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You Don't Have To Know Anything About Baseball To Respond To Babe Ruth Because He's Just This Magnificent Human Being. And A Really Good Story Because He Was This Kid Who Grew Up Essentially As An Orphan, You Know, Had A Tough Life, And Then He Became The Most Successful Baseball Player Ever. But He Was Also A Really Good Guy.

-Bill Bryson

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You Don't Have To

Bill Bryson

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You Don't Have To Know Anything About Baseball To Respond To Babe Ruth Because He's Just This Magnificent Human Being. And A Really Good Story Because He Was This Kid Who Grew Up Essentially As An Orphan, You Know, Had A Tough Life, And Then He Became The Most Successful Baseball Player Ever. But He Was Also A Really Good Guy.

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Everything Seems To Be Designed For The Benefit Of The Automobile And Not The Benefit Of The Human Being.

Those Who Sniff Decay In Every Shift Of Sense Or Alteration Of Usage Do The Language No Service. Too Often For Such People The Notion Of Good English Has Less To Do With Expressing Ideas Clearly Than With Making Words Conform To Some Arbitrary Pattern.

99.99 Percent Of All Species That Have Ever Lived Are No Longer With Us.

Every Atom You Possess Has Almost Certainly Passed Through Several Stars And Been Part Of Millions Of Organisms On Its Way To Becoming You. We Are Each So Atomically Numberous And So Vigorously Recycled At Death That A Significant Number Of Our Atoms-up To A Billion For Each Of Us, It Has Been Suggested-probably Once Belonged To Shakespeare. A Billion More Each Came From Buddha And Genghis Khan And Beethoven, And Any Other Historical Figure You Care To Name.

Des Moines Is Like Your Typical American City; It's Just These Concentric Circles Of Malls, Built Outward From The City.

Because Time Moves More Slowly In Kid World ... It Goes On For Decades ... It Is Adult Life That Is Over In A Twinkling.

Entirely Incidentally, A Little-known Fact About Shakespeare Is That His Father Moved To Stratford-upon-avon From A Nearby Village Shortly Before His Son's Birth. Had He Not Done So, The Bard Of Avon Would Instead Be Known As The Rather Less Ringing Bard Of Snitterfield.

Hunters Will Tell You That A Moose Is A Wily And Ferocious Forest Creature. Nonsense. A Moose Is A Cow Drawn By A Three-year-old.

To My Mind, The Greatest Reward And Luxury Of Travel Is To Be Able To Experience Everyday Things As If For The First Time, To Be In A Position In Which Almost Nothing Is So Familiar It Is Taken For Granted.

I Can't Fix The World. If You Want To Make A Difference In Life, You Have To Direct Your Energies In A Focused Way.

Making A Difference

South Dakota... Is Like The World's First Drive-through Sensory Deprivation Chamber.

It Was The Kind Of Pure, Undiffused Light That Can Only Come From A Really Hot Blue Sky, The Kind That Makes Even A Concrete Highway Painful To Behold And Turns Every Distant Reflective Surface Into A Little Glint Of Flame. Do You Know How Sometimes On Very Fine Days The Sun Will Shine With A Particular Intensity That Makes The Most Mundane Objects In The Landscape Glow With An Unusual Radiance, So That Buildings And Structures You Normally Pass Without A Glance Suddenly Become Arresting, Even Beautiful? Well, They Seem To Have That Light In Australia Nearly All The Time.

I'm Quite Certain That If The Rest Of The World Vanished Overnight And The Development Of Cricket Were Left In Australian Hands, Within A Generation, The Players Would Be Wearing Shorts And Using The Bats To Hit Each Other, And The Thing Is, It'd Be A Much Better Game For It.

More Than 300 Million People In The World Speak English And The Rest, It Sometimes Seems, Try To.

So Here I Am, My Affections Torn Between A Postal Service That Never Feeds Me But Can Tackle A Challenge And One That Gives Me Free Tape And Prompt Service But Won't Help Me Out When I Can't Remember A Street Name. The Lesson To Draw From This, Of Course, Is That When You Move From One Country To Another You Have To Accept That There Are Some Things That Are Better And Some Things Worse, And There Is Nothing You Can Do About It. That May Not Be The Profoundest Of Insights To Take Away From A Morning's Outing, But I Did Get A Free Doughnut As Well, So On Balance I Guess I'm Happy.

Clearly, Some Time Ago Makers And Consumers Of American Junk Food Passed Jointly Through Some Kind Of Sensibility Barrier In The Endless Quest For New Taste Sensations. Now They Are A Little Like Those Desperate Junkies Who Have Tried Every Known Drug And Are Finally Reduced To Mainlining Toilet Bowl Cleanser In An Effort To Get Still Higher.

And I Find Chopsticks Frankly Distressing. Am I Alone In Thinking It Odd That A People Ingenious Enough To Invent Paper, Gunpowder, Kites And Any Number Of Other Useful Objects, And Who Have A Noble History Extending Back 3,000 Years Haven't Yet Worked Out That A Pair Of Knitting Needles Is No Way To Capture Food?

Knitting Needles

When The Poet Paul Valery Once Asked Albert Einstein If He Kept A Notebook To Record His Ideas, Einstein Looked At Him With Mild But Genuine Surprise. "oh, That's Not Necessary," He Replied . "it's So Seldom I Have One.

You Don't Need A Science Degree To Understand About Science. You Just Need To Think About It.

Look At A Globe And What You Are Seeing Really Is A Snapshot Of The Continents As They Have Been For Just One-tenth Of 1 Per Cent Of The Earths History.

