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From Gadling : Even though Edgar Allan Poe's funeral do-over in Baltimore was a couple weeks ago, there are several locations where it's not too late to pay tribute to this literary master of horror. Poe, a traveler himself, moved between Boston, Charlottesville and Richmond, Virginia and Baltimore, plus a few towns in between. Because several of the Poe-related landmarks still exist, it's possible to follow his trail from his birth to his death. Given that this is the 200th year of his birth, why not pay Poe tribute by heading to one of these locations for a Halloween weekend remembrance? Bring a copy of his short stories or poems with you to add to the ambiance. Make sure "The Raven" and "The Fall of the House of Usher" are among them: some of the stops are where they were written. First stop, Boston : Poe was born on Carver Street where an historical marker denotes the location of his birthplace. Poe was born to actor parents January 19, ...

What a busy old year 1969 was. When man wasn't landing on the moon, the Beatles were performing their last concert together, Led Zeppelin were releasing Led Zeppelin I and the Rolling Stones were playing Altamont. Say no more. Meanwhile, on October 29, the first Arpanet network connection between remote computers was established. Arpanet was the military precursor to what we now know as the internet (the term "internetting" would not be coined until 1977). Anyway, at 10.30pm precisely, the first message was sent over the Arpanet between the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Stanford Research Institute by student Charley Kline. The message itself was the word "login". The "l" and the "o" transmitted without problem but then the system crashed. So, trivia fans, the first message transmitted over the internet was "lo". To mark the internet's coming of middle age, our friends at the service provider Easynet Connec...

by Yann Martel  I would guess that most books come from the same mix of three elements: influence, inspiration and hard work. Let me detail how each one came into play in the writing of Life of Pi . Influence Ten or so years ago, I read a review by John Updike in the New York Times Review of Books . It was of a novel by a Brazilian writer, Moacyr Scliar . I forget the title [editor's note: it's Max and the Cats ], and John Updike did worse: he clearly thought the book as a whole was forgettable. His review — one of those that makes you suspicious by being mostly descriptive, without critical teeth, as if the reviewer were holding back — oozed indifference. But one thing about it struck me: the premise. The novel, as far as I ...

Wuthering Heights , Emily Brontë Ponden Hall and Top Withens, England Brontë probably had two places in mind when she imagined Wuthering Heights, the haunted house in Yorkshire at the center of her only novel. The Heights’ remote, windswept location could have been that of Top Withens, a ruined farmhouse that overlooks the moors south of her hometown of Haworth. The structure itself could have been based on Ponden Hall, a 19th-century manor house also near Haworth; the single-paned window on the second floor may well have been the one that Catherine Linton’s ghost tried to climb through one wild, snowy night. (Ponden’s owners, Stephen Brown and Julie Akhurst, do offer tours to small groups.) "The Flying Dutchman" Cape of Good Hope, South Africa The story of a ship called the Flying Dutchman doomed to sail the seas for eternity is a trusty old chestnut much loved in the arts. Richard Wagner turned it into an opera, Washington Irving wrote about it, American artist...

Ang Lee boards Life of Pi film: "I'm delivering the first draft," he said. "I think I've cracked the structure of the movie and I'll figure out how to do it later. "How exactly I'm going to do it, I don't know … A little boy adrift at sea with a tiger. It's a hard one to crack!" Lee said the film would most likely be out in two years' time. Guardian

From the NYT 2008 Food Issue

(...) “Even at the worst times, there were good people, too. Someone taught me to tie the ends of my pants so I could fill the legs with any potatoes I was able to steal. I walked miles and miles like that, because you never knew when you would be lucky again. Someone gave me a little rice, once, and I traveled two days to a market and traded it for some soap, and then traveled to another market and traded the soap for some beans. You had to have luck and intuition. “The worst it got was near the end. A lot of people died right at the end, and I didn’t know if I could make it another day. A farmer, a Russian, God bless him, he saw my condition, and he went into his house and came out with a piece of meat for me.” “He saved your life.” “I didn’t eat it.” “You didn’t eat it?” “It was pork. I wouldn’t eat pork.” “Why?” “What do you mean why?” “What, because it wasn’t kosher?” “Of course.” “But not even to save your life?” “If nothing matters, there’s nothing to save.”

