor, and the building was deserted. But after a moment White felt a jolt. The lights went out and immediately flashed on again. And then the elevator stopped.

The control panel made a beep, and White waited a moment, expecting a voice to offer information or instructions. None came. He pressed the intercom button, but there was no response. He hit it again, and then began pacing around the elevator. After a time, he pressed the emergency button, setting off an alarm bell, mounted on the roof of the elevator car, but he could tell that its range was limited. Still, he rang it a few more times and eventually pulled the button out, so that the alarm was continuous. Some time passed, although he was not sure how much, because he had no watch or cell phone. He occupied himself with thoughts of remaining calm and decided that he’d better not do anything drastic, because, whatever the malfunction, he thought it unwise to jostle the car, and because he wanted to be (as he thought, chuckling to himself) a model trapped employee. He hoped, once someone came to get him, to appear calm and collected. He did not want to be scolded for endangering himself or harming company property. Nor did he want to be caught smoking, should the doors suddenly open, so he didn’t touch his cigarettes. He still had three, plus two Rolaids, which he worried might dehydrate him, so he left them alone. As the emergency bell rang and rang, he began to fear that it might somehow—electricity? friction? heat?—start a fire. Recently, there had been a small fire in the building, rendering the elevators unusable. The Business Week staff had walked down forty-three stories. He also began hearing unlikely oscillations in the ringing: aural hallucinations. Before long, he began to contemplate death.

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The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online

This site contains Darwin's complete publications, thousands of handwritten manuscripts and the largest Darwin bibliography and manuscript catalogue ever published; also hundreds of supplementary works: biographies, obituaries, reviews, reference works and more.

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This should be mandatory reading for anyone who espouses opinions about whether or not evolution is real.

The man who was Stalin's body double finally tells his story

The narrow, baggy eyes and droopy moustache are unmistakable – features that terrified half the world, condemned millions to a cruel death and which even today are an instant symbol of monstrous despotism.

Yet the man who so clearly has Joseph Stalin's face upon his shoulders is not Stalin at all.

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In pictures: Visions of Science

This image of a peppercorn and a grain of salt taken by David McCarthy is the overall winner (and close-up category winner) in this year's Visions of Science Photographic Awards. The competition is sponsored by Novartis and The Daily Telegraph.

Nine more HERE

Space violets

BERWICK, Pa.—Thanks to outer space, Arietta Varner's African violets produce half-dollar-sized blooms nearly year-round and need little care.

Her two plants come from a strain of flowers that were grown from seeds that spent about six years in space in the 1980s. The seeds were exposed to radiation, which caused certain genetic mutations.

Guests to the Varner home are drawn to the pair of potted plants by the living room window.

"They can't believe the size of the blooms," said her husband, Ron Varner. "Some of them are as big as half a dollar. That's almost double the size of a normal African violet."

Arietta Varner's daughter, Crystal Russ, Levittown, gave her mother a small, potted "Space Violet" as a Mother's Day gift about nine years ago.

Ron Varner, as the green thumb between the two, tended to the plant. He watered it once a week, gave it a fertilizer supplement every three weeks and kept it in a window where it got bright, indirect light.

A year later, the plant had grown, so he put it in a larger pot. Four years after that, it was even bigger, and he moved it to a pot about 8 inches in diameter, where it stays today.

During that second transition, a piece of the plant fell off. Ron Varner put it in water, where the cutting sprouted roots. He potted it, and now they have two plants.

The second one took about four years to reach the size of the first one.

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Boomtown

What happens when an oil field as big as any in the Middle East is discovered in the desolate border towns of Montana and North Dakota?

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Sword of Goujian

In 1965, while an archaeological survey was being performed along the second main aqueduct of the Zhang River Reservoir in Jingzhou, Hubei, more than fifty ancient tombs of the Chu State were found in Jiangling County. The dig started in the middle of October 1965 and ended in January 1966. More than 2000 artifacts were recovered from the sites, the most interesting of which was a bronze sword.

In December, 1965, 7 km away from the ruins of Jinan, an ancient capital of Chu, a casket was discovered in Wangshan site #1. Inside, an ornate sword was found on the left of a human skeleton.

The sword was found sheathed in a wooden black lacquer scabbard. The scabbard had an almost air-tight fit with the sword body. Unsheathing the sword revealed an untarnished blade, despite the tomb being soaked in underground water for over two thousand years. A simple test conducted by the archaeologists showed that the blade could still easily cut a stack of twenty pieces of paper.

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Improv Everywhere Gives Little League Team Their Best Game Ever

Improv Everywhere is the cosmic balance to Gawker: a group of real-world performance artists who generally make people feel like the world is a magical place. And in this clip that's been making the rounds, they turn a little league baseball game into a major league match, with an NBC sportscaster, a Jumbotron, and I won't ruin the rest. See below.

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Interactive Vietnam Veterans Memorial

Facts about The Interactive Wall

• At full size, The Wall image on Footnote is about 460 feet wide (400,000 pixels wide by 12,500 pixels tall).
• We found 58,320 names inscribed on The Wall.
• There are about 70 names which are duplicates or misspellings.
• 8 names are women.
• 2,056 are listed as "body not recovered."
• Average age is 22.8 years old.
• 6,301 images were photographed by Peter Krogh
• Darren Higgins used six computers to stitch 1,494 images into a single 5 gigapixel image of The Wall.

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Firefox 3 Beta 5 Easter Egg

Intrepid testers using Firefox 3 beta 5: type about:robots into the address bar to get a fun page of robotic references

Even better, in the title bar of the tab are written the immortal words : "Klaatu Barada Nikto".

Field Guide to Testing Firefox 3

If you're sick of Firefox 2 eating up over a gigabyte of memory only to freeze up and crash, it may be time to move onto Firefox 3. The new version of our favorite browser has seen its fifth and final beta release, and Mozilla says its for testing purposes only. However, the Firefox 3 beta is leaner, meaner, faster, and just plain better than Firefox 2—and don't tell Daddy Mozilla, but even at this early stage, we've found it to be stable enough for full-time use. There are a few ways you can start using Firefox 3 without blowing your browser setup to hell or losing your most important extensions. Here's how.

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Tube Guitar

On this site you can learn to play guitar by watching free video guitar lessons of other people playing songs or teaching guitar. This is the fastest and most effective way to increase your guitar skills and learn new songs. Don’t forget to subscribe so you can learn something new every day.

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The Adventure of Many Lifetimes

For thousands of years,

the human race has spread out across the Earth, scaling mountains and plying the oceans, planting crops and building highways, raising skyscrapers and atmospheric CO2 levels, and observing, with tremendous and unflagging enthusiasm, the Biblical injunction to be fruitful and multiply across our world's every last nook, cranny and subdivision.

An invitation.

Earth has issues, and it's time humanity got started on a Plan B. So, starting in 2014, Virgin founder Richard Branson and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin will be leading hundreds of users on one of the grandest adventures in human history: Project Virgle, the first permanent human colony on Mars.

The question is, do you want to join us?

Ever yearned to journey to the stars? You can learn how to become a Virgle Pioneer, test your Pioneering potential, or join the Mission Control community that will help develop the 100 Year Plan we've outlined here.

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