Nepenthe

TOYS ARE US Check Robosapiens story abridged in The Independent (The image goes directly to the Robosapiens website itself) TOYS WERE US Rubik's Cube This perplexing treat became the must-have toy, Christmas 1981. This Eighties icon shifted more than 100 million units. Sylvanian Families This figurine franchise addressed the pressing debate as to how a fox and a chicken would get on were they ever forced to live in the same house - and dress in turn-of-the-century frontier costume. They won Toy of the Year an unprecedented three times, in 1987, 1988, and 1989. Tamagotchi Fickle children forgot that a Tamagotchi is for life, abandoning these virtual pets almost as soon as the 1996 festive rush was over. Their Japanese manufacturers shipped more than 70 million units in two months to the US and UK alone. Furbies The cuddly, loquacious Furby took the toy market by storm in the late Nineties. Famously banned from the Pentagon, because they were...

Book aid: a literary pantheon follows musicians' lead on Aids in Africa First the pop stars sang for aid to Africa, and now an illustrious group of authors are helping victims of Aids in the continent. Twenty-one writers, including five Nobel prize winners, have produced an anthology to raise money for a charity helping those with Aids and HIV in southern Africa. Telling Tales , a collection of short stories by Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood, Gabriel García Márquez, Susan Sontag, Woody Allen, John Updike and 15 others, will be launched at the United Nations headquarters in New York by Kofi Annan tomorrow, before World Aids Day. The book was the brainchild of the Booker prize winning author Nadine Gordimer after it struck her that writers should follow the example of musicians, who have rerecorded Do They Know It's Christmas and have also been active in supporting Aids causes across Africa. "I became very conscious of the fact that musicians and singers were having c...

(...) marmalade. ‘I was told by the French owner of a well-known brand of jam,’ wrote the reader, ‘that the origin of the word marmalade is in fact the English mispronunciation of the French phrase ‘‘maladie de Marie’’. Mary, Queen of Scots, would visit her close ally the French king by sea from Scotland rather than risk the wrath of Elizabeth I by travelling through England. Mary suffered awful sea-sickness during the often choppy crossing. Eating portions of bitter Seville oranges was found to be an effective remedy for this illness. Hence the name of “guérir la maladie de Marie’’ (to cure Mary’s sickness) for small pieces of bitter Seville oranges.’ A likely story! When did these Marian visits to France during Elizabeth’s reign take place, then? And where does the French word marmelade come from, pray? I’ve heard a less garbled version in which the supposed origin is ‘Marie est malade’. You might as well say mal de mer. But the truth, as a less Rutherfordian reader suggested the d...

The Brain's Own Marijuana Research into natural chemicals that mimic marijuana's effects in the brain could help to explain--and suggest treatments for--pain, anxiety, eating disorders, phobias and other conditions Marijuana is a drug with a mixed history. Mention it to one person, and it will conjure images of potheads lost in a spaced-out stupor. To another, it may represent relaxation, a slowing down of modern madness. To yet another, marijuana means hope for cancer patients suffering from the debilitating nausea of chemotherapy, or it is the promise of relief from chronic pain. The drug is all these things and more, for its history is a long one, spanning millennia and continents. It is also something everyone is familiar with, whether they know it or not. Everyone grows a form of the drug, regardless of their political leanings or recreational proclivities. That is because the brain makes its own marijuana, natural compounds called endocannabinoids (after the plant...

Textbook Disclaimers, anyone?

The Give-and-Take At the Book Thing BALTIMORE -- Early one morning a couple of winters ago, a homeless man scanned the spines of hundreds of books set in neat rows outside the Book Thing of Baltimore. As he searched for a good book to kill time before heading to a nearby shelter, a sparkling gold Mercedes-Benz SUV pulled up to the curb. Out stepped a fifty-something woman wearing a full-length mink coat and carrying two or three Neiman Marcus bags full of paperbacks. "It was just so cliche," recalls Book Thing founder Russell Wattenberg. "It's like one of those things where if I saw this on a TV show, I'd say they were, like, stretching it." The paperbacks were a donation to the Book Thing, a novel kind of exchange where thousands of books are given away each weekend. The woman wanted a receipt, so Wattenberg ducked into the crowded basement from which the Book Thing operates and wrote one up. When he emerged, he says, the wealthy woman and the de...