Suddenly, In The Space Of A Moment, I Realized What It Was That I Loved About Britain - Which Is To Say, All Of It. Every Last Bit Of It, Good And Bad - Old Churches, Country Lanes, People Saying 'mustn't Grumble,' And 'i'm Terribly Sorry But,' People Apologizing To Me When I Conk Them With A Careless Elbow, Milk In Bottles, Beans On Toast, Haymaking In June, Seaside Piers, Ordnance Survey Maps, Tea And Crumpets, Summer Showers And Foggy Winter Evenings - Every Bit Of It.

England Was Full Of Words I'd Never Heard Before - Streaky Bacon, Short Back And Sides, Belisha Beacon, Serviettes, High Tea, Ice-cream Cornet.

You Can Be A Scientist And Believe In God: The Two Can Go Hand In Hand.

As A Rule Of Thumb, I Would Submit That If You Need To Call Your Floss Provider, For Any Reason, You Are Probably Not Ready For This Level Of Oral Hygiene.

Traveling Is More Fun - Hell, Life Is More Fun - If You Can Treat It As A Series Of Impulses.

Woods Are Not Like Other Spaces. To Begin With, They Are Cubic. Their Trees Surround You, Loom Over You, Press In From All Sides. Woods Choke Off Views & Leave You Muddled & Without Bearings. They Make You Feel Small & Confused & Vulnerable, Like A Small Child Lost In A Crowd Of Strange Legs. Stand In A Desert Or Prairie & You Know You Are In A Big Space. Stand In The Woods And You Only Sense It. They Are Vast, Featureless Nowhere. And They Are Alive.

Taxonomy Is Described Sometimes As A Science And Sometimes As An Art, But Really It’s A Battleground.

It Is Not True That The English Invented Cricket As A Way Of Making All Other Human Endeavors Look Interesting And Lively; That Was Merely An Unintended Side Effect... It Is The Only Sport That Incorporates Meal Breaks. It Is The Only Sport That Shares Its Name With An Insect. It Is The Only Sport In Which Spectators Burn As Many Calories As Players - More If They Are Moderately Restless.

So, If People Didn’t Settle Down To Take Up Farming, Why Then Did They Embark On This Entirely New Way Of Living? We Have No Idea – Or Actually, We Have Lots Of Ideas, But We Don’t Know If Any Of Them Are Right. According To Felipe Fernández-armesto, At Least Thirty-eight Theories Have Been Put Forward To Explain Why People Took To Living In Communities: That They Were Driven To It By Climatic Change, Or By A Wish To Stay Near Their Dead, Or By A Powerful Desire To Brew And Drink Beer, Which Could Only Be Indulged By Staying In One Place.

If You Can Imagine A Man Having A Vasectomy Without Anesthetic To The Sound Of Frantic Sitar-playing, You Will Have Some Idea Of What Popular Turkish Music Is Like.

Australians Are Very Unfair In This Way. They Spend Half Of Any Conversation Insisting That The Country's Dangers Are Vastly Overrated And That There's Nothing To Worry About, And The Other Half Telling You How Six Months Ago Their Uncle Bob Was Driving To Mudgee When A Tiger Snake Slid Out From Under The Dashboard And Bit Him On The Groin, But That It's Okay Now Because He's Off The Life Support Machine And They've Discovered He Can Communicate With Eye Blinks.

Romans Park Their Cars The Way I Would Park If I Had Just Spilled A Beaker Of Hydrochloric Acid On My Lap.

My Favourite Fellow Of The Royal Society Is The Reverend Thomas Bayes, An Obscure 18th-century Kent Clergyman And A Brilliant Mathematician Who Devised A Complex Equation Known As The Bayes Theorem, Which Can Be Used To Work Out Probability Distributions. It Had No Practical Application In His Lifetime, But Today, Thanks To Computers, Is Routinely Used In The Modelling Of Climate Change, Astrophysics And Stock-market Analysis.

Maine Is Wonderful. It Can Be Very Hard. I Mean, If You Look At The Profile Maps It Doesn't Look It, But Somehow When You Get Out There It's Really Steep And Hard.

Tune Your Television To Any Channel It Doesn't Receive And About 1 Percent Of The Dancing Static You See Is Accounted For By This Ancient Remnant Of The Big Bang. The Next Time You Complain That There Is Nothing On, Remember That You Can Always Watch The Birth Of The Universe.

As The Saying Goes, It Takes All Kinds To Make The World Go Around, Though Perhaps Some Shouldn't Go Quite So Far Around It As Others.

The People Are Immensely Likable— Cheerful, Extrovert, Quick-witted, And Unfailingly Obliging. Their Cities Are Safe And Clean And Nearly Always Built On Water. They Have A Society That Is Prosperous, Well Ordered, And Instinctively Egalitarian. The Food Is Excellent. The Beer Is Cold. The Sun Nearly Always Shines. There Is Coffee On Every Corner. Life Doesn't Get Much Better Than This.

Roads Get Wider And Busier And Less Friendly To Pedestrians. And All Of The Development Based Around Cars, Like Big Sprawling Shopping Malls. Everything Seems To Be Designed For The Benefit Of The Automobile And Not The Benefit Of The Human Being.

America Is A Very Seductive Place In Terms Of Lifestyle And Comfort, But It Wasn't For Me.

America Is A Great Disappointment To Me. As I Said In One Of My Books, Other Societies Create Civilisations; We Build Shopping Malls.

By The Time I Had Finished My Coffee And Returned To The Streets, The Rain Had Temporarily Abated, But The Streets Were Full Of Vast Puddles Where The Drains Where Unable To Cope With The Volume Of Water. Correct Me If I'm Wrong, But You Would Think That If One Nation Ought By Now To Have Mastered The Science Of Drainage, Britain Would Be It.

You Can Always Tell A Midwestern Couple In Europe Because They Will Be Standing On A Traffic Island In The Middle Of A Busy Intersection Looking At A Windblown Map And Arguing Over Which Way Is West. European Cities, With Their Wandering Streets And Undisciplined Alleys, Drive Midwesterners Practically Insane.

