Olfactory information is processed in the left hemisphere of the pigeon brain, which connects more strongly to the right nostril, so it makes sense that the right side of their noses would be critical if the birds used smell to navigate. This connection isn’t limited to birds, either; though humans, on average, can smell better with the left nostril than the right, we tend to find odors more pleasant when inhaled through the right nostril.
from The Thing with Feathers, by Noah Strycker
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God created war so that Americans would learn geography.
Mark Twain
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If you ever marry, Mr. Magee, and I suppose you will, take my advice. Marry a sense of humor first, and a woman incidental-like.
from Seven Keys to Baldpate, by Earl Derr Biggers
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During this period a nurse stood guard over the brood, a sinister gargoyle with the temper of a wasp and a face hewn out of Indiana limestone. Miss Bramble had lived on some of the finest estates at Newport and had certain standards, even if she was working for poor white trash. Every afternoon she dressed her charges in Eton jackets, starched muslin, and velvet ribbons, which seemed rather formal wear for the manure pile. By skillful suggestion, she built up the notion of snakes in the greenery to the point where screams rang out when a salad was placed on the table.
from The Most of S.J. Perelman, by S.J. Perelman
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A native Angeleno and graduate of the Hollywood High School, she had never been anywhere but Palm Springs, Lake Arrowhead, Tiajuana, and similar local flytraps. One rainy day, on a bearskin rug before a glowing fire, she confessed her profound discontent, her overwhelming Weltschmerz. I suggested that she take a trip around the world.
“Oh, I know,” returned the lady, yawning with ennui, ” but there’s so many other places I want to see first.”
from The Most of S.J. Perelman, by S.J. Perelman
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Well I remember the Traveling preacher, Brother Burnett, who visited our community twice a month. Brother Burness were a fine old fellow and one of the best chicken-eaters I ever knew. He could not read or write. His wife done all the reading to him, and he would memorize his sermons from what his wife read out of the Bible. Sometimes he got his quotations pretty badly mixed up, but he meant well even if he couldn’t remember things straight. …
Sunday was a dreadful time. All day long our folks made us listen to that long-whiskered man with the split-tail coat pray and preach—most of the morning and again in the afternoon, and between the two sermons he ate all our chicken.
from Cow by the Tail, by Jesse James Benton
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Old Tom, for example. He were a dandy lead steer. His horns had a spread of near seven foot, and he were a big critter all over. He were branded with Odem’s home ranch brand at Buffalo Gap in Colman County—PUP. He word forty dollars’ worth of gold on his horns. The boys in our outfit had bought from the Injuns two solid gold rings made from twenty-dollar gold pieces. These gold rings was screwed down on the horns about one inch from the tip, and the way he stepped along you could almost figure he was proud of them rings.
When a herd of steers were sold and he were cut from them, and they would be driv away, he would always low as if to say good-bye. That was after he had led all the steers into the loading pens.
On the trail he would step along twenty or thirty yards in front, a natural-born leader, just the way there are leaders among men. The herd of steers sure would follow him through streams of water, over hills and broken ground, through heavy brush, wherever you wanted them to go. All you had to do was to point the way and he would step out like a saddle horse, with all the rest after him. You could holler to him gee or haw, and he would turn right or left; and he would stop when you hollered whoa at him. And he would come to you when you called him. You could talk to him just like you would to a man.
from Cow by the Tail, by Jesse James Benton
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My father had been a pioneer air traveller on Imperial Airways until on one occasion the machine in which he had been travelling had got into an air pocket and fallen vertically a hundred feet before regaining its equilibrium. The shock had been so great that my father’s head had gone clean through the roof and he had found himself in a screaming wind looking straight into the monocled eye of Sir Sefton Brancker, the Director of Civil Aviation, who had suffered a similar indignity. After the forced landing in a field near Romney Marsh, Sir Sefton had stood my father a bottle of Champagne, but he had had enough of aeroplanes and his subsequent journeys were made by more conventional means.
from Something Wholesale: My Life and Times in the Rag Trade, by Eric Newby
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It was Jesus Christ Himself in the Sermon on the Mount who told us to be bird-watchers! “Behold the fowls of the air” is how the King James Version renders His command (Matthew 6:26). Translated into basic English, however, His instruction becomes “watch birds!” So we have the highest possible authority for this activity. Moreover, He meant more than that we should notice them. For the Greek verb employed here means to fix the eyes on or take a good look at.”
from The Birds Our Teachers, by John Stott
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Nor could he [the author’s father] match the endless stories that my mother told me in the years before I could read, or the many songs. The only song I ever heard him sing was this one:
Rain forty days
Rain forty nights
Sauerkraut sticking out the smokestack.
Apparently there were additional words, but if so he never sang them.
from Happy Days, by H.L. Mencken
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Many other eatables, in those days, were thought to be injurious to the young, or even fatal. One of them was cheese. When a boy was allowed to eat it at all it was a sign that he was almost well enough along to be intrusted with horses, edged tools and firearms, and even so he was always introduced to it by slow stages, with many cautious halts. His first dose was a very thin slice, and he was watched carefully for symptoms of spasms. If he appeared to turn a shade pale he was at once given a jigger of ipecac and put to bed, with the blankets piled a foot high, Winter or Summer. My brother and I had little confidence in such notions, and one day we made off with a heel of cheese that had been laid aside by the hired girl for her mouse traps. We divided it evenly and ate it boldly, defying Jahveh, Dr. Wiley or anyone else it might concern to do his worst. Once more, nothing much happened. The taste was dreadful—indeed, so dreadful that we pitied the poor mice. But apart from a few sharp twinges in the gastric region, maybe of psychic origin, we suffered no damage.
from Happy Days, by H.L. Mencken
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It was his theory that all reformers were either frauds or idiots, and that some of them were both. He believed that practical politicians, taking one with another, made the safest and most competent public officials, if only because they were intelligent. He granted somewhat grudgingly that there were occasional thieves among them, but he argues that their worst corruptions were cheaper to the taxpayer than the insane wastes of the uplift.
from Heathen Days, by H.L. Mencken
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As a follower of Jim Busey, the Democratic boss of the ward for many years, he took an active hand in the ruffianism that Busey always staged on Election Day. Opposition voters were jabbed with shoemakers’ awls as they stood at the windows of the polling places, or otherwise mauled and intimidated. A favorite device was to bespatter one of them with blood obtained from a slaughter-house and then chase him through the ward. Usually he was a Negro, which is to say, a Republican. The other Negroes, seeing him bloody and assuming that he had been stabbed and was about to be killed, kept away from the polls.
from Heathen Days, by H.L. Mencken