Grab the Nearest Book...

[dearc]

I turned to page 28 and it was blank. (Chapter 3 started on page 30) Some days are like that.

 

[Maid of Marvels]

So, Mr. Blank Page on 28, after reading your profile I see that you may be one of only a handful that understands what it means to "fashion (insert ingredient here) into the size of a golf ball" when we come across that in cookbooks. Can I have your autograph?

 

[dearc]

Maid of Marvels...an autograph ? I'm jst an analogue man in a digital world.

 

[Maid of Marvels]

Okay, I'll take an e-autograph. That would be similar but... different.

 

[Munachi]

Aufgrund der sprachlichen Nähe der Sotavento-Varietäten haben manche Linguisten angenommen, dass es sich beim Kriol um exportiertes Kabuverdianu handelt, das nur nicht so stark relusitanisiert worden sei wie das Kabuverdianu selbst.

(Because of the linguistic similarity of the Sotavento-varieties, some linguists assumed that Kriol is an exported version of Capverdian, which just hasn't been relusitanized as much as Capverdian itself.)

 

[MaiusImperium]

WWII Postal Acronyms

B.U.R.M.A. - Be Upstairs Ready My Angel

M.A.L.A.Y.A. - My Ardent Lips Await Your Arrival

N.O.R.W.I.C.H. - (K)nickers Off Ready When I Come Home

S.W.A.L.K. - Sealed With A Loving Kiss

H.O.L.L.A.N.D. - Hope Our Love Lasts And Never Dies

I.T.A.L.Y. - I'm Thinking About Loving You

B.O.L.T.O.P. - Better On Lips Than On Paper

Toasts of the Navy

Monday - Our Ships at Sea

Tuesday - Our Men

Wednesday - Ourselves

Thursday - A Bloody War or A Sickly Season

Friday - A Willing Foe and Sea Room

Saturday - Sweethearts & Wives (may they never meet)

Sunday - Absent Friends


Taken from Ben Schott's Schott's Original Miscellany I found it a very interesting, light read.

 

[Nibbles_n_Tits]

"Blanche and Louis, accompanied by Louis' younger brothers Alphonse and Robert, senior members of the court, personal servants, and a military escort consisting of two dozen crossbow men and twenty knights, were already ensconced in their apartments when Marguerite's entourage appeared on the horizon."

Nancy Goldstone
Four Queens
The Provencal Sisters Who Ruled Europe

 

[UnseenMaiden]

A few times he almost slipped with some anecdote that might have amused Maura and would have been of little import, but he always caught himself.

Code Ezra by Gay Courter
(actually one of the few books in this house I have yet to read.)

 

[Munachi]

However, the most important reason the majority of the world's languages are known only to specialists and the speakers themselves is that many linguists work on only one language or sometimes a handful of related languages, and linguistics have tended to work on the familiar and easily accessible languages of Western Europe spoken by large numbers of people.

 

[Kaena]

"If you are hinting that the princess might be more careful about what she admits to have done with her men, then save your breath."

(Source: Lick of Frost, Laurell K. Hamilton)

 

[ShivanDragon00]

All were CEOs of companies that had invested in ITC, or venture capitalists.


(source: Timeline, Michael Crichton)

 

[andygorn]

"That was probably why he clung so tightly to his dreams and was reluctant to let them go: because they were a form of wish-fulfilment, a place and a time when the world was a different world and the Necroscope a different person; himself."

['Necroscope: The Lost Years (Volume 1)' by Brian Lumley].

 

[Munachi]

El 27 de mayo de 1975, con la Ley N° 21 156 se reconoció el idioma quechua "al igual que el castellano" como lengua oficial de la República del Perú por ser la primera hablada por "vastos sectores de la población [que] desconocen sus obligaciones y están limitados en el ejercicio de sus derechos" y con el fin de "rescatar nuestro idioma nativo, como medio esencial para lograr la unificación nacional".
(Perú: Educación bilingüe en un país plurilingüe?)

 

[trysail]

"Almost every town in France now has a museum of 'daily life' or of 'popular arts and traditions'. Most of them are stocked with artefacts that would otherwise have disappeared or turned into expensive accessories in homes and restaurants. The roughly decorated chests, the butter churns and baskets, the wooden tables with smooth, saucer shaped depressions into which the soup was poured, bear witness to the resilience of their owners. They have the dignity of objects that shared a human life. Each one contains the ghost of a gesture that was performed a million times. They make it easy to imagine a life of hard work and habit.

