Martha Payne, the 9-year-old blogger in Scotland who went viral documenting her school lunches for two months has been shut down by the local council. The blog had caused visible improvement in the quality of the local school lunches, and had raised £2,000 for a food charity. But Martha was called out of class yesterday and told she could no longer take photographs in school because of a newspaper article. Martha protested that she doesn't write newspaper articles. Her father made an inquiry, as the school had supported Martha's efforts, and found that the new rule came not from the school, but from the Argyll and Bute council. No explanation was given for the council's decision. Link -via Wired
Update: Today, the council at least temporarily reversed its decision, and placed the blame on the newspaper. Link-Thanks, Walaka!
Random House has a problem. There's so much security in the building that writers are afraid to bring manuscripts in person. Maureen Johnson decided to send hers by FedEx. But the FedEx agent, a young man, said they couldn't ship her package.
MAUREEN: Why?
FEDEX: (very disapproving look) I can’t send this to a random house.
MAUREEN: What?
FEDEX: I can’t send this to a random house. You need an address.
Now MAUREEN gets it. She can barely believe this wonderful thing is happening, but she gets it.
MAUREEN: Oh! No, no. It’s a publisher.
FEDEX: Yeah, but I can’t send it.
MAUREEN: Why?
FEDEX: I can’t send to a random house.
The rest of the exchange, which she swears is real, reads like a modern remake of the Abbot & Costello routine known as Who's On First. Link -via Breakfast Links
Whenever there's a human activity, someone will make a sport out of it. WikiWars is a race through Wikipedia to connect two unrelated terms, and it is quite competitive.
To win a WikiWars round, one must click to from one specific Wikipedia article to another using only links within Wikipedia articles. Victory requires mental focus, precise clicking, a surprisingly large need for a knowledge of geography, & the ability to not start hyperventilating.
In this video, Evan and Michael are in their third round of competition. -via Geekosystem
Paper cups were the first widely-available product that was meant to be used once and then discarded, and it was a life saver of the time. Before the Dixie Cup, water was dispensed to everyone using a common cup or dipper, which transmitted diseases that had no cure back in the day. But inventor Lawrence Luellen just wanted a way to sell water for the American Water Supply Company. Read about the origin of the Dixie Cup, how and why it was named, and how it took off and influenced products that came after it, at Smithsonian's Food and Think blog. Link
Parents in Manhattan are complaining about the lack of structure at a school founded by the Blue Man Group. You'd think they would have checked out the curriculum before handing over the tuition -what did they think a school run by the Blue Man Group would be like? But that's just one school. If you've got the money, you can go to a school without books, without classes, or without rules. Or you can attend a more traditional but strangely specialized school. One from this list that fascinated me was the FDNY High School For Fire And Life Safety.
This school doesn't just have fire drills — it prepares students for a career in fire safety. The Brooklyn high school is run by the Fire Department of New York.
Each school is linked for more information in this list of ten from Buzzfeed. Link
Some properties have a lot of promise only if you have some imagination. Sure, you can buy a house, and probably pretty cheaply right now, but what about a boat dock, a school, or something historic that can be converted into a lucrative business? For example, Scott FladHammer is a house flipper, but when he began to invest in "haunted" houses, he opened up an opportunity to make money with a TV show about those houses! Read about other ways to invest in some strange real estate that you'd have never otherwise thought about in this list at Creonline. Link -via the Presurfer
With school out and jobs for teenagers pretty scarce, reading for pleasure is mandatory on hot summer days. Teach.com has compiled a list of 101 suggested books for high school students, and assembled a handy flowchart to decide which to begin with, according to the reader's interests. This is just a small part of the extensive chart at the site. Link -via Metafilter
Redditor tifypoo posted her aunt and uncle's wedding announcement, or possible a "save the date" card. Either way, it's awesome! However, not everyone could have pulled this off. You have to have the legs for it. Link
Russian women who are 100 years old now lived under the Czar, through the Revolution, endured World Wars I and II, suffered under Stalin, remember the Cold War, experienced glasnost, and now tell us what they think. English Russia has a translation of an article from Russian Esquire, with portraits and stories of seven centenarians, including Sarra Isaakovna Prinyakina:
I do not remember the revolution quite well. News didn’t reach Siberia fast. We could not understand what was happening. A White ataman came to our village, we thought it was a revolutioner and all went outside to welcome him. But were only whipped.
When I grew older I moved to sister in Ulan-Ude. There I got married with one guy and had a daughter. But he went to the front and never came back.
I worked as a horse. Lived in a dugout, took care of cattle, fleeced, carried potatoes for 25 km away.. We had no bread and we ate only potatoes, it made children sick. But that was nothing. One man with his son, evacuated from Leningrad, lived nearby, they ate leather and glue.
At 1,456 pages, War and Peace makes a big impression … and a great doorstop. But books don’t have to weigh a lot to be heavy hitters. Here are seven tiny tomes—all fewer than 100 pages—that sparked revolutions.
1. Common Sense by Thomas Paine (52 pages)
In the 1770s, American colonists were riding the fence. Should they cut ties with the tax-happy King George or just sit around drinking English tea? As they waffled, a penniless Brit named Thomas Paine sailed to Philadelphia and published the incendiary tract Common Sense.
Released in 1776, Paine’s text lambasted King George as a “crowned ruffian” and the progeny of a “French bastard.” The language struck a nerve, turning loyalists into patriots and nudging the likes of George Washington and John Adams into action. Less than six months later, the colonies declared independence, and the Revolutionary War was on. As for Paine, he went on to write another powerful little book, The Age of Reason, a deist work that criticized organized religion and questioned the authenticity of the Bible. This time, however, Paine’s words missed the mark. He was condemned as an atheist, shunned by friends, and denied citizenship in the United States—the young nation he helped create.