I Turned To My Own Bunk And Examined It With A Kind Of Appalled Fascination. If The Mattress Stains Were Anything To Go By, A Previous User Had Not So Much Suffered From Incontinence As Rejoiced In It. He Had Evidently Included The Pillow In His Celebrations.

People Don't Talk Like This, Theytalklikethis. Syllables, Words, Sentences Run Together Like A Watercolour Left In The Rain. To Understand What Anyone Is Saying To Us We Must Separate These Noises Into Words And The Words Into Sentences So That We Might In Our Turn Issue A Stream Of Mixed Sounds In Response.

In A Funny Way, Nothing Makes You Feel More Like A Native Of Your Own Country Than To Live Where Nearly Everyone Is Not.

When You Tell An Iowan A Joke, You Can See A Kind Of Race Going On Between His Brain And His Expression.

Columbus Real Achievement Was Managing To Cross The Ocean Successfully In Both Directions. Though An Accomplished Enough Mariner, He Was Not Terribly Good At A Great Deal Else, Especially Geography, The Skill That Would Seem Most Vital In An Explorer.

Boston's Freeway System Is Insane. It Was Clearly Designed By A Person Who Had Spent His Childhood Crashing Toy Trains.

If You Drive To, Say, Shenandoah National Park, Or The Great Smoky Mountains, You'll Get Some Appreciation For The Scale And Beauty Of The Outdoors. When You Walk Into It, Then You See It In A Completely Different Way. You Discover It In A Much Slower, More Majestic Sort Of Way.

But What Is Life To A Lichen ? Yet Its Impulse To Exist, To Be, Is Every Bit As Strong As Ours Arguably Even Stronger. If I Were Told That I Had To Spend Decades Being A Furry Growth On A Rock In The Woods, I Believe I Would Lose The Will To Go On.

I Still Enjoy Traveling A Lot. I Mean, It Amazes Me That I Still Get Excited In Hotel Rooms Just To See What Kind Of Shampoo They've Left Me.

I Mused For A Few Moments On The Question Of Which Was Worse, To Lead A Life So Boring That You Are Easily Enchanted, Or A Life So Full Of Stimulus That You Are Easily Bored.

There Is No Such Thing, Incidentally, As One Kudo.

A Cough So Robust That I Tapped Into Two New Seams Of Phlegm.

In The Morning I Awoke Early And Experienced That Sinking Sensation That Overcomes You When You First Open Your Eyes And Realize That Instead Of A Normal Day Ahead Of You, With Its Scatterings Of Simple Gratifications, You Are Going To Have A Day Without Even The Tiniest Of Pleasures; You Are Going To Drive Across Ohio.

Think Of A Single Problem Confronting The World Today. Disease, Poverty, Global Warming... If The Problem Is Going To Be Solved, It Is Science That Is Going To Solve It. Scientists Tend To Be Unappreciated In The World At Large, But You Can Hardly Overstate The Importance Of The Work They Do. If Anyone Ever Cures Cancer, It Will Be A Guy With A Science Degree. Or A Woman With A Science Degree.

You May Find That Your Parents Are The Most Delightful People, But You Don't Want To Live With Them.

It Is A Slightly Arresting Notion That If You Were To Pick Yourself Apart With Tweezers, One Atom At A Time, You Would Produce A Mound Of Fine Atomic Dust, None Of Which Had Ever Been Alive But All Of Which Had Once Been You.

I See Litter As Part Of A Long Continuum Of Anti-social Behaviour.

I Have A Small Tattered Clipping That I Sometimes Carry With Meand Pull Out For Purposes Of Privateamusement. It's A Weather Forecast From Thewestern Daily Mail And It Says, In Toto: 'outlook: Dry And Warm, But Cooler With Some Rain.

The Taipan Is The One To Watch Out For. It Is The Most Poisonous Snake On Earth, With A Lunge So Swift And A Venom So Potent That Your Last Mortal Utterance Is Likely To Be: "i Say, Is That A Sn--

Isn´t It Strange How Wealth Is Always Wasted On The Rich?

In Three Minutes, 98 Percent Of All The Matter There Is Or Will Ever Be Has Been Produced. We Have A Universe

For Most Of Us The Rules Of English Grammar Are At Best A Dimly Remembered Thing. But Even For Those Who Make The Rules, Grammatical Correctitude Sometimes Proves Easier To Urge Than To Achieve. Among The Errors Cited In This Book Are A Number Committed By Some Of The Leading Authorities Of This Century. If Men Such As Fowler And Bernstein And Quirk And Howard Cannot Always Get Their English Right, Is It Reasonable To Expect The Rest Of Us To?

The Real Problem You Get With Humour Is That You Only Have So Many Kinds Of Jokes Within You, And You Mine That Vein A Lot. This Isn't Just Common To Me; It's Anybody Who's Funny.

There Are Things You Just Can't Do In Life. You Can't Beat The Phone Company, You Can't Make A Waiter See You Until He's Ready To See You, And You Can't Go Home Again.

When You Consider It From A Human Perspective, And Clearly It Would Be Difficult For Us To Do Otherwise, Life Is An Odd Thing. It Couldn't Wait To Get Going, But Then, Having Gotten Going, It Seemed In Very Little Hurry To Move On.

Anyone Who Has Read My Books Will Know That I Don't Tend To Use Guides When I Am Travelling. It's Not A Pride Thing, But It Is Certainly A Fact.

Open Your Refrigerator Door, And You Summon Forth More Light Than The Total Amount Enjoyed By Most Households In The 18th Century. The World At Night, For Much Of History, Was A Very Dark Place, Indeed.