The origin of the title

(mothers...)     EMMY HITLER ate lamp shades in her third trimester.     Frances Edison had inexplicable cravings for tungsten (which was then still known as wolfram), and glass.  Doctor Williams, who'd known Frances since she was knee-high to a corn stalk, told her to control herself.  Couldn't be good for her, or the baby. Pregnancy ..., he said, every now and again you see it do something funny to a woman .     It wasn't funny, though, when Reba Carter chased down three pounds of unshelled peanuts with a handful of Not Cool for Cal in '24! buttons -not funny to her esophagus which was jabbed and pricked by the buttons's needle backings, and not funny to her rectum that had to pass Coolidge and shards of undigested shells, only centimeters from her birth canal.  Nor was it funny to Wade Carter when he received the ph...

My Life as a Dog FOR the last 20 years, New York City parks without designated dog runs have permitted dogs to be off-leash from 9 p.m. to 9 a.m. Because of recent complaints from the Juniper Park Civic Association in Queens, the issue has been revisited. On Dec. 5, the Board of Health will vote on the future of off-leash hours. Retrievers in elevators, Pomeranians on No. 6 trains, bull mastiffs crossing the Brooklyn Bridge ... it is easy to forget just how strange it is that dogs live in New York in the first place. It is about as unlikely a place for dogs as one could imagine, and yet 1.4 million of them are among us. Why do we keep them in our apartments and houses, always at some expense and inconvenience? Is it even possible, in a city, to provide a good life for a dog, and what is a “good life?” Does the health board’s vote matter in ways other than the most obvious? I adopted George (a Great Dane/Lab/pit/greyhound/ridgeback/whatever mix — a k a Brooklyn shorthair) because...

More than 300 million people in the world speak English and the rest, it sometimes seems, try to...' Only Bill Bryson could make a book about the English language so entertaining. With his boundless enthusiasm and restless eye for the absurd, this is his astonishing tour of English. From its mongrel origins to its status as the world's most-spoken tongue; its apparent simplicity to its deceptive complexity; its vibrant swearing to its uncertain spelling and pronunciation, Bryson covers all this as well as the many curious eccentricities that make it as maddening to learn as it is flexible to use. Bill Bryson's classic Mother Tongue is a highly readable and hilarious tale of how English came to be the world's language.

The Art of Mehmet Ozgur

I already have the one on the left, edited by Professor Leonard Wolf now it's time for the New one :-[ Click to visit the author's website

Edward Norton and I are in a cab on the way to the airport, where three Maasai warriors named Samson, Parashi, and Sunte are landing from Kenya. Norton’s invited them to run with him in the New York City Marathon in order to call attention to the plight of the African ecosystem. In between Norton’s explaining, earnestly, how all of this came about, we’re contending with the driver, Hamdid, who’s quite excited that Norton is the fare. He’s singing “ A movie star is in my cab, a movie star is in my cab! ” and bragging over the phone to a friend, in Arabic, of his good luck. “ Italian Job is my favorite movie,” Hamdid says, over his shoulder. “Yeah, it’s the best one I’ve ever made,” replies Norton, drily. “Can I have your picture? That’s all I want, a picture of me and the movie star in my cab!” Norton rolls his eyes. “Sure, as long as you get us to the airport alive,” he says. Then he returns to telling how all this happened. The short story is that Norton is very involved in a ...

Tony Buzan Earlier this year, it was declared that we are in the age of intelligence: 2,000 delegates at the 14th International Conference of Thinking in Kuala Lumpur embraced the fact that instead of thinking agriculturally, informationally or technologically, we will finally think intelligently. And as the year draws to an end, it seems that they were on to something. Everywhere in the world, intellectual capital has become the new buzz phrase ; people are realising that the brain is now the prime resource and the main currency is intelligence. China has creative thinking on its curriculum, Malaysia has said its nation will be mentally literate. In Britain, Wellington College has declared it will become a beacon as a “thinking and intelligent” school, the LSE is providing introductions to intelligence and thinking skills to its new intake and tonight a Channel 4 series on race starts with a show exploring intelligence and ethnicity (see right) ...

As temperatures rise and ice melts, it has become clear that Man’s attempt to impose his will on Nature has gone awry. A new breed of scientists is beginning to approach our myriad problems from a new, humbler perspective; how, they ask, can we learn from Nature and borrow some of its extraordinary inventiveness in the fight against climate change. The deep ocean is an unlikely source of inspiration for one project, which aims to make our cities alive and glowing. The plan sounds almost biblical; the lighting of the world from a multitude of fish. Dr Rachel Armstrong, an architectural researcher from University College London, wants to transform buildings from being sterile, inert objects into entities that interact and evolve with the natural environment. She sees this as the fulfilment of what architects have always seen as the purpose of their work. “We’ve likened the city to an organism, but so far it has been a symbolic description. In the future, architectu...