Naturally the artefacts are the best examples available: the hefty cradle, the expensive plough with metal parts and a manufacturer's name, the embroidered smock that was kept in a chest as part of someone's trouseau and never saw the pigsty or the field. As survivors, they tell a heartening tale of endurance. Other companions of daily life— the rotting bed, the treasured dung heap, the stench-laden fug of human and animal breath that could extinguish a burning candle— are impossible to display.

Sometimes, the person who was survived by her possessions appears in their midst and the purposeful display is belied by the photograph of a face scoured by hardship. The expression is often one of faint suspicion, dread or simply dull fatigue. It makes imagining the life that belonged to these objects seem a blundering intrusion. It seems to say that daily existence is harder to fathom than the obsolete tools and kitchen utensils, and that, if it could be recreated, the staple diet of a past life, with its habits, sensations and smells would have a stranger taste than the most exotic regional dish.

Written descriptions of daily life inevitably convey the same bright sense of purpose and progress. They pass through the years of lived experience like carefree travellers, telescoping the changes that only a long memory could have perceived. Occasionally, however, a simple fact has the same effect as the photograph in the museum. At the end of the eighteenth century, doctors from urban Alsace to rural Brittany found that high death rates were not caused primarily by famine and disease. The problem was that, as soon as they became ill, people took to their beds and hoped to die. In 1750, the Marquis d'Argenson noticed that the peasants who farmed his land in the Touraine were 'trying not to multiply': 'They wish only for death'. Even in times of plenty, old people who could no longer wield a spade or hold a needle were keen to die as soon as possible. 'Lasting too long' was one of the great fears of life. Invalids were habitually hated by their carers. It took a special government grant, instituted in 1850 in the Seine and Loiret départments, to persuade poor families to keep their ailing relatives at home instead of sending them to that bare waiting room of the graveyard, the municipal hospice.

When there was just enough food for the living, the mouth of a dying person was an obscenity. In the relatively harmonious household of the 1840s described by the peasant novelist Émile Guillaumin, the family members speculate openly in front of Émile's bed-ridden grandmother (who has not lost her hearing): 'I wish we knew how long it's going to last.' And another would reply, 'Not long, I hope.' As soon as the burden had expired, any water kept in pans or basins was thrown out (since the soul might have washed itself— or, if bound for Hell, tried to extinguish itself— as it left the house), and then life went on as before.

'Happy as a corpse' was a saying in the Alps. Visitors to the villages in the Savoy Alps, the central Pyrenees, Alsace and Lorraine, and parts of the Massif Central were often horrified to find silent populations of cretins with hideous thyroid deformities. (The link between goitre and lack of iodine in the water was not widely recognized until the early nineteenth century.) The Alpine explorer Saussure, who asked in vain for directions in a village in the Aosta Valley when most of the villagers were out in the fields, imagined that 'an evil spirit had turned the inhabitants of the unhappy village into dumb animals, leaving them with just enough human face to show that they had once been men.

The infirmity that seemed a curse to Saussure was a blessing to the natives. The birth of a cretinous baby was believed to bring good luck to the family. The idiot child would never have to work and would never have to leave home to earn money to pay the tax-collector. These hideous, blank creatures were already half-cured of life. Even the death of a normal child could be a consolation. If the baby had lived long enough to be baptized, or if a clever witch revived the corpse for an instant to sprinkle it with holy water, its soul would pray for the family in heaven...

...Categorical terms like 'peasants', 'artisans' and 'the poor' reduce the majority of the population to smudges in a crowd scene that no degree of magnification could resolve into a group of faces. They suggest a large and luckless contingent that filled in the background of important events and participated in the nation's historical development by suffering and engaging in a semblance of economic activity.

Even with a short term view, these categories turn out to be misleading. Rich people could fall into povery and peasants could be rich and powerful. Many peasants lived in towns and commuted to the fields. Many were also craftsmen, traders and local officials, just as many so-called aristocrats were semi-literate farmers. Statistics based on a mixture of surveys, censuses and guesswork give what seems a balanced view of the whole population. In 1789, three-quarters were described as 'agricultural'. A century later, the agricultural population had fallen to about 48 per cent, while 25 per cent worked in industry, 14 per cent in commerce and transport, 4 per cent in public services and administration and 3 per cent in the liberal professions, and 6 per cent were independently wealthy. But for reasons that will become clear, these figures always exaggerate the tidy divisions of the population and underestimate the number of people who tried to live off the land."

