26

"The average age of the (NASA) systems engineers, the controllers on the day of the moon landing was 26."
- Al Gore

atheist

"Left to themselves evil people will do evil things and good people will do good things. If you want good people to do evil things, that takes religion."
- Steven Weinberg

how they read you

"A con artist isn't a good talker. A con artist is a good listener."
- Maria Konnikova, PhD

Hell's Angel

on acting

"You live with rejection."
- Kevin Spacey

on love

"If equal affection cannot be, Let the more loving one be me."

- W.H. Auden

deep

"We don't know the depth of someone until they are challenged."
- Kevin Spacey

text

"Writers know that they are writers even before they can hold a pencil."
- Sandra Cisneros

Donald Gay Trump

No words were changed.

symbol of the pure Aryan race

Myron's 5th century BC Discobolus (Discuss Thrower) was bought by the Nazis for a record breaking five million lire as at least Adolph Hitler believed Germans were direct Greek decedents.

Image source here.

Please advise if you know the current value of 1938 lira.

giver of bliss

"You never identify yourself with the shadow cast by your body, or with its reflection, or with the body you see in a dream or in your imagination. Therefore you should not identify yourself with this living body, either."

- Shankara (A.D. 788-820),

Image source here.

unbidden mirth

"God is a comedian performing before an audience that is afraid to laugh."
- Friedrich Nietzsche

An earlier reference to comedy and church here.

a place to buy a suit in Hong Kong

Website here.

an early appeal of theatre

You could laugh which was forbidden in church.

AKT1

The links between cannabis use and psychosis has long been of interest to scientists, with studies in recent times indicating that a gene called AKT1 affects the likelihood of cannabis users developing a psychotic disorder. More here.

book a night in Van Gogh's Arles

For $10 here.

my worst times are when I'm not writing

"You don't have to go looking for suffering if you want to be a writer. It'll find you soon enough."
- Philip Roth

the end of Scottish culture

Hendrick ter Brugghen, Bagpipe Player, 1624

An earlier reference to the Battle of Culloden here.

on history

"May my son study history, for it is the only true psychology, and the only true philosophy."
- Napoleon to the duke of Reichstadt at St. Helena

"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."

- John F. Kennedy

école de Honfleur

Eugène Boudin, Festival in the Harbor of Honfleur (1858), came from the school that contributed to the look of the Impressionists.

Japanese toilet

physics superheros

“Understanding is a kind of ecstasy”
- Brian Cox quoting Carl Sagan

Before games

"I vomited."
- Jim Kelly, NFL Hall of Fame QB

eureka

"' I do not depend on figures at all. I try an experiment and reason out the result, somehow, by methods which I could not explain.' And so it was that by testing 1,600 different materials, from coconut fibre to fishing line and even hair from a colleague's beard, Edison finally found a particular type of bamboo which could be used, in carbonized form, as the filament in the first proper incandescent light bulb. He demonstrated it on New Year's Eve 1879 at his laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey."
- The Economist December 5th 2015

Energy

"We never walk. We run."
- Hong Kong axiom

Image by Nero Chan

oral hygiene

Martin Amis explains that he spent $30,000 of a writing advance to fix his teeth.

road trip

Joke

"I have a Knight inside of me. Cirrhosis of the liver."
- SNL

Image source here.

fish

"What leadership is about is not just swimming with the current."
- Bernie Sanders