via the Killer Web Directory blog by Administrator
Here is a great infographic from the folks at Motorcycler.com that provides lots of information about the history of the motorbike. This timeline begins in 1867 when the first ever motorbike was invented by and goes all the way through to modern times when the first water cooled electric engine was introduced.
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via Interesting Literature
The full title of Robert Burns’s ‘To a Mouse’ is, in fact, ‘To a Mouse, On Turning Her up in Her Nest with the Plough, November 1785’. That full title explains what the poem is about – and it was probably based on a real event, when Burns accidentally destroyed a mouse’s nest while ploughing a field. The poem inspired the title of John Steinbeck’s novel Of Mice and Men with its line, ‘The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men, / Gang aft agley’ (that is, often go awry).
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via About History
The bronze collapse is a term that archaeologists and historians refer to the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age in the ancient Middle East and the Eastern Mediterranean. In this region, the change of epochs was associated with catastrophic changes in the social order, the loss of many production and cultural traditions, including writing, the destruction of all major states and many cities of that time. On a large part of the territory comes the period of “dark ages”.
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I finished copying and pasting this and started to wonder what was happening in a Biblical sense at this time. Down the rabbit hole I went and found a timeline of the Bible.
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Tales of the unexpected: 10 literary classics you may not have read#
via the Guardian by Henry Eliot
A detail from the cover of MP Shiel’s The Purple Cloud. Photograph: Matthew Young/Penguin
Early feminist science fiction, the last man on Earth and the memoir of a highly intelligent cat ... among the 1,200 titles in the Penguin Classics series are these forgotten masterpieces
The world’s largest library of classic literature is the Penguin Classics series, which has more than 1,200 titles in print. It features all the most famous works of world literature, from Homer’s Odyssey to Ulysses by James Joyce. But as well as its grand galleries and corridors, its illustrious authors and literary landmarks, it has plenty of secret rooms and hidden corners, filled with titles that fewer people read, and these can be just as rewarding to explore.
Continue reading and you may discover, as I did, that you read none of them.
Left Bank: Art, Passion and the Rebirth of Paris 1940–50
By Agnès Poirier
Bloomsbury 377pp £21.99 order from our bookshop
A review by Kevin Jackson in the Literary Review [via Arts & Letters Daily]
For a book that is crammed with adulteries, alcoholism, betrayals, broken friendships, deportations, deprivation, drug addiction, executions, humiliation, illicit abortions, imprisonment, murder, Nazi atrocities, starvation, torture chambers (on the avenue Hoche, passers-by could hear the screams coming up from the cellars’ air vents), treason and worse, Agnès Poirier’s Left Bank is a remarkably exhilarating read.
Above all, it has a terrific cast, with, as leading players, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The novelist, jazz musician and pataphysician Boris Vian, Samuel Beckett and the resident aliens Picasso and Giacometti also feature, as do brilliant African-American musicians and writers such as Miles Davis, James Baldwin and Richard Wright, the vehemently anti-communist Hungarian writer and wife-beater Arthur Koestler and, among the occupiers, the sinister but fascinating German Ernst Jünger, aesthete, entomologist and polymath.
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via Interesting Literature
Written in 1785 and published the following year, ‘Halloween’ is not Robert Burns’s best-known poem, but it is one of his longest. Focusing on the traditions and activities associated with Halloween in eighteenth-century Scotland, ‘Halloween’ is best read aloud – but failing that, here’s the text of the full poem (all 252 lines of it!).
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via the OUP blog by Susan Valladares
Plate III, Negres au Travail’. CC BY 4.0 via Wellcome Collection.
He ran away from bondage in Jamaica and became the leader of what the newspapers described as “a very desperate gang of Negro Slaves”. He had a mutilated hand. He was accused of robbery and several murders. Between 1780 and 1781, he evaded all attempts at capture. A royal proclamation was issued, offering a reward of £100 for his arrest (to which was later added £200 for his head), the promise of emancipation for any slave who should take or kill him, and a further £5 for the apprehension of each of his followers.
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via Interesting Literature
‘Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness’: John Keats wrote many a memorable and arresting opening line in his short life, but his opening to his great poem ‘To Autumn’, one of his finest odes, is perhaps his most resonant of all. On one level a straightforward evocation of the season of autumn, ‘To Autumn’ (or ‘Ode to Autumn’ as it is sometimes known) is also a poem that subtly reflects the early nineteenth-century context in which it was written.
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via the Big THink blog by Paul Ratner
A buzzworthy study looks at the strange actions of bees.
- Scientists recorded the activities of bees during the 2017 total solar eclipse.
- They found that bees completely stopped flying and buzzing.
- A team of professional and citizen scientists was involved.
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Watch: caterpillars feeding on exploding touch-me-not seed podsvia Boing Boing by Mark Frauenfelder
There is a kind of caterpillar in England's Lake District that has evolved to feed exclusively on the seed pods of a plant called the touch-me-not. Unfortunately for the caterpillar, the seed pods explode, without warning, to disperse their seeds. In this BBC video narrated by Bernard Cribbins you'll see a number of caterpillars having their feast interrupted when it explodes in their face.
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