-Graham Robb
The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography from the Revolution to the First World War.
New York and London, 2007.


Pure serendipity led me to pick up this book whilst strolling amongst the stacks at the local library. What good luck!

Unbeknownst to most all (from the dust jacket description), "While Gustave Eiffel was changing the skyline of Paris, large parts of France were still terra incognita. Even in the age of railways and newspapers, France was a land of ancient tribal divisions, prehistoric communication networks, and pre-Christian beliefs. French itself was a minority language. Historians and anthropologists of the time referred to this land, without irony, as 'Gaul' and Julius Caesar was still being quoted at the end of the nineteenth century as a useful source of information on the inhabitants of the vast interior.

Graham Robb describes that unknown world— before and after the shattering arrival of modern civilization, from the end of the ancien régime to the early twentieth century— in arresting narrative detail. He recounts the epic journeys of mapmakers, scientists, soldiers, administrators, and intrepid tourists, of itinerant workers, pilgrims, and herdsmen with their millions of migratory domestic animals. We learn how France was explored, charted, and colonized, and how the imperial influence of Paris was gradually extended throughout a kingdom of isolated towns and villages..."

For me, it was a truly eye-opening book; I was totally and utterly ignorant of the extent to which medieval conditions predominated throughout almost all of France right up to the dawn of the twentieth century. Amazing!

 

[Kaena]

"Yes, ma'am." His smile usually started out as a smirk, and often stayed there.

High Noon- Nora Roberts

 

[oreocookie]

I'm jst gonna hope no one already did this one because frankly, I don't feel like reading each and every one!
Oh crap this ones obvious (in my opinion)
"An entire chapter to the whole Potter-Dumbledore relationship..."
Well at least, the series is obvious the specific book isn't

 

[Nibbles_n_Tits]

The adventures of Sherlock Holmes continue.

" 'From which it was no great job to divine that you are either a low-level staff officer or a high-ranking member of military intelligence. Given our present circumstances which conclusion would you draw?' "

Caleb Carr
The Italian Secretary

 

[bluerosekissed]

should be in another section but

ill use these for everythin that needs stirring, if my whisk is dirty, ill use a spoon for whipping my creams and lotions.

the herbal body book...

 

[trysail]

"Rose Gorelick Blumkin came to Omaha from the tiny village of Shchedrin, in the region of Minsk. Born in 1893, she and her seven brothers slept on straw on the bare floor of a two-room log house because her rabbi father couldn't afford to buy them a mattress.

'I dreamed all my life, since I was six years old,' she said. 'The first dream of mine was to go to America.'

'In Russia, they used to have pogroms against the Jews. They'd cut up the pregnant women and take out their kids. They'd tear up the fathers and then have a dance in the main market. I was six years old when I found out about that. I said, I'm going to America when I grow up.'

At thirteen, Rose walked barefoot for eighteen miles to the nearest train station to save the leather soles of her brand-new shoes. She had the equivalent of four cents in her pocket and hid under a train seat for three hundred miles to save her money, until she reached the closest town, Gomel. There she knocked on twenty-six doors until the owner of a dry-goods store responded to her proposition. 'I'm not a beggar,' the four-foot-ten-inch girl said. 'I've got four cents in my pocket. Let me sleep in your house and I'll show you how good I am.' The next morning, 'When I came to work I waited on a customer. I rolled out the material and I added it up before anybody picked up a pencil. And at twelve o'clock he asked me if I was going to stay.'

By age sixteen, she was a manager, supervising six married men. 'Don't worry about the men, Mamma!' she wrote her mother. 'They all mind me!' Four years later she married Isadore Blumkin, a shoe salesman in Gomel. That same year, World War I broke out, vigilantes ran amok in Russia, and Rose made up her mind. They had money for only one passage to America, so she sent her husband and started saving to go herself. Two years later, the czarist monk Rasputin was killed by revolutionaries in December 1916. Fearing the chaos that would ensue even more than the cruelties of the czarist regime, Rose began her journey to America two weeks later, boarding the Trans-Siberian Railway on a train headed for China.

