I take it that's the warm weather over with for this year then? 
Happy invoicing!
- Baghdad Country Club - How a chance meeting in an airport led a British contractor to set up a bar in occupied Iraq: ”He had never handled that much of his own money before—$150,000—much less handed it over to someone he barely knew, in cash. His entire life savings was now denominated in liquor, which he had piled into an 18-wheeler and driven through hostile Baghdad… Within days, James’s alcohol supply was sold through, at quite a margin. He had doubled his money, and that was just from informal sales through a small rented storefront. Now his ambition grew from accidental entrepreneur to impresario.”
- Dogged Dark Matter Hunters Find New Hiding Places to Check - Physicists are looking down the back of the Universe's sofa cushions: ”Perhaps dark matter is made of an entirely different kind of particle than the ones physicists have been searching for. New experiments are springing up to look for these ultra-lightweight phantoms.”
- The One-Way Nuclear Mission - The early days of the nuclear deterrent were somewhat makeshift: ”A few targets were close enough to NATO bases that a return trip was feasible. But for most, the limited range of the fighters meant they would only have enough fuel to escape the nuclear blast, bail out, then escape and evade back to friendly territory.”
- Rocket Man - ”In the twentieth century, the jetpack became synonymous with the idea of a ‘futuristic society.’ Appearing in cartoons and magazines, it felt like a matter of time before people could ride a jetpack to work.” Turns out there was only one of them, and the pilot was risking his life every time he demonstrated it
- Cinema in the rubble: movies made in the ruins of postwar Germany - ”Billy Wilder, Howard Hawks, Cary Grant and Marlene Dietrich are among the actors and directors who went to Germany in the aftermath of the Second World War, to film stories amid the rubble of a country in ruins.”
- My Friend Twiggy, & The Wrestlers Who Made Soho - Patrick W. Reed reminisces about a number of recondite aspects of Soho history, and his own life: ”I was, in the manner of all young men who swallow William Blake’s lie that the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom, exploring my own particular ‘low life’ just as enthusiastically as I was expanding my literary horizons, believing that there was some wisdom or nobility to be found in the gutter.”
- Judge a book by its cover: Inside the world of book design - ”Up until the 19th century, book covers were merely an extra piece of paper intended to protect the book from damage and dust before purchase… Everything changed when British literary periodical ‘The Yellow Book’ started publishing dust jackets with images on them, designed by Aubrey Beardsley, in 1894.”
- The therapist who hated me - ”Going to a child psychoanalyst four times a week for three years was bad enough. Reading what she wrote about me was worse.” Michael Bacon discovered that not only had his childhood therapist written extensively about him as a case study, she had also completely failed to understand anything he’d ever said to her.
- “Head-On Joe” and the Greatest Show on Two Rails - The story of Joseph S. Connolly, who got rich by crashing trains for paying audiences: ”The two locomotives faced each other at opposite ends of a temporary track. At a signal, an engineer at the controls of each locomotive opened the throttle… Upon impact both locomotives were demolished as iron shrapnel flew in all directions from a thundercloud of steam and smoke.”
- This is what 30 years of British counterculture looks like - ”Exist to Resist — Matthew Smith has spent three decades documenting street culture at its rawest, from rural raves to political protests, in the face of police pressure.” This is from a march against the Criminal Justice and Public Order Bill in 1994.
Happy invoicing!
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