This Was 1990, The Year That Communism Died In Europe And It Seemed Strange To Me That In All The Words That Were Written About The Fall Of The Iron Curtain, Nobody Anywhere Lamented That It Was The End Of A Noble Experiment. I Know That Communism Never Worked And I Would Have Disliked Living Under It Myself But None The Less It Seems That There Was A Kind Of Sadness In The Thought That The Only Economic System That Appeared To Work Was One Based On Self Interest And Greed.

Protons Give An Atom Its Identity, Electrons Its Personality.

Every Living Thing Is An Elaboration Of A Single Original Plan. As Humans We Are Mere Increments - Each Of Us A Musty Archive Of Adjustments, Adaptations, Modifications And Providential Tinkerings Stretching Back To 3,8 Billion Years. Remarkably We Are Even Quite Closely Related To Fruit And Vegetables. About Half The Chemical Functions That Take Place In A Banana Are Fundamentally The Same As The Chemical Functions That Place In You. It Cannot Be Said Too Often: All Life Is One. That Is, And I Suspect Will Ever Prove To Be, The Most Profound True Statement There Is.

I Don't Know Whether I'm Misanthropic. It Seems To Me I'm Constantly Disappointed. I'm Very Easily Disappointed.

It Was An Odd Situation. For A Century And A Half, Men Got Rid Of Their Own Hair, Which Was Perfectly Comfortable, And Instead Covered Their Heads With Something Foreign And Uncomfortable. Very Often It Was Actually Their Own Hair Made Into A Wig. People Who Couldn't Afford Wigs Tried To Make Their Hair Look Like A Wig.

Language Is More Fashion Than Science, And Matters Of Usage, Spelling And Pronunciation Tend To Wander Around Like Hemlines.

Not Writing The Same Kind Of Book Over And Over Again Is To Me The Real Pleasure Of What I Do.

I'm Definitely An American, Because I Grew Up Here. But I've Lived Very Happily In Britain.

There Is Something About The Momentum Of Travel That Makes You Want To Just Keep Moving, To Never Stop.

There Is Always A Little More Toothpaste In The Tube. Think About It.

There Is The Odd Exception, Like Albert Einstein, But As A Breed, Scientists Tend Not Be Very Good At Presenting Themselves.

I Don't Know Whether I'm Misanthropic. It Seems To Me I'm Constantly Disappointed. I'm Very Easily Disappointed. Disappointed In The Things That People Do; Disappointed In The Things That People Construct. I Want Things To Be Better All The Time.

Beulah Has A Husband?' I Know. It's A Miracle. There Can't Be More Than Two People On The Planet Who'd Be Willing To Sleep With Her, And Here We Are Both In The Same Town.

On The Dashboard Of Our Family Car Is A Shallow Indentation About The Size Of A Paperback Book. If You Are Looking For Somewhere To Put Your Sunglasses Or Spare Change, It Is The Obvious Place, And It Works Extremely Well, I Must Say, So Long As The Car Is Not Actually Moving. However, As Soon As You Put The Car In Motion ... Everything Slides Off ... It Can Hold Nothing That Has Not Been Nailed To It. So I Ask You: What Then Is It For?

Every Dog On The Face Of The Earth Wants Me Dead.

Making English Grammar Conform To Latin Rules Is Like Asking People To Play Baseball Using The Rules Of Football.

A Sign In The Yard Of A Church Next Door Said Christ Is The Answer. (the Question, Of Course, Is: What Do You Say When You Strike Your Thumb With A Hammer?)

Before, Prior To. There Is No Difference Between These Two Except Length And A Certain Affectedness On The Part Of 'prior To.' To Paraphrase Bernstein, If You Would Use 'posterior To' Instead Of 'after,' Then By All Means Use 'prior To' Instead Of 'before.

Geologists Are Never At A Loss For Paperweights.

I Had Always Thought That Once You Grew Up You Could Do Anything You Wanted - Stay Up All Night Or Eat Ice-cream Straight Out Of The Container.

No One Knows, Incidentally, Why Australia's Spiders Are So Extravagantly Toxic; Capturing Small Insects And Injecting Them With Enough Poison To Drop A Horse Would Appear To Be The Most Literal Case Of Overkill. Still, It Does Mean That Everyone Gives Them Lots Of Space.

Our Instinct May Be To See The Impossibility Of Tracking Everything Down As Frustrating, Dispiriting, Perhaps Even Appalling, But It Can Just As Well Be Viewed As Almost Unbearably Exciting. We Live On A Planet That Has A More Or Less Infinite Capacity To Surprise. What Reasoning Person Could Possibly Want It Any Other Way?

Strange As It May Seem, Wrote Richard Feynman, We Understand The Distribution Of Matter In The Interior Of The Sun Far Better Than We Understand The Interior Of The Earth.

Richard Feynman

After Years Of Patient Study (and With Cricket There Can Be No Other Kind), I Have Decided That There Is Nothing Wrong With The Game That The Introduction Of Golf Carts Wouldn't Fix In A Hurry.

It Is A Curious Feature Of Our Existance That We Come From A Planet That Is Very Good At Promoting Life But Even Better At Extinguishing It.

I Had To Drive To Minneapolis Once, And Went On A Back Road Just To See The Country. But There Was Nothing To See. It's Just Flat And Hot, And Full Of Corn And Soybeans And Hogs. Every Once In A While You Come Across A Farm Or Some Dead Little Town Where The Liveliest Thing Is The Flies.

It Is Unthinkable To Have A British Countryside That Doesn't Have Actual Functioning Farmers Riding Tractors, Cows In Fields, Things Like That.

The Remarkable Position In Which We Find Ourselves Is That We Don't Actually Know What We Actually Know.

Being A Pessimist Is Just Such A Gloomy Way Of Looking At Things, So I Have To Hope For The Best - Life Wouldn't Be Worth Living If We Didn't Have Hope. And I Also Do Think That Human Beings Often Do Do Wonderful, Correct, Brilliant Things. So, On Balance, I'd Like To Be Optimistic About The Future.