For seven days she rode the train until, at the border town of Zabaykai'sk, a Russian guard stopped her before she could enter China. She told the man she was buying leather for the army and promised him a bottle of slivovitz on her return. Either naive or lenient, he let her through the border. She rode through Harbin, Manchuria, to Tientsin, China, on another train. By then Rose had journeyed over nine thousand miles across almost the entire continent of Asia. From Tientsin she used her small stock of money to take a boat to Japan, with stops at Hiroshima and Kobe along the way, until she finally arrived in Yokohama. There she waited for another two weeks until finding the Ava Maru, a cargo boat carrying peanuts that gave her steerage passage to the United States. As the Ava Maru crossed the Pacific for six leisurely weeks on its way to Seattle, 'I never saw so many peanuts,' she said later. 'I thought I'd never get here.' She had carried black bread on board but was too sick for most of the journey to eat.

Landing in Seattle on the Jewish holiday Purim after almost three months of travel with a face swollen from illness, Rose was met at the dock by the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, fed a kosher dinner, and given a hotel room. 'When I came to this country,' she said, 'I thought I am the luckiest one in the whole world.' The HIAS put a tag around her neck with her name and 'Ft. Dodge, Iowa,' where her husband had settled and was working as a junk peddler. They sent her on a train through Minneapolis to Fort Dodge, where the American Red Cross met her and reunited her with Isadore. Rose got pregnant right away and gave birth to a daughter, Frances. She didn't know a word of English.

Two years later, she still spoke hardly any English. Feeling isolated, the Blumkins decided they had to live in a place where Rose could converse in Russian and Yiddish, so they moved to Omaha, a town filled with 32,000 immigrants drawn by the railroads and packinghouses.

Isadore rented a pawnshop. 'You never hear of a pawnshop going broke,' he said. Rose stayed home and had three more children, Louis, Cynthia, and Sylvia. Sending fifty dollars at a time back to Russia, she brought ten of her relatives to America. Unlike her husband, she still didn't speak much English. 'I was too dumb,' she said. 'They couldn't drill it in me with a nail. The kids teached me. When my Frances started kindergarten, she says, 'I'll show you what an apple is, what a tablecloth, what a knife.' But the store struggled and the family almost did go broke during the Depression. Then Rose took charge. I know what to do, undersell the big shots, she told her husband. 'You buy an item for three dollars and sell it for $3.30. Ten percent over cost!' When the old-fashioned suits they carried weren't selling, Rose handed out ten thousand circulars all over Omaha, saying their store would outfit a man for five dollars from head to toe— underwear, suit, tie, shoes, and straw hat. They took in $800 in a single day, more than they had made the entire year before. The store branched into jewelry, used fur coats, and furniture. Then Rose drove the department stores crazy when she started underselling them on new fur coats on consignment. But she had a philosophy: it's better to have them hate you than to feel sorry for you.'

Soon customers started asking her for more furniture. At first she accompanied them to wholesalers and bought for them at ten percent over her cost. She noticed that, unlike pawnbroking, selling furniture was a 'happy business,' so in 1937 she borrowed $500 from a brother to open a store called Blumkin's in a basement near her husband's pawnshop. But the furniture wholesalers didn't want her as a customer, because their dealers complained that she was underselling them. So Rose went to Chicago, found one sympathetic man, and ordered $2,000 worth of merchandise from him on thirty days' credit. The time came due and she was short, so she sold her own home furnishings cheap to pay off the debt. 'When my kids came home, they cried like somebody will die,' she recalled. 'Why I took away the beds and the refrigerator? The whole house, an empty house? I told them, they were so nice to me I can't stand it not to keep my promise.' That night she took a couple of mattresses from the store for the family to sleep on. 'The next day I brought in a refrigerator and stove,' she said, 'and the kids quit crying.'

In school the other children picked on her son, Louie, for having a pawnbroker as a father. He found it painful but ignored their taunts, worked in the store after school, remained a good student, and became an all-American diver at Tech High while delivering sofas until midnight. His mother by now had established the Nebraska Furniture Mart and moved to larger quarters. In a side business, she sold and rented out Browning automatic shotguns during hunting season. Louie's favorite job was testing the guns by firing them into cinder blocks in the family's basement.

