There seems to have been an awful lot of news lately, so here's some stuff to take your mind off it 
Happy invoicing!
- The Day the Lake Took the Edmund Fitzgerald - ”In November of 1975, the SS Edmund Fitzgerald left port in Wisconsin for a routine shipment run. Neither she nor her 29 crewmen made it to their destination.” Thoughts on the power of the Great Lakes and the shipwreck immortalised in song by Gordon Lightfoot.
- Strange Giant Filaments Reveal a Mystery at the Milky Way’s Heart - ”Astrophysicist Farhad Yusef-Zadeh has spent decades peering into the center of the Milky Way galaxy, discovering hundreds of enigmatic filaments in the process.” Tentacles, probably
- "Garfield" phones have littered France's coast for 30 years; mystery solved - ”For more than 30 years bright orange "Garfield" phones have been washing up on the French coast to the bemusement of local beach cleaners, who have finally cracked the mystery behind them.” A shipping container, obviously, but it proved to be extremely well-hidden
- Learning to be a loser: a philosopher’s case for doing nothing - ”For Emil Cioran, a life devoid of action, practical ambitions and busyness is a life in which room has been made for meaning.” Sounds good to me.
- Sydney’s Jazz Age Criminal Queens Ruled the Streets With Razors - Move over, Peaky Blinders: ”On the streets of Sydney, two female monarchs ruled the people. Tilly Devine, the Queen of Waterloo and Kate Leigh, the Queen of Surry Hills were at the head of two razor gangs that terrorized the city and took trouble with them wherever they went.”
- Escaping China with a spoon and a rusty nail - ”How one Uyghur man fled Xinjiang via the notorious smugglers' road and broke out of a Thai prison.” Either one of those would be impressive enough in its own right
- Lost Liners - Britannic - The Titanic gets all the attention, but her younger sister also met an unfortunate end while serving as a WWI hospital ship: ”Only the outbreak of war had prevented the Britannic from joining White Star's fleet as the largest, the most luxurious -- and the safest -- passenger ship flying the British flag. Instead her fancy fittings sat in storage, her promenade decks were crowded with hospital beds and her first-class dining room had become the intensive care ward where the most seriously wounded would stay before and after surgery in the operating theater next door, formerly the grand reception room.”
- 'Operation Midnight Climax': The CIA mixed LSD and sex at this SF brothel - ”San Francisco has never been afraid of the obscene. But the events unfolding inside a dimly lit apartment on Chestnut Street were some of the most shocking the city has ever seen… For eight years, between 1955 and 1963, federal agents ran a hidden brothel in one of San Francisco’s poshest neighborhoods and tested LSD on unsuspecting Bay Area residents.” It's almost as if secretive, unaccountable government agencies can't be trusted to behave themselves
- 12 Famous Quotes That Always Get Misattributed - ”One person quotes someone else without a shoutout, and all of a sudden, they become the original speaker. Or we just decide a quote sounds like something Mark Twain would say.” I doubt we'll ever be able to lay any of these misattributions to rest, as they've pervaded the culture for too long. But now you can be the annoying person who says “Actually…”
- Women and Their Fish – Fantastic Vintage Snapshots - ”Great snapshots of fish and the women who posed with them.”
Happy invoicing!
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