An 18-year-old Utah man was arrested on suspicion of burglary after police say he left his homework at the crime scene.
Police in Orem say they tracked a USB drive found at the burglarized home to [redacted -- ed.]. They say the computer hard drive contained his homework and was in a backpack abandoned in the backyard.
FlippyCat assembled 60 walls, each consisting of 990 dominoes, and an additional field of 600 dominoes. The project took 65 hours over 8 days and some painful failures along the way. But when he finally pushed it over at 0:55, he made a beautiful cascade of color and sound.
-via Daily Caller
It happened in the neighborhood of Calima, north of the city of Cali, Colombia. Two men arrived to an internet cafe, rented two computers, did their thing for a bit and, as they pretended to be paying, they took out guns and got all the money.
And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.
The reviewer for The Times could barely contain himself: "I announce with trembling pleasure the appearance of a great story." Forty years ago, a hitherto unknown British civil servant named Richard Adams released Watership Down and captivated two generations of trembling fans. Here are ten things that you might not know about it.
1. The novel began as stories that Adams told his daughters on long car rides to Stratford-upon-Avon. He submitted his manuscript to many publishers, but they rejected it time and time again. Adams was about to hire a vanity publisher to produce a few copies when a small time publisher named Rex Collings accepted Watership Down for a 2,000-copy run. It has since sold millions of copies.
2. Watership Down the movie came out in 1978. It was an animated movie about rabbits. So reviewers often mistook the movie as made for children -- as they had for the novel. But the violent, bloody battle scenes were hardly appropriate for little kids.
3. During World War II, Adams was a supply officer in the British Army. He spent time in Palestine, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, India and Singapore. The war was a personally transformative experience and much of his autobiography, The Day Gone By, is devoted to it. The adventures of the officers of the 250 Company of the 1st Airborne Division inspired Watership Down:
There were about twelve or thirteen altogether, and they comprised a very strong team, much stronger than any I had yet come across. Apart from that, collectively, they have importance to this book, since later, from my memory, they provided the idea for Hazel and his rabbits in Watership Down. (304)
4. Hazel-Rah was modeled on Major John Gifford, the commander of the 250 Company. Gifford was a born leader and Adams has maintained a lifelong admiration of him. Adams writes:
Everything about him was quiet, crisp, and unassuming. He was the most unassuming man I have ever known. When giving any of his officers an order, he usually said ‘Please’, ‘Would you like to -- ?’ or ‘Perhaps you’d better -- ‘. He could be extraordinarily cutting; at least one sensed it like that because a rebuke from him was so quiet and rare, and because everyone had such a high regard for him that you felt his slightest reproof very keenly. (304)