2. The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss (72 pages)
Written in 1957 for children learning to read, The Cat in the Hat has saved generations of first-graders from the mind-numbing adventures of Dick and Jane. Instead of seeing Dick run and Jane pet Spot, kids got to watch as a free-spirited, umbrella-toting cat stood on a ball, juggled goldfish, and generally encouraged chaos. Dr. Seuss spent a year and a half working on The Cat in the Hat; apparently, it’s not so easy to write a rollicking good tale with a vocabulary of only 236 words. Incredibly, just 15 words in the book are more than one syllable long.
3. The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli (82 pages)
A how-to manual for aspiring dictators, The Prince is one of the most reviled, and most studied, political treatises in history. First published in 1532, the book gave rise to the idea that a ruler’s first duty is to build a strong and stable state, no matter what the cost. The Prince inspired numerous tyrants, including Oliver Cromwell, Hitler, and Mussolini. Stalin was particularly moved by the book, scribbling copious notes in the margins of his copy.
4. Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau (26 pages)
If Machiavelli helped unleash tyranny on the world, then Thoreau taught the world how to fight back. His ideas were simple but revolutionary: Don’t obey evil laws, and don’t pay taxes to the governments that create them. Thoreau penned the essay collection in 1849, inspired by his disgust over issues such as slavery and the Mexican-American War. But few paid attention to Civil Disobedience during Thoreau’s lifetime. That wouldn’t happen until six decades later, when Gandhi came across the work while studying at Oxford and took a copy with him to South Africa. There, he and his followers used Thoreau’s ideas to launch a campaign of passive resistance against the government, later repeating those tactics in India. Civil Disobedience has been on the march ever since, toppling colonialism, segregation, apartheid, and all manner of injustice.
5. The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White (52 pages)
For nearly a century, this pithy little grammar book has taught Americans how to write. Along the way, it’s won over the hearts and minds of countless English teachers, copy editors, and authors, from Dorothy Parker to Stephen King. First published by Strunk in 1918, the manual took on a new life in 1959 when author E.B. White was brought on board to revise and expand it. (The co-authored version exceeded 100 pages.) But the book’s key lessons have always remained the same: encouraging writers to be clear, use concrete language, and omit needless words. Surprisingly, the little rulebook has also inspired other forms of expression, including a ballet of the same name by choreographer Matthew Nash. Not everyone agreed with Nash’s interpretation, though. One reviewer panned the choreography as too indecisive, claiming it failed to distinguish between the active and passive voice.
6. The Art of War by Sun Tzu (68 pages)
Despite the title’s promise, most of this ancient Chinese handbook is about how to win a conflict without needing to fight. Sun Tzu was a military general 2,500 years ago, but he was also a Taoist philosopher who believed in getting to know your enemy and cultivating a peaceful state of mind. For this reason, The Art of War is studied not only by military strategists, but also by business executives, diplomats, and lawyers. The list of people influenced by the book is impressive: Napoleon, Chairman Mao, Donald Trump, and of course, Gordon Gekko, Michael Douglas’ character in 1987’s Wall Street, who quotes Sun Tzu continuously throughout the movie.
7. Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (54 pages)
Europe’s emerging communist movement was getting no respect in the mid-1800s, so it asked two good friends, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, to do what communists do best—write propaganda. The resulting manifesto recast history as one giant class struggle and outlined a 10-point program for building a communist state. The booklet climaxed with the rousing motto, “Workers of the world, unite!” About 40 years later, those words stirred the heart of young Vladimir Lenin, who led the Bolshevik Revolution and helped create the Soviet Union. What followed was a series of unfortunate events, including the nuclear arms race, the Vietnam War, and, of course, Rocky IV.
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The above article by Michael Ridgeway is reprinted with permission from the Scatterbrained section of the September-October 2010 issue of mental_floss magazine.
There have been many different versions of the board game Trivial Pursuit sold since it debuted in 1982. Do you recall playing the first one, called the Genus edition? Today's Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss will tax your nostalgia on that game. Can you match the original six categories in Trivial Pursuit with their color codes? I couldn't. That was a long time ago! Link
During World War II, both Germany and the U.S. began research on airplanes that could take off and land vertically, which would eliminate the need for huge runways. The basic idea was to have the plane sit on its tail, and also land on its tail! There were many designs and prototypes of "tailsitters," but the idea fell by the wayside as helicopters took over that job. Aerospace engineers are still working on vertical takeoff and landing, but not by sitting on the craft's tail. Read about these experimental craft and see more pictures at Dark Roasted Blend. Link
How many of the things in your home are props? How about your car or your office? Props in this case mean things that are put there for style or to make a statement, but are really never used for anything else. Kurt Andersen, who wrote for an architectural magazine in the 1980s, noticed the props when he visited the homes he was writing about.
“I was always amazed: they were exactly propped with perfect art books,” Mr. Andersen said last week, recalling how obvious it was that the homes had been styled by someone other than their occupants.
“Maybe all these people were interested in the same Botero coffee table book,” he added. “But I don’t think so.”
Since then, the self-consciously styled home has become almost commonplace, particularly in cities like New York and Los Angeles where creative types congregate. “It’s not just rich people now,” he said. “It’s all of us.”
The article at the New York Times theorizes that the explosion of props has to do with social media. Blogger Elaine Miller says,
“People are insanely self-conscious,” Ms. Miller said. “People act like they’re always being watched. Even their house is a performance.”
This funny medieval drawing of a knight engaged in battle with an enormous snail inspired Donna D. to look up other strange illuminations that apparently had very little to do with the manuscript they accompanied. Images from the British Library have modern captions attached in a collection at Buzzfeed. Link