Computers as Authors? Literary Luddites Unite! or some people, writing a novel is a satisfying exercise in self-expression. For me, it's a hideous blend of psychoanalysis and cannibalism that is barely potent enough to overcome a series of towering avoidance mechanisms - including my own computer. Writers and computers nowadays are locked in such an enduringly dysfunctional embrace that it can be hard to tell us apart. We both rely heavily on memory, for instance. We are both calculating, complex and crash-prone. And like Hebrew National hot dogs, we both seem to answer to a higher power: writers, according to Plato, were divinely inspired; computers have Bill Gates. Occasionally you hear of a Luddite novelist who shuns computers, but the truth is that most of us would be lost without them. If I rail and curse at mine, it is partly out of resentment at our miserable co-dependence. Imagine, then, the blow to my scribbler's vanity when I discovered a while bac...

Which File Extension are You?

Gutenberg Printing Method Questioned Johannes Gutenberg may be wrongly credited with producing the first Western book printed in movable type, according to an Italian researcher. Presenting his findings in a mock trial of Gutenberg at the recent Festival of Science in Genoa, Bruno Fabbiani, an expert in printing who teaches at Turin Polytechnic, said the 15th-century German printer used stamps rather than the movable type he is said to have invented between 1452 and 1455. Gutenberg (c.1397-1468), whose real name was Johannes Gensfleisch, is credited with inventing a mold for small metal blocks with raised letters on them. The blocks could be put together to form words. After a page was printed, the type could be reused for printing other pages. With this method, Gutenberg is said to have printed an edition of about 180 copies — of which only 48 exist today — of the 42-line bible, so called for the number of lines in each printed column. The invention produced a literary boo...

It's official - the platypus is weird Scientists from the Australian National University have proved what many have thought for years - platypuses are really weird. In the international Nature journal today they report a platypus has five chromosones determining sex, not one - like the rest of the species in the world. Professor Jennifer Graves says platypus have five X and five Y chromosomes, and when sperm are made it gets even stranger. " What we've discovered is that these five Xs and five Ys line up in a great big long chain, that go XY XY XY XY XY XY, and then all the X chromosomes move to one pole, and all the Y chromosomes move to the other ," she said. Professor Graves says there is another unexpected finding. " One end of the chain looks like human sex chromosomes but the other end of the chain looks like bird sex chromosomes, so the chain is actually linking a very ancient system of sex determination in birds and probably reptiles too ," sh...

So, this is the best I could do so far. 'Twas fun. 1 – What was Arnold Layne’s hobby, and where did he end up as a result of it? He collected women's clothes from washing lines. Ended up imprisoned. 2 – Which Pink Floyd album can be seen in the Stanley Kubrick movie, A Clockwork Orange ? In one scene, where alex (malcom Mcdowell) goes to the shoping center to buy a record. once he stands in front of the man, bangs his stick and askes about his request, if you look to the top right hand corner near the light, the album cover, of the cow is clearly visible. 3 – Which Pink Floyd song has 36 different drummers playing on it? 4 – How many different types of animals have been named in the lyrics of Pink Floyd songs? Thirty-two (Armadillo, Bear, Bird, Butterfly, Cat, Cattle, Crow, Dog, Dove, Duck, Eagle, Fish, Fox, Hound, Jaguar, Kingfisher, Lark, Mackeral, Mole, Mouse, Pig, Pigeon, Rabbit, Rat, Raven, Seagull, Sheep, Swallow, Swan, Tiger, Unicorn, Worm) ...

One might have expected the uproar that ensued last February when UPN unveiled plans for a reality show called "Amish in the City." The premise--five Old Order Amish teenagers move to Los Angeles to live with six of their non-Amish peers, confronting the seductive powers of technology and libertinage--instantly aroused opposition from a coalition of Amish advocates, rural-life preservationists, and a majority of U.S. senators, who signed a letter accusing Viacom, UPN's parent company, of bigotry. "Amish in the City," these guardians of good taste insisted in newspaper ads and press conferences, would hold the Amish up to ridicule. (This was before the show had even been produced, let alone aired.) After mulling cancellation, UPN decided to air the show anyway, prompting Rep. Joseph Pitts (R-Pa.), who represents the heavily Amish Lancaster area, to tell local papers that "[t]he very nature of this program is offensive and exploitative." Pitts needn...