via Boing Boing by Carla Sinclair
Is there a difference in how you feel after drinking red wine versus hard liquor? I've always thought so (sleepy with wine, invigorated with dirty martinis and tequila shots), and now a study published in British Medical Journal’s BMJ Open suggests that perhaps different types of alcohol really do affect different emotions after drinking them.
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via Interesting Literature
The best poems by America’s first poet
Anne Bradstreet (1612-1678) was the first person in America, male or female, to have a volume of poems published. She herself wasn’t American and had been born in England, but she was among a group of early English settlers in Massachusetts in the 1630s. In 1650, a collection of her poems, The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung up in America, was published in England, bringing her fame and recognition. This volume was the first book of poems by an author living in America to be published. She continued to write poetry in the ensuing decades.
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via the Guardian by Will Self
How was your day? he’d say, at Broadway Lodge, in the somnolent suburbs of Weston-super-Mare, in the mid-1980s. How was your day? He wore khaki cargo pants (although they weren’t called that yet) and had a nice line in the homiletic: try to get up from that chair, he’d say, and when I expressed perplexity, continued: trying is lying – either you get up or you don’t, and it’s the same with your addiction …
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via the National Archives Blog
Gisela Winegard, alias Klein, a model who had links with John Profumo (catalogue reference: KV 6/146)
Today we have made available to the public 64 previously top secret files from the UK Security Service, or MI5.
The records cover a range of subjects and span the Second World War and post-war era up to the mid-1960s. Personal files include Second World War German intelligence agents and suspected agents, double agent operations, Soviet intelligence agents and suspected agents, Right-wing extremists, Communists, and suspected communist and Russian sympathisers.
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via Arts & Letters Daily: Bradley J Birzer in The American Conservative
John William Waterhouse, “La Belle Dame sans Merci” (1893) (Public Domain)
If you look at what’s playing on your television, at what’s showing at the local cinema, at what video games your children are playing, or at what is selling in the young adult section of your neighborhood Barnes & Noble, you’ll see something that is at once deeply cultural and deeply countercultural at the exact same moment: Romanticism.
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via Boing Boing by Mark Frauenfelder
The Foreign Service Institute has ranked the difficulty of learning a language for English speakers.
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via OUP blog by Walter Frisch
“Streamers” by Nicholas A. Tonelli. CC by 2.0 via Flickr
“Over the Rainbow,” voted the greatest song of the twentieth century in a survey from the year 2000, has been recorded thousands of times since Judy Garland introduced it in The Wizard of Oz in 1939. Even the most diehard fans, including myself, are unlikely to have listened to every version. But five stand out, each distinctive and compelling in its own way.Continue reading
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via the Big Think blog by Derek Beres
We influence one another more than we’ll ever know. Ideas, mores, customs, and religions spread through communities like contagions. So does bacteria, as we know from a history of infections as well as new research on the social circles of lemurs. This study might offer another insight into the complex and fascinating nature of what health entails.
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And yes, I did choose this article because of its illustration which I cannot copy and paste to here! Please follow the link for a delightful picture of a group of lemurs.
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via the Guardian by Stuart Clark
A newly discovered world dwarfs our own largest planet, Jupiter pictured above, and could be a kind of ‘failed’ star known as a brown dwarf. Adding to the mystery, it has been found in a forbidden region around its star called the brown dwarf desert. Photograph: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Betsy Asher Hall/Gervasio Robles
‘When is a planet not a planet?’ is a lot more than the beginning of a poor joke at a drunken astronomers’ Christmas party (but we laughed nonetheless). It is actually a serious question that cuts to the heart of our ignorance about how celestial objects form.
The discovery of a giant planet 22,000 light years away may now help shine some light on this particularly knotty problem. The planet is called OGLE-2016-BLG-1190. It was found on June 2016 by the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (Ogle), a Polish astronomical project run by the University of Warsaw.
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via Interesting Literature
A reading of a classic satirical poem
‘Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes’ is, along with his ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ and his ‘Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College’, the most famous poem by Thomas Gray (1716-71). The poem was occasioned by a real-life event involving the cat belonging to Gray’s friend, Horace Walpole (author of the first Gothic novel among other things). Gray’s poem pokes fun at human sentimentality by describing the death of the cat in deliberately exaggerated terms, likening the cat’s plight to the tragic fall of an epic hero.
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