hum

Siccome negli ultimi momenti della creatura umana, il prete, profittando dello stato spossato in cui si trova il moribondo, e della confusione che sovente vi succede, s’ inoltra, e mettendo in opera ogni turpe stratagemma, propaga coll’ impostura in cui è maestro, che il defunto compì, pentendosi delle sue credenze passate, ai doveri di cattolico: in conseguenza io dichiaro, che trovandomi in piena ragione oggi, non voglio accettare, in nessun tempo, il ministero odioso, disprezzevole e scellerato d’ un prete, che considero atroce nemico del genere umano e dell’Italia in particolare. E che solo in stato di pazzia o di ben crassa ignoranza, io credo possa un individuo raccomandarsi ad un discendente di Torquemada.

Giuseppe Garibaldi

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.

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!)

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

I’m less likely to step on a sea urchin and get a spike in my foot in Crete than trip over a dead neigbour and get a syringe in my eye in London.

This week Charlie decided, after hearing several goats at close range, that the disturbing thing about goats is how human they sound: “Almost exactly like people moaning about being trapped in a goat’s body without using actual words, in fact.”