By the time the United States entered World War II in 1941, Louie had enrolled at the University of Nebraska, but he dropped out to enlist in the service after only a few semesters, still just a teenager. During the war, he and his mother wrote every day. His mother was discouraged, and he urged her not to quit. Because the big wholesalers refused to sell to Nebraska Furniture Mart, Rose had become a furniture 'bootlegger,' traveling on trains all over the Midwest to buy overstock merchandise at five percent over wholesale from stores like Macy's and Marshall Field's. 'They could see she knew what she was doing,' says Louie. 'They were fond of her and would say, here's this dining room set that just came in. It wasn't easy or cheap, but she got it.' Rose said, 'The more [the wholesalers] boycotted me, the harder I worked.' You don't own the country, the country belongs to everyone, was her attitude. She developed a lasting hatred of big shots. 'When you're down they spit on you,' she said. 'When you start making some dollars they start paying attention. Phooey. Who needs them? Give me the middle class and I'll be happy.' Her slogan was "Sell cheap and tell the truth, don't cheat nobody, and don't take no kickbacks.' When she made a sale, she also told the employees, 'Deliver it before they change their minds!'

Louie won a Purple Heart at the Battle of the Bulge. After the war, he came straight home to Omaha in 1946 and went back to work. He learned everything about merchandising: buying, pricing, inventories, accounting, delivery, display. To Rose, nobody was as good as Louie. Ruthless with her employees, she screamed at them at the top of her lungs; 'You worthless golem! You dummy!' But after his mother fired them, Louie would hire them back.

Four years later the store was prospering, but then the Korean War began, and sales started to sink. Rose decided to give the business a boost by adding carpet to her line. She went to Marshall Field's in Chicago and told them she was buying carpet for $3.00 a yard. She retailed it for $3.95, half the standard price, although the fact that she had lied to Marshall Field's seemed to bother her for years afterward.

Rose had managed to launch a successful carpet business by giving her customers a better price than the other carpet dealers. But carpet maker Mohawk filed a lawsuit to enforce their minimum-pricing policies— under which manufacturers required all their retailers to charge a minimum price— and sent three lawyers to court. Rose showed up alone. 'I say to the judge: I don't have any money for a lawyer because nobody would sell to me. Judge, I sell everything ten percent above cost, what's wrong? I don't rob my customers.' The trial lasted only an hour before the judge threw the case out. The next day, he went out to the Nebraska Furniture Mart and bought $1,400 worth of carpet.

...By the early 1980s, Rose and Louie Blumkin had built the largest furniture store in North America. Its three acres sold over $100 million of furniture a year under one roof, ten times the volume of stores of similar size. From then on, sales grew every single year, in good economies or bad, whether Omaha grew or shrank."

-Alice Schroeder
The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life.
New York, 2008.


A book that illuminates the actual human being behind a person previously known to most of the world as the supreme rationalist-calculating machine: Warren Edward Buffett. Those who think of him as equivalent to "The Marble Man" ( a nickname given to Robert E. Lee by some of his peers for his apparent perfect character ) will be surprised. Here is a brilliant, deeply complex and driven man, here are the forces that shaped his character and enabled his unparalled success as both investor and teacher and here is the story of his career. Some episodes are well-known and already accorded legendary status by investors, others are detailed for the first time. It is the first biography written with Buffett's cooperation.

Buffett's request of the book's author: "Whenever my version is different from somebody else's, Alice, use the less flattering version."

 

[Original_Cyn2]

D. Eddings

Shouldn't we have SOME say on who inherits it?

 

[justabrick]

This it is no coincidence that women, long recognized for their role in passing our culture from generation to generation, excel at spreading memes.

(Sort of fitting, no? )

 

[JudeRodney]

The higher the speed, the faster the torpedoes travel.

Battlefleet Gothic rulebook

 

[Younglord]

Some of our pros felt that this stuff was beneath them.



from Keane The Autobiography

(Roy Keane ex captain of Manchester United)

 

[Nibbles_n_Tits]

From the author of Stiff

"Now that she'd been reborn as someone new, she argued, she couldn't possibly be expected to live or sleep with her old husband."


Mary Roach
Spook
Science Tackles the Afterlife

 

[Munachi]

All available evidence indicates that newer immigrants from parts of the globe not favored by current United States immigration policy differ quite markedly from immigrants of half a century ago.

Joshua A. Fishman: Language in Sociocultural Change