I Wanted To Quit And To Do This Forever, Sleep In A Bed And In A Tent, See What Was Over The Next Hill And Never See A Hill Again. All Of This All At Once, Every Moment, On The Trail Or Off.

English Grammar Is So Complex And Confusing For The One Very Simple Reason That Its Rules And Terminology Are Based On Latin - A Language With Which It Has Precious Little In Common. In Latin, To Take One Example, It Is Not Possible To Split An Infinitive. So In English, The Early Authorities Decided, It Should Not Be Possible To Split An Infinitive Either. But There Is No Reason Why We Shouldn't, Any More Than We Should Forsake Instant Coffee And Air Travel Because They Weren't Available To The Romans.

For A Long Time, I'd Been Vaguely Fascinated By The Idea That Charles Lindbergh Flew The Atlantic And Babe Ruth Hit 60 Home Runs In The Same Summer.

When I Awoke It Was Daylight. The Inside Of My Tent Was Coated In A Curious Flaky Rime, Which I Realized After A Moment Was All Of My Nighttime Snores, Condensed And Frozen And Pasted To The Fabric, As If Into A Scrapbook Of Respiratory Memories.

Human Beings Would Split The Atom And Invent Television, Nylon, And Instant Coffee Before They Could Figure Out The Age Of Their Own Planet.

[the Royal Society] Is Quite Simply The Voice Of Science In Britain. It Is Intellectually Rigorous, Not Afraid To Be Outspoken On Controversial Issues Such As Climate Change, But It Is Not Aggressively Secular Either, Insisting On A Single View Of The World. In Fact, There Are Plenty Of Eminent Scientists - Robert Winston, For Instance - Who Are Also Men Of Faith.

I Have Long Known That It Is Part Of God's Plan For Me To Spend A Little Time With Each Of The Most Stupid People On Earth.

The Best That Can Be Said For Norwegian Television Is That It Gives You The Sensation Of A Coma Without The Worry And Inconvenience.

The Number Of People On Whose Cooperative Efforts Your Eventual Existence Depends Has Risen To Approximately 1,000,000,000,000,000,000, Which Is Several Thousand Times The Total Number Of People Who Have Ever Lived.

There'd Never Been A More Advantageous Time To Be A Criminal In America Than During The 13 Years Of Prohibition. At A Stroke, The American Government Closed Down The Fifth Largest Industry In The United States - Alcohol Production - And Just Handed It To Criminals - A Pretty Remarkable Thing To Do.

The Upshot Of All This Is That We Live In A Universe Whose Age We Can't Quite Compute, Surrounded By Stars Whose Distances We Don't Altogether Know, Filled With Matter We Can't Identify, Operating In Conformance With Physical Laws Whose Properties We Don’t Truly Understand.

I Often Feel I'm A Disappointment To People Because They Expect Me To Be The Guy In The Books. When I Sit Next To Someone At A Dinner Party I Can See They Expect Me To Be Quick And Witty, And I'm Not At All.

We Used To Build Civilizations. Now We Build Shopping Malls.

In France, A Chemist Named Pilatre De Rozier Tested The Flammability Of Hydrogen By Gulping A Mouthful And Blowing Across An Open Flame, Proving At A Stroke That Hydrogen Is Indeed Explosively Combustible And That Eyebrows Are Not Necessarily A Permanent Feature Of One's Face.

But That's The Glory Of Foreign Travel, As Far As I Am Concerned. I Don't Want To Know What People Are Talking About. I Can't Think Of Anything That Excites A Greater Sense Of Childlike Wonder Than To Be In A Country Where You Are Ignorant Of Almost Everything. Suddenly You Are Five Years Old Again. You Can't Read Anything, You Have Only The Most Rudimentary Sense Of How Things Work, You Can't Even Reliably Cross A Street Without Endangering Your Life. Your Whole Existence Becomes A Series Of Interesting Guesses.

You Don't Have To Know Anything About Baseball To Respond To Babe Ruth Because He's Just This Magnificent Human Being. And A Really Good Story Because He Was This Kid Who Grew Up Essentially As An Orphan, You Know, Had A Tough Life, And Then He Became The Most Successful Baseball Player Ever. But He Was Also A Really Good Guy.

An Awful Lot Of England Is Slowly Eroding, In Ways That I Find Really Distressing, And An Awful Lot Of It Is The Hedgerows... We're Reaching The Point Where A Lot Of The English Countryside Looks Just Like Iowa - Just Kind Of Open Space.

When You Sit In A Chair, You Are Not Actually Sitting There, But Levitating Above It At A Height Of One Angstrom (a Hundred Millionth Of A Centimetre), Your Electrons And Its Electrons Implacably Opposed To Any Closer Intimacy.

But I Got A Great Deal Else From The Experience. I Learned To Pitch A Tent And Sleep Beneath The Stars. For A Brief, Proud Period I Was Slender And Fit. I Gained A Profound Respect For The Wilderness And Nature And The Benign Dark Power Of Woods. I Understand Now, In A Way I Never Did Before, The Colossal Scale Of The World. I Found Patience And Fortitude That I Didn't Know I Had. I Discovered An America That Millions Of People Scarcely Know Exists. I Made A Friend. I Came Home.

"croissant": However You Choose To Pronounce It At Home, It Is Perhaps Worth Nothing That Outside The United States, The Closer You Can Come To Saying "kwass-ohn," The Sooner You Can Expect To Be Presented With One.

I Can't Imagine There Has Ever Been A More Gratifying Time Or Place To Be Alive Than America In The 1950s. No Country Had Ever Known Such Prosperity.

It Was An Especially Wonderful Time To Be A Noisy Moron.

