Bill Bryson

Perhaps the most irrational fