Wed 2007-11-14 From the NYPL Digital Library, a set of cigarette cards on how to deal with an World War 2 incendiary bomb, in your living room, while wearing high-heel shoes:
It is interesting to contrast the practical attitude shown by these cards with that shown by government advice in the current terrorism scares.
Mon 2007-11-12 
Another image from an old book, this time from The Story of the Heavens by Sir Robert Stawell Ball, 1893. Coggia's comet was studied spectroscopically by William Huggins, Father Secchi, Norman Lockyer and others. More details can be found here. It was also seen by the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins who made the following entry in his journal for 1874:
July 13. The comet - I have seen it at bedtime in the west, with head to the ground, white , a soft well-shaped tail, not big: I felt a certain awe and instress, a feeling of strangeness, flight (it hangs like a shuttlecock at the height, before it falls), and of threatening.
(Instress is a word Hopkins coined to mean the force or energy that sustains the inner nature of a person or object.)
Sat 2007-11-10 door zombie dör zom'bi, n. a person who insists on blocking the exit from a railway carriage by standing in front of the doors whilst listening to an mp3-player and staring intently at the carriage wall, even though they have absolutely no intention of getting off at the next stop and there are plenty of empty seats available.
There, I feel better now for getting that off my chest.
Sat 2007-11-10 I would have thought that a bishop would know better than to bring up the subject of descent from apes:
Bishop Boniface Adoyo, the head of the 35 Kenyan evangelical denominations, is leading opposition to the exhibition. “I do not dispute that as humans we have a history, but my family most certainly did not descend from the apes,” he said.
Power corrupts even those who have been ordained.