Book Tours Are Really Kind Of Fun. You Get To Stay In Nice Hotels, You Are Driven Everywhere In Big Silver Cars, You Are Treated As If You Are Much More Important Than You Are, You Can Eat Steak Three Times A Day At Someone Else's Expense, And You Get To Talk Endlessly About Yourself For Weeks At A Stretch.

Very Little Of What America Does Is Actually Bad, And I Don't Think It Ever Does Anything Anywhere That Is Intentionally Bad. I Mean, Sometimes We Make Mistakes And Bad Judgments And Kind Of Back The Wrong Regimes And Things, But By And Large What America Does Is Really Good.

Every Kid I Knew Had A Father With A Little Stash Of Men's Magazines Which The Father Thought Was Secret And Which The Kid Knew All About.

I Hadn't Realized Quite How Extraordinary Charles Lindbergh's Achievement Was In Flying The Atlantic Alone. He Had Never Flown Over Open Water Before, But He Flew Straight To Dingle Bay In Ireland And Then On To Paris, Exactly As Planned.

To My Surprise, I Felt A Certain Springy Keenness. I Was Ready To Hike. I Had Waited Months For This Day, After All, Even If It Had Been Mostly With Foreboding. I Wanted To See What Was Out There. All Over America Today People Would Be Dragging Themselves To Work, Stuck In Traffic Jams, Wreathed In Exhaust Smoke. I Was Going For A Walk In The Woods. I Was More Than Ready For This.

Of All The Things I Am Not Very Good At, Living In The Real World Is Perhaps The Most Outstanding.

We Forget Just How Painfully Dim The World Was Before Electricity. A Candle, A Good Candle, Provides Barely A Hundredth Of The Illumination Of A Single 100 Watt Light Bulb.

I Had Spent The Whole Of My Savings ... On A Suit For The Wedding - A Remarkable Piece Of Apparel With Lapels That Had Been Modelled On The Tail Fins Of A 1957 Coupe De Ville And Trousers So Copiously Flared That When I Walked You Didn't See My Legs Move.

Coming Back To Your Native Land After An Absence Of Many Years Is A Surprisingly Unsettling Business, A Little Like Waking From A Long Coma. Time, You Discover, Has Wrought Changes That Leave You Feeling Mildly Foolish And Out Of Touch.

In The Countryside, Litter Doesn't Have A Friend. It Doesn't Have Anybody Who's Saying, 'wait A Minute, This Is Really Starting To Get Out Of Control.'

For A Long Time It Puzzled Me How Something So Expensive, So Leading Edge, Could Be So Useless. And Then It Occurred To Me That A Computer Is A Stupid Machine With The Ability To Do Incredibly Smart Things, While Computer Programmers Are Smart People With The Ability To Do Incredibly Stupid Things. They Are, In Short, A Perfect Match.

Physics Is Really Nothing More Than A Search For Ultimate Simplicity, But So Far All We Have Is A Kind Of Elegant Messiness.

I Really Enjoy Going To A Library And Spending The Day Doing Research - To Me That Is The Most Pleasurable Part Of Writing The Science Book.

As James Surowiecki Noted In A New Yorker Article, Given A Choice Between Developing Antibiotics That People Will Take Every Day For Two Weeks And Antidepressants That People Will Take Every Day For Ever, Drug Companies Not Surprisingly Opt For The Latter. Although A Few Antibiotics Have Been Toughened Up A Bit, The Pharmaceutical Industry Hasn't Given Us An Entirely New Antibiotic Since The 1970s.

18th Century Scientists, The French In Particular, Seldom Did Things Simply If An Absurdly Demanding Alternative Was Available.

I Love Everything About Motels. I Can't Help Myself. I Still Get Excited Every Time I Slip A Key Into A Motel Room Door And Fling It Open.

That's The Trouble With Losing Your Mind; By The Time It's Gone, It's Too Late To Get It Back.

English Grammar Is So Complex And Confusing For The One Very Simple Reason That Its Rules And Terminology Are Based On Latin, A Language With Which It Has Precious Little In Common.

English Grammar

Distance Changes Utterly When You Take The World On Foot. A Mile Becomes A Long Way, Two Miles Literally Considerable, Ten Miles Whopping, Fifty Miles At The Very Limits Of Conception. The World, You Realize, Is Enormous In A Way That Only You And A Small Community Of Fellow Hikers Know. Planetary Scale Is Your Little Secret.

There Seemed To Be A Mystifying Universal Conspiracy Among Textbook Authors To Make Certain The Material They Dealt With Never Strayed Too Near The Realm Of The Mildly Interesting And Was Always At Least A Long-distance Phone Call From The Frankly Interesting.

A Significant Fraction Of Thru-hikers Reach Katahdin, Then Turn Around And Start Back To Georgia. They Just Can't Stop Walking, Which Kind Of Makes You Wonder.

Physicists Are Atoms' Way Of Thinking About Atoms.

When The Duke [w.j.c. Scott-bentinck] Died, His Heirs Found All Of The Aboveground Rooms Devoid Of Furnishings Except For One Chamber In The Middle Of Which Sat The Duke's Commode. The Main Hall Was Mysteriously Floor Less. Most Of The Rooms Were Painted Pink. The One Upstairs Room In Which The Duke Had Resided Was Packed To The Ceiling With Hundreds Of Green Boxes, Each Of Which Contained A Single Dark Brown Wig. This Was, In Short, A Man Worth Getting To Know.

Absolute Brain Size Does Not Tell You Everything Or Possibly Sometimes Even Much. Elephants And Whales Both Have Brains Larger Than Ours, But You Wouldn't Have Much Trouble Outwitting Them In Contract Negotiations.

Traveling Makes You Realize What An Immeasurably Nice Place Much Of America Could Be If Only People Possessed The Same Instinct For Preservation As They Do In Europe.

