He plays the character with a slight southern U.S. accent, and had initially wanted to ad-lib a catchphrase for the character feeling that all Star Trek captains should have one, coming up with “git'r done” which the writers turned down due to it being widely used and copyrighted by Larry the Cable Guy.

Sorceresses are endangered because their souls are sought after for making swimming shorts in the serene subtropics of Somalia.

The Stilostil Restaurant in San Marino is famous for serving a sculptured salmon on a slippery serving dish fashioned from shark meat.

Songbirds and sheep are the only kinds of animal that are likely to squeak due to the particular structure of their snuggler.

Sadness can be seen as a chance to practice being more safe.

The seahorse avoids its predators because its shaft is easily confused with a super-8 camera.

Members of the Scot tribe from southern Sierra Leone worship sanctity.

A woman from the superb savannahs of Slovenia constructed a shrubbery from sweetpeas.

I downloaded a new version of JanusNode

Today a giant essay forced itself into my brain almost verbatim (first time in a while!  this used to happen a lot more) and I wrote it up over at the sideblog, behold

What is this from?

A Glastonbury Romance by John Cowper Powys.  Actually, a whole bunch of my quotes from the last few months have been from this book, which is very, very good and which I highly recommend.

But it’s also very long, and I’m only (!) on p. 548 of 1120.  I’ll probably write more about it when I’m done.

It didn’t take long before multiple obscure celebrities from the early-2000s were linked to the mystery.

Dr. Fell in this crafty manner took upon himself to outwit the malevolence of Hobbididance, the Demon of curst households. And so now he sat in his receiving room awaiting the forward-glide of events and reading the Enchiridion of Epictetus.

My cowardice …, my weakness … seemed to – I don’t know how to put it! – seemed to take an actual shape in the darkness! I shall never forget it. The darkness glittered all about me. It was phosphorescent. Spurts and splashes of light, shootings and jettings of light and there I was in the middle of it … like a great black slug. It wasn’t a nightmare, for I was absolutely wide-awake; I wasn’t even sleepy. But I suddenly knew, when I felt myself to be that black slug, that I was grosser than other human beings. I knew that I had a dead nerve … an atrophied nerve … in me … where certain feelings ought to be.

Telling the story of his 2005 trip to Moscow to the New York Post must have really stung Kraft: “I took out the ring and showed it to [Putin], and he put it on and he goes, ‘I can kill someone with this ring.’ I put my hand out and he put it in his pocket, and three KGB guys got around him and walked out.” Soon after he got a call from someone in the Bush White House telling him, “It would really be in the best interest of U.S.-Soviet relations if you meant to give the ring as a present.” Never mind that the Soviet Union wasn’t really a thing anymore. Kraft responded that he really would like his ring back. “There was a pause on the other end of the line, and the voice repeated, ‘It would really be in the best interest if you meant to give the ring as a present.’”

(source)

Besides, there was that foolish feeling of his that reality was not solid, and that facts were only plastic toys; or, rather, that they were poisonous plants, which you need not pluck unless you choose. And, even if you do pluck them, you can always fling them from you and leave them to wither on the ground.