Sherlock Holmes never said “Elementary, my dear Watson.” Neither Ingrid Bergman nor anyone else in “Casablanca” says “Play it again, Sam”; Leo Durocher did not say “Nice guys finish last”; Vince Lombardi did say “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing” quite often, but he got the line from someone else. Patrick Henry almost certainly did not say “Give me liberty, or give me death!”; William Tecumseh Sherman never wrote the words “War is hell”; and there is no evidence that Horace Greeley said “Go west, young man.” Marie Antoinette did not say “Let them eat cake”; Hermann Göring did not say “When I hear the word ‘culture,’ I reach for my gun”; and Muhammad Ali did not say “No Vietcong ever called me nigger.” Gordon Gekko, the character played by Michael Douglas in “Wall Street,” does not say “Greed is good”; James Cagney never says “You dirty rat” in any of his films; and no movie actor, including Charles Boyer, ever said “Come with me to the Casbah.” Many of the phrases for which Winston Churchill is famous he adapted from the phrases of other people, and when Yogi Berra said “I didn’t really say everything I said” he was correct.

via Notable Quotables : The New Yorker.

For just $50,000 each—half off for kids—I can buy a fractional share of the Terra Vivos underground shelter network, a project that will include at least 19 more “community bunkers,” each of them located within 150 to 200 miles of a major American city. Terra Vivos is a concrete-and-steel solution to the end times, whether brought about by climate change or nuclear war or even an unavoidable realignment of the cosmic order. Wherever I happen to be at that terrible moment, I’ll have a place to live the morning after.

It all came together for Vicino in 1980:

The idea to build and sell post-apocalyptic bunkers weighed on Vicino for many years before he acted. In 1980 he saw a replica of the Mayan calendar, the ancient stone carving that predicts that the world will end on December 21, 2012. Vicino recalls the moment clearly. “It just gave me this gut-wrenching feeling that I needed to convert a mine to a shelter for 1,000 people with everything you’d need to survive for a long period of time.”

via Popular Science.

Words fail me.

In the past few months North Korea has embraced social media, first creating a YouTube channel, and in August a Twitter account with the name @uriminzok, which roughly means ‘our people’ in Korean. North Korea has since been busy and has already racked up 457 tweets for its 10,334 followers. Pyongyang is however being very selective over who it chooses to follow. As of today it has followed only 13 other accounts. Who are these 13 accounts that North Korea has deemed worthy of following? You might be surprised by the answer.

via reviewmylife.

Aldo Sassi has claimed that he can guarantee that the seven riders he coaches are not doping. The Italian, who oversees the training of Ivan Basso (Liquigas-Doimo) and Cadel Evans (BMC), was speaking in response to comments made by CONI anti-doping investigator Ettore Torri on the pervasiveness of doping in cycling. “In the bible, the prophet Jonah speaks to God of the city of Nineveh, which is overrun with criminals. ‘How many just men are there?’ they ask. Maybe five. ‘Then I won’t destroy it,’ said God. In my cycling Nineveh, I can count on seven just men,” Sassi told Gazzetta dello Sport.

via cyclingnews.com.

I love reading such creative mashups of the text!

[caption id="attachment_46" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="Micah & Hannah, at 6 & 6"][/caption] January 2004. micah was 6 years old, hannah was 6 months.

They've both always been very close, developmentally-mandated bickering aside.

Alan Jacobs on civility online:

I have thought a lot about why people get so hostile online, and I have come to believe it is primarily because we live in a society with a hypertrophied sense of justice and an atrophied sense of humility and charity, to put the matter in terms of the classic virtues.

via Big Questions Online.

So when you put together a hypertrophied sense of justice and an atrophied sense of humility & charity, and seek to plot the trajectory the origin seems to be narcissism, no?

The destination?

How Oct. 4 - Oct. 15, 1582 came to be simply declared out of existence by Pope Gregory XIII:

The commission sent its report to the pope Sept. 14, 1580. He issued a papal bull on Feb. 24, 1582, declaring that the new calendar would go into force in October (when there were few holy days), and that 10 days would be skipped. The day after Oct. 4 would be called not Oct. 5, but Oct. 15.

via wired.com.

Imagine doing something like that today...