Nepenthe

From I Love Charts , of course ;)

illustration by Markéta Vydrová, found here Tobermory "'What do you think of human intelligence?' asked Mavis Pennington lamely. 'Of whose intelligence in particular?' asked Tobermory coldly." At Lady Blemley's house party, it is discovered that Tobermory the cat has been taught to speak by one of the guests. ("Cats," says Cornelius Appin, the guest in question, "those wonderful creatures which have assimilated themselves so marvellously with our civilization while retaining all their highly developed feral instincts.") The initial amazement of the other guests quickly gives way to alarm as they realise the embarrassment that may be caused by an intelligent and articulate animal that spends its time "creeping about our bedrooms and under chairs, and so forth," as another guest puts it. Eeyore ( Winnie-the-Pooh  and  The House at Pooh Corner  by AA Milne) Like many of the other characters in these two books, Eeyore is a sligh...

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From I Love Charts !

Remembered by his colleagues The Guardian In the movies, an actor's face is his fortune. It isn't simply a matter of being good-looking enough to play the romantic hero or rugged enough to carry an action picture. It's about having an instantly available, readable screen personality; it's also about attitude, a continuous professional battle-readiness: Hollywood talks about someone having their "game-face on" or having "the chops" for a certain job. And perhaps no actor's career or industry presence has been defined by his face more than Pete Postlethwaite : the British character actor whose rugged features made him every casting director's go-to guy for raw, lived-in truth . The stark planes and bulges of his face created a veritable Easter Island statue of authenticity and plainness. On camera, his face read as "real", in counterpoint to all the prettyboy or prettygirl leads. It was impossible to imagine him young, ye...

Sustainable Food , from the NYT Chop, Fry, Boil: Eating for One, or 6 Billion By  MARK BITTMAN “Revolutionary” diet books flood the market this time of year, promising a life changed permanently and for the better — yes, in just 10 to 30 days! — but, as everyone knows, the key to eating better begins with a diet of real food. The problem is, real food is cooked by real people — you! — and real people are cooking less than ever before.We know why people don’t cook, or at least we think we do: they’re busy; they find “convenience” and restaurant foods more accessible than foods they cook themselves; they (incorrectly) believe that ready-to-eat foods are less expensive than those they cook themselves; they live in so-called food deserts and lack access to real food; and they were never taught to cook by their parents, making the trend self-perpetuating. Yet Americans watch 35 hours of television a week, according to a  Nielsen survey . (Increasing amounts of that time are sp...