Nepenthe

A History of Private Libraries Daniel Talcott of Bangor, Maine, loved his books so much they killed him. "It is a pathetic fact," wrote Samuel Boardman in 1900. Mr. Talcott wanted to keep the books in his library warm and dry as winter approached, "and it was in persisting to build a fire in the room on an inclement day that he took the cold that brought on his death." As soon as there were books, there were private libraries, each as unique to its owner as a fingerprint. But book collectors throughout history share one characteristic: They're highly opinionated about how a library should look and what should be in it. An Ideal Number In the 1600s, the English diarist Samuel Pepys believed a gentleman should own exactly 3,000 books. In his library, books were numbered from the smallest size to the largest. To make the tops of the books even on the shelves, he built little wooden stilts for the short books, camouflaging the stilts to match the bin...

"Illusion is the first of all pleasures", Oscar Wilde once said. So it is fitting then that the Google doodle has changed again, this time to celebrate what would have been the 156th birthday of one of the greatest writers, poets and playwrights who ever lived.The design pays tribute to the Irishman by featuring a portrait from The Picture of Dorian Gray - the first and only novel published by Wilde. The work was published in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine in 1890. It was revised and published as a novel a year later. "An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them," Wilde wrote in the first chapter. In a review of the 2009 film, starring Colin Firth and Ben Barnes, Darragh McManus said in the Guardian , "For me, Dorian Gray is special – not necessarily Wilde's best work but unique in his canon – because it's so sincere: ineffably, inescapably, absolutely. It's a very good novel anyway: mov...

(entre tantos outros...) A Expedição de Vasco da Gama O Metro Humano O Nascimento da Filosofia As Línguas da Europa   A Colonização Chinesa em África no Século XXI La Historia con Mapas

GraphJam

Two of my favourites, food and illustrations ;)

  (outra) Tradução minha para a Guerra & Paz ;)

Tradução minha para a Guerra & Paz ;)

Click and enjoy ;D

Question: Why are vampires so popular right now? Guillermo del Toro:  I think that, you know, the moment of the birth of the vampire myth in English literature is with essentially there is few writings here and there, a poem and this and that. But in fiction most everyone agrees that it was birthed by John W. Polidori with a short story, "The Vampyre."  Now, the fact that Polidori had an ambivalent relationship with his master and friend, Lord Byron and he based the character of the main vampire in that story, Lord Ruthvren on Lord Byron, you know. Immediately gave birth to a vampire that was both a loathsome parasite and a dandy.  A seductive character that is later absorbed by a Stoker in "Dracula" and you know, you can trace it all the way to Anne Rice. And I think that right now, we have an unbridled sort of melodramatic, romantic, fantasy with the vampire is only one half of the myth.  The bad boy romantic lead myth, which is esse...

And thanx to Luís Filipe on FaceBook ;) Mines and munitions dumped in the oceans during twentieth century wars could still kill you today. Atlantic inter-governmental organisation OSPAR helped put together this map of dumped munitions in coastal Atlantic waters. It's not pretty. According to OSPAR's Quality Status Report: Vast amounts of munitions were dumped at designated sites or randomly jettisoned into the sea following the First and Second World Wars. These included conventional munitions such as bombs, grenades, torpedoes and mines, as well as incendiary devices and chemical munitions. The presence of munitions in the sea is a risk to fishermen and coastal users. As recently as 2005, three fishermen were killed in the southern North Sea when a Second World War bomb exploded on their fishing vessel after having been caught in their nets. There are also concerns over the many chemicals used in the munitions, which may be released as the munitions degrade w...