Take a break from watching the Conservative party ritually disembowel itself and have a look at this lot 
Happy invoicing!
- When the Fire Came for Fort McMurray - As seen in New York last week, it's wildfire season. But it could have been worse: ”In 2016, a wildfire jumped the Athabasca River and headed straight for Fort McMurray, an Alberta oil town 600 miles south of the Arctic Circle… John Vaillant chronicles the moment the blaze enters town, forcing nearly 90,000 people to flee in what remains the largest, most rapid single-day evacuation in the history of modern fire.”
- Was a small-brained human relative the world’s first gravedigger—and artist? - ”A trio of papers posted online and presented at a meeting today lays out an astonishing scenario. Roughly 240,000 years ago, they suggest, small-brained human relatives carried their dead through a labyrinth of tight passageways into the dark depths of a vast limestone cave system in South Africa.” Not everybody agrees, though
- Scholars may have an authentic manuscript of a medieval comedy show — and it's pretty funny - Des O'Connor's joke book found: ”In addition to containing the earliest known example of the expression ‘red herring,’ this late 15th-century booklet, known as the Heege Manuscript, appears to record the repertoire of an entertainer from that period.”
- The Man Who Knows What the World’s Richest People Want (and How To Get It) - Even billionaires need a hand doing the shopping: ”Rey Flemings has become one of the premiere fixers for the global elite. More than that, though, he gives the rich a place to admit what they can’t say publicly: that they need help finding happiness.”
- Hitting Zero - ”Three days inside the bouncy, sparkly, girl-powered, extremely hard-core world of competitive cheer.” It’s not all waving pom-poms and doing cartwheels.
- How to build a cheap DIY underground bunker to protect you from nuclear fallout, in 6 steps - HT to DoctorStrangelove for this useful guide: ”Turns out, if a nuclear attack is imminent, you can build your own DIY fallout shelter for relatively cheap.”
- The Eight-Thousanders - Award-winning short story by Jason Sanford: ”He spoke once, the words whispered by frozen lips on a face so frostbitten he looked like a porcelain doll. I found him below the summit as our expedition bottlenecked before the Hillary Step on our final ascent of Mount Everest… I thought the man sitting under the overhang dead until I saw condensation rise from his lips.”
- The Birth of Brainstorming - ”Meet the self-help author who wanted to teach corporate America how to think.” Next time you’re in some tedious session with a facilitator saying “Don’t think about it, just say it!” you’ll know who to blame
- Ingenious librarians - ”A group of 1970s campus librarians foresaw our world of distributed knowledge and research, and designed search tools for it.” A look back at early research into providing access to almost unlimited information.
- Lettering for Stitchers (1973) - ”Purchased and scanned by us, a long time ago.” “Us” being the fine stationers of Present and Correct
Happy invoicing!
