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TIL: There is a ransom note longer than Jonbenet Ramsey's... well over twice as long
I had read somewhere that Barbara Mackle's ransom note was the second-longest in U.S. records. This is incorrect. By word length, Barbara's RN actually beats out Jonbenet's significantly, 970 to 377 wordsThat link is to an IDI site because they were the resource that kept coming up again and again as I tried to find the text of Barbara's ransom ( Read more... ) -
Is she why there is the trope of lesbian auto mechanics?
Summerscale also wrote a bio I haven't seen (not in the true crime section of the library) about Joe Carstairs (born Marion).
Never really grokked before how useful a "non-consummation annulment" can be if you're going into a church marriage for legal/financial reasons... -
TIL: The UK's papers continue to enjoy the spectacles of child killers... 2014: Brian Blackwell
Summoning Kate SummerscaleReddit thinks the parents were narcissists who raised another damaged narcissistic. The Telegraph (second link) definitely takes the line of "bad seed ( Read more... ) -
Do you smell the pending dystopia?
Maybe my "this will lead to dystopia" sensors are overcalibrated, maybe not.
Super SEALs: Elite Units Pursue Brain-Stimulating Technologies
Money quotes:
"In experiments, people who were watching these screens ... their ability to concentrate would fall off in about 20 minutes," Szymanski said. "But they did studies whereby a little bit of ( Read more... ) -
Damn, Hagrid
I’m re-reading Philosopher’s Stone… ve-e-e-e-e-ery slowly, coz I’m reading it in Spanish… and here’s a new question ( Read more... ) -
TIL
In Old Chinese, Jupiter (the star) was named *skots, because it traveled in the sky to measure time with its passage. The original meaning is compatible with “wanderers,” which is the original meaning of “Scot”-any member of Gaelic tribes of Northern Ireland that migrated to Scotland in the 5th century. (Correspondences of the Basic Words between ( Read more... ) -
You're joking, right?
"One of them, the hallucinogenic and poisonous Hyoscyamus niger, called henbane in English because of the danger it poses to free-range poultry, has long been associated with witches in European tradition."
What. -
When I was younger, so much younger than today...
This is hard to write, but I miss my LJ mates. So here goes nothing.
( This part went on a bit longer than I thought it would )