Everything That Has Ever Lived, Plant Or Animal, Dates Its Beginning From The Same Primordial Twitch. At Some Point In An Unimaginably Distant Past, Some Little Bag Of Chemicals Fidgeted To Life. It Absorbed Some Nutrients, Gently Pulsed, Had A Brief Existence. This Much May Have Happened Many Times Before. But This Ancestral Packet Did Something Additional And Extraordinary. It Cleaved Itself And Produced An Heir. A Tiny Bundle Of Genetic Material Passed From One Living Entity To Another, And Has Never Stopped Moving Since. It Was The Moment Of Creation For Us All.

When I Was Growing Up I Used To Think That The Best Thing About Coming From Des Moines Was That It Meant You Didn't Come From Anywhere Else In Iowa. By Iowa Standards, Des Moines Is A Mecca Of Cosmopolitanism, A Dynamic Hub Of Wealth And Education, Where People Wear Three-piece Suits And Dark Socks, Often Simultaneously.

The Universe Is Not Only Queerer Than We Suppose; It Is Queerer Than We Can Suppose

Eating In Sweden Is Really Just A Series Of Heartbreaks.

I Became Quietly Seized With That Nostalgia That Overcomes You When You Have Reached The Middle Of Your Life And Your Father Has Recently Died And It Dawns On You That When He Went He Took Some Of You With Him.

What Is It About Maps? I Could Look At Them All Day, Earnestly Studying The Names Of Towns And Villages I Have Never Heard Of And Will Never Visit.

If You Go Out On The Appalachian Trail, You Have To Bring So Much More Equipment - A Tent, Sleeping Bag - But If You Go Hiking In England, Or Europe, Generally, Towns And Villages Are Near Enough Together At The End Of The Day You Can Always Go To A Nice Little Inn And Have A Hot Bath And Something To Drink.

Take A Moment From Time To Time To Remember That You Are Alive. I Know This Sounds A Trifle Obvious, But It Is Amazing How Little Time We Take To Remark Upon This Singular And Gratifying Fact. By The Most Astounding Stroke Of Luck An Infinitesimal Portion Of All The Matter In The Universe Came Together To Create You And For The Tiniest Moment In The Great Span Of Eternity You Have The Incomparable Privilege To Exist.

I'm Not Funny In Person. I Mean I'm Really Not. I'm One Of Those People Who Always Screw Up Anecdotes.

Taking A Scenic Route In Southeast Iowa Is Like Talking About A Good Barry Manilow Album. You Have To Make Certain Allowances.

I'm Not A Natural Story-teller. Put A Keyboard In Front Of Me And I'm Fine, But Stand Me Up In Front Of An Audience And I'm Actually Quite Shy And Reserved.

Disassemble The Cells Of A Sponge (by Passing Them Through A Sieve, For Instance), Then Dump Them Into A Solution, And They Will Find Their Way Back Together And Build Themselves Into A Sponge Again. You Can Do This To Them Over And Over, And They Will Doggedly Reassemble Because, Like You And Me And Every Other Living Thing, They Have One Overwhelming Impulse: To Continue To Be.

I Understand Cricket - What's Going On, The Scoring - But I Can't Understand Why.

I Can Wear A Baseball Cap; I Am Entitled To Wear A Baseball Cap. I Am Genetically Pre-disposed To Wear A Baseball Cap, Whereas Most English People Look Wrong In A Baseball Cap.

Not One Of Your Pertinent Ancestors Was Squashed, Devoured, Drowned, Starved, Stranded, Stuck Fast, Untimely Wounded, Or Otherwise Deflected From Its Life's Quest Of Delivering A Tiny Charge Of Genetic Material To The Right Partner At The Right Moment In Order To Perpetuate The Only Possible Sequence Of Hereditary Combinations That Could Result -- Eventually, Astoundingly, And All Too Briefly -- In You.

...and It Occurred To Me, With The Forcefulness Of A Thought Experienced In 360 Degrees, That That's Really What History Mostly Is: Masses Of People Doing Ordinary Things.

Nearly A Quarter Of American Men Were In The Armed Forces. The Rest Were In School, In Prison, Or Were George W. Bush.

Perhaps It's My Natural Pessimism, But It Seems That An Awfully Large Part Of Travel These Days Is To See Things While You Still Can.

My First Rule Of Consumerism Is Never To Buy Anything You Can't Make Your Children Carry.

Science Has Been Quite Embattled. It's The Most Important Thing There Is. An Arts Graduate Is Not Going To Fix Global Warming. They May Do Other Valuable Things, But They Are Not Going To Fix The Planet Or Cure Cancer Or Get Rid Of Malaria.

My Mother Only Ever Said Two Things. She Said,'i Don't Know, Dear.'and She Said,'can I Get You A Sandwich, Honey?

Houses Aren't Refuges From History. They Are Where History Ends Up.

I Always Wanted To Do A Baseball Book; I Love Baseball. The Problem Is That A Very Large Part Of My Following Is In Non-baseball Playing Countries.

Consider The Lichen. Lichens Are Just About The Hardiest Visible Organisms On Earth, But The Least Ambitious.

Most Of The Time I Am Sunk In Thought, But At Some Point On Each Walk There Comes A Moment When I Look Up And Notice, With A Kind Of First-time Astonishment, The Amazing Complex Delicacy Of The Words, The Casual Ease With Which Elemental Things Come Together To Form A Composition That Is—whatever The Season, Wherever I Put My Besotted Gaze—perfect.

If A Potato Can Produce Vitamin C, Why Can't We? Within The Animal Kingdom Only Humans And Guinea Pigs Are Unable To Synthesize Vitamin C In Their Own Bodies. Why Us And Guinea Pigs? No Point Asking. Nobody Knows.

If You Believe In God, It's Much More Fantastic To Believe That He Created This Universe Billions Of Years Ago And Set In Motion This Long Train Of Activities That Eventually Resulted In Us. I Think That's So Much More Satisfying, More Thrilling, Than The Idea That It Was All Done In Seven Days.

