We think we understand the rules when we become adults but what we really experience is a narrowing of the imagination.
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| — | David Lynch |
For all its bravura, Mr. Fairfax’s seafaring almost pales beside his earlier ventures. Footloose and handsome, he was a flesh-and-blood character out of Graham Greene, with more than a dash of Hemingway and Ian Fleming shaken in.
At 9, he settled a dispute with a pistol. At 13, he lit out for the Amazon jungle.
At 20, he attempted suicide-by-jaguar. Afterward he was apprenticed to a pirate. To please his mother, who did not take kindly to his being a pirate, he briefly managed a mink farm, one of the few truly dull entries on his otherwise crackling résumé, which lately included a career as a professional gambler.
This is totally worth a quick read. A pistol fight at nine years old? Bad ass.
From Joel Sartore’s fantastic Biodiversity Project:
Hibernating Arctic ground squirrels (Spermopilus parryii) at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks. This animal is the grand champion of all hibernators. It’s the only mammal that can drop its body temperature to below freezing. They hibernate for seven months. Females go in first, in August. Males follow a month later. They come out again to feed on tundra plants in May. Biologists at UAF have been studying the animal for 20 years, but still can’t figure out how this animal maintains a flat body temperature for all those months just above freezing. “You could put people into hibernation for space trips if you could understand it better,” said Franziska ‘Fran’ Kohl, one of the biologists here. “They also show symptoms of Alzheimers during hibernation.” She added that traumatic head injuries heal when in hibernation, another thing scientists are trying to figure out.
Holiday
April 1961
via survival2019
From our wonderful sister blog, I Love Old Magazines!
By the way, Cody is absolutely crushing it at Old Magazines right now. He has been finding some great stuff. If you like that blog, you should tell him so!
Alan Kay (born May 17, 1940) is an American computer scientist, known for his early pioneering work on object-oriented programming and windowing graphical user interface design
