The Twisted Journey Of 'Napoleon's Privates' "Whenever someone implies that history is boring, I bring up Napoleon's penis..." (via)
10 Badasses From the Pages of History A few surprises in there. A few that I never heard of.
Studs Terkel interviews Frank Zappa In August of 1968, Chicago's WFMT-FM broadcast of Studs Terkel's Wax Museum featuring composer, guitarist and full-time anarchist Frank Zappa. (via)
How Hunter S. Thompson beat back his writer’s block Writers sometimes suffer bouts of major paralysis. They want to write, are desperate to get down something great, but it’s just not coming easily, in fact not at all. (via)
Richard K. Morgan blogging on Amazon US (via)
Baseball diamonds: the lefthander's best friend "Ninety percent of the human population is right-handed, but in baseball 25 percent of the players, both pitchers, and hitters, are left-handed..." There are a number of purely physical reasons why the game favors lefties. Mechanical engineer David A. Peters breaks it down for us.
Pothead Ph.D. I never would have made it this far in graduate school without the aid of marijuana. Not a cautionary tale. Forget all the cliches and misinformation, this guy pretty much nails it. (via)
Japanese etiquette on entering a home or room, take off your shoes A quick primer, with video, for us gaijin barbarians.
also: World Conflicts Today (via); Richard Tomlinson v. MI6 The whereabouts of Richard Tomlinson is unknown, and whether he is alive or dead. (via); The Memory Hole is back!
lagniappe: Down for everyone or just me? (via)
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
stray bullets
2 comments:
Regarding Pothead PhD: It may stimulate creativity, lateral thinking, that sort of thing, but in my experience school was mostly rote memorization, smoking pot and studying were mutually exclusive pursuits. The writer emphasized the need for moderation, but I've never been able to keep pot in the house without--you know, smokin' it. Never managed to get that college degree.
Regarding 10 Badasses:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExphZ54XVEU
Retention and weed are indeed not compatible. Some would debate the value of the inspiration gained from smoking weed but some would say, as in the article above, that it works for them.
There's probably a lot of body chemistry factors that are hard to gauge and marijuana varies from plant to plant in it's chemical composition. There are 50+ psychoactive chemicals in marijuana and a seemingly infinite variety. It's never the same from breed to breed, even plant to plant. I buddy of mine's mother is a research scientist and she was part of a study to isolate and identify all the different compounds. I think they're done with that now, for the most part. Now they're figuring out what they do to a brain and body.
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From what I've read, Genghis Khan was quite the badass. I've also read that his lieutenant, Jebe the Arrow was even more so. Maybe less murderous, but far more cunning and skillful.
If you drop me an email, I'll send you an interesting book.
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