For Anyone Of A Rational Disposition, Fashion Is Often Nearly Impossible To Fathom. Throughout Many Periods Of History – Perhaps Most – It Can Seem As If The Whole Impulse Of Fashion Has Been To Look Maximally Ridiculous. If One Could Be Maximally Uncomfortable As Well, The Triumph Was All The Greater.

My First Rule Of Travel Is Never To Go To A Place That Sounds Like A Medical Condition And Critz Is Clearly An Incurable Disease Involving Flaking Skin.

The Great Failure In Education, Much Of The Time, Is The Lack Of Excitement And Stimulus

Because We Humans Are Big And Clever Enough To Produce And Utilize Antibiotics And Disinfectants, It Is Easy To Convince Ourselves That We Have Banished Bacteria To The Fringes Of Existence. Don't You Believe It. Bacteria May Not Build Cities Or Have Interesting Social Lives, But They Will Be Here When The Sun Explodes. This Is Their Planet, And We Are On It Only Because They Allow Us To Be.

I Come From Des Moines. Someone Had To.

Germans Are Flummoxed By Humor, The Swiss Have No Concept Of Fun, The Spanish Think There Is Nothing At All Ridiculous About Eating Dinner At Midnight, And The Italians Should Never, Ever Have Been Let In On The Invention Of The Motor Car.

There Are Only Three Things That Can Kill A Farmer: Lightning, Rolling Over In A Tractor, And Old Age.

Finally, This Being America, There Is The Constant Possibility Of Murder.

Four Times I Was Honked At For Having The Temerity To Proceed Through Town Without The Benefit Of Metal.

I Wish I Could Adjust My Voice, But It's Just What's Happened To Me. It's Because I've Lived Abroad For A Long Time, And My Wife Is English And My Kids All Have English Accents, And Every Voice I Hear Is English. I've Never Intentionally Changed My Accent At All.

Black Bears Rarely Attack. But Here's The Thing. Sometimes They Do. All Bears Are Agile, Cunning And Immensely Strong, And They Are Always Hungry. If They Want To Kill You And Eat You, They Can, And Pretty Much Whenever They Want. That Doesn't Happen Often, But - And Here Is The Absolutely Salient Point - Once Would Be Enough.

Christmas Tree Stands Are The Work Of The Devil And They Want You Dead.

He Had The Sort Of Face That Makes You Realize God Does Have A Sense Of Humor.

If You Were Designing An Organism To Look After Life In Our Lonely Cosmos, To Monitor Where It Is Going And Keep A Record Of Where It Has Been, You Wouldn't Choose Human Beings For The Job. But Here's An Extrememly Salient Point: We Have Been Chosen, By Fate Or Providence Or Whatever You Wish To Call It. As Far As We Can Tell, We Are The Best There Is. We May Be All There Is. It's An Unnerving Thought That We May Be The Living Universe's Supreme Achievement And Its Worst Nightmare Simultaneously.

The English Invented Cricket To Make Other Human Endeavors Look Interesting.

English Is Full Of Booby Traps For The Unwary Foreigner. Any Language Where The Unassuming Word Fly Signifies An Annoying Insect, A Means Of Travel, And A Critical Part Of A Gentleman's Apparel Is Clearly Asking To Be Mangled.

In My Day, The Principal Concerns Of University Students Were Sex, Smoking Dope, Rioting And Learning. Learning Was Something You Did Only When The First Three Weren't Available.

University Students

Britain Still Has The Most Reliably Beautiful Countryside Of Anywhere In The World. I Would Hate To Be Part Of The Generation That Allowed That To Be Lost.

The Tearoom Lady Called Me Love. All The Shop Ladies Called Me Love And Most Of The Men Called Me Mate. I Hadn't Been Here Twelve Hours And Already They Loved Me.

Where I Grew Up, In Des Moines, Iowa, There Is Hardly Any Downtown Economic Activity Now. Everybody Shops In Malls - You Don't Find A Sense Of Community In Malls.

It Isn't Easy To Become A Fossil. ... Only About One Bone In A Billion, It Is Thought, Becomes Fossilized. If That Is So, It Means That The Complete Fossil Legacy Of All The Americans Alive Today - That's 270 Million People With 206 Bones Each - Will Only Be About 50 Bones, One-quarter Of A Complete Skeleton. That's Not To Say, Of Course, That Any Of These Bones Will Ever Actually Be Found.

Have You Ever Seen Glenn Beck In Operation? It Is The Most Terrifying Thing. It's So Bad That You Think He's Going To Announce In A Minute That It's All A Great Con. He Makes Sarah Palin Look Reasonable And Steady.

I Come Des Moines. Somebody Had To.

The Human Diet Consists Of Just Nine Plants: Corn, Rice, Wheat, Potatoes, Cassava, Sorghum, Millet, Beans, Barley, Rye And Oats.

A Third...candidate For Shakespearean Authorship Was Christopher Marlowe. He Was The Right Age (just Two Months Older Than Shakespeare), Had The Requisite Talent, And Would Certainly Have Had Ample Leisure After 1593, Assuming He Wasn't Too Dead To Work.

Still, I Never Really Mind Bad Service In A Restaurant. It Makes Me Feel Better About Not Leaving A Tip.

To My Mind, The Only Possible Pet Is A Cow. Cows Love You. They Will Listen To Your Problems And Never Ask A Thing In Return. They Will Be Your Friends Forever. And When You Get Tired Of Them, You Can Kill And Eat Them. Perfect.

What This Means In Practice Is That If You Are Not A Born Worrier You Have Nothing To Worry About (though Of Course You Wouldn't Be Worrying Anyway), Whereas If You Are A Worrier By Nature There Is Absolutely Nothing You Can Do About It, So You May As Well Stop Worrying, Except Of Course You Can't.

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