Word: fact
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...nights, but he's required to move things along, plotwise. To this end, he's made poor James a virgin who is eager to be otherwise, allowing romance to lend shape to the summer. Will he find love with Em? Or the practically mythical Lisa P? (The fact that she is not Lisa, not Lisa Peters, but Lisa P, is perhaps the movie's most exquisitely right touch.) But which girl, if any, James ends up with feels immaterial. Ultimately the movie is less interesting as a romance than as a meditation on the commonality of uncertainty. Whenever it taps...
...then you have little details everywhere, like the fact that there are soldiers encamped near Meryton in the original book, for seemingly no reason whatsoever. I mean, there's just this huge regiment of soldiers there, and the obvious thing to do in this case is to say that, well, they're there digging up graves and burning bodies and fighting the unmentionable menace. (See the top 10 fiction books...
...logic. So much of Austen is about the unmentionable - about using wit and good manners to cover up nasty things like sex and money. So why not have one of those unmentionable things be zombies? That was what was so funny to me about this idea, is the fact that these people in Austen's books are kind of like zombies. They live in this bubble of extreme wealth and privilege, and they're so preoccupied with the little trivial nothings of their lives - who's dating who, who's throwing this ball, or having this dinner party. As long...
China's Gift to Taiwan: Fake Pandas! Taipei Times "Taiwan-China relations were dealt a severe setback yesterday when it was found that Taipei Zoo's "pandas" are not what they seem. Zookeepers discovered at feeding time yesterday that the two pandas are in fact Wenzhou brown forest bears that had been dyed to create the panda's distinctive black-and-white appearance. The Taipei Zoo's head of ursidae ex-procynidae care, Connie Liu... said she became suspicious when the pandas Tuan Tuan and Yuan Yuan began to spend almost all of their waking hours having sex. Pandas...
...where does this rule about not touching the Queen come from? The sovereigns of England and France at some point in their nations' long histories claimed a divine right to rule, a right often amplified by titles bestowed by the Pope in Rome. (The Queen, in fact, still has the title Defender of the Faith, an honor given to Henry VIII before he broke with the Catholic Church and established the Church of England.) That touch of holiness once gave the occupant of the throne the supposed ability to cure certain diseases - most famously, scrofula, a terrible skin ailment that...