hum

The other medical expert was James P. Grigson, a forensic psychiatrist. He testified so often for the prosecution in capital-punishment cases that he had become known as Dr. Death. (A Texas appellate judge once wrote that when Grigson appeared on the stand the defendant might as well “commence writing out his last will and testament.”) Grigson suggested that Willingham was an “extremely severe sociopath,” and that “no pill” or treatment could help him. Grigson had previously used nearly the same words in helping to secure a death sentence against Randall Dale Adams, who had been convicted of murdering a police officer, in 1977. After Adams, who had no prior criminal record, spent a dozen years on death row—and once came within seventy-two hours of being executed—new evidence emerged that absolved him, and he was released. In 1995, three years after Willingham’s trial, Grigson was expelled from the American Psychiatric Association.

David Grann

Anteo Zamboni was a 15-year old anarchist who tried to assassinate Benito Mussolini by shooting at him during a parade.

Zamboni, whose shot missed Mussolini, was immediately attacked and lynched by nearby fascists.

The man who first detained him and identified him as the would be assassin was cavalry officer Carlo Alberto Pasolini, father of film director Pier Paolo Pasolini.

He tried film scores for a bit, but that wasn’t rewarding. People kept interfering: producers, the distributors. “You put all this effort into it, and then the film comes out and you realise that the interest in the music is so limited, it’s so homogenised. You look at the poster and think, fucking hell, what did we have to do with it?” He rolls his eyes. “You know, it would be easier to make another record.” And Massive Attack dissolve into laughter again.

If you think you are so enlightened, go and spend a week with your parents.

Ram Dass

George said:
‘You know we are on the wrong track altogether. We must not think of the things we could do with, but only of the things that we can’t do without.’
George comes out really quite sensible at times. You’d be surprised. I call that downright wisdom, not merely as regards the present case, but with reference to our trip up the river of life generally. How many people, on that voyage, load up the boat till it is in danger of swamping with a store of foolish things which they think essential to the pleasure and comfort of the trip, but which are really only useless lumber.
[…]
Throw the lumber over, man! Let your boat of life be light, packed with only what you need – a homely home and simple pleasures, one or two friends, worth the name, someone to love and someone to love you, a cat, a dog, and a pipe or two, enough to eat and enough to wear, and a little more than enough to drink; for thirst is a dangerous thing.

Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog!)

When Passepartout discovered the cost of this latest crossing he let out the sort of extended ‘Oh’ that goes through every interval on the descending chromatic scale.

Jules Verne

He belonged to none of those numerous societies that proliferate in the English capital, from the Harmonic Society down to the Entomological Society, whose main purpose is the destruction of harmful insects.

Jules Verne

As the ship neared the tropics and the heat, boredom and gossip intensified, so too did the tensions, both alimentary and sexual. The filth in first class was as bad as it was in the third - from the shy newlyweds who kept half the ship awake by “reciting Spanish verbs” in their cabin at night, to the opera tenor who cruised the lower decks for peasant beauties, to the Swiss-Italian woman in black silk stockings who gaily betrayed her bookish husband with the Argentinian politician, the Tuscan adolescent and the opera tenor. As the old hunchback commented in despair, “Se ‘e porcaie pesassan, saiescimo zà a fondo”: “If filth was heavy, we’d be on the bottom already.”

John Dickie

“One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” or should that have been “One small step for a man”? Neil Armstrong has always said he thought that’s what he said […] so, rather than fluffing those famous lines, Neil Armstrong poetically, and perhaps perfectly, captured one of humanity’s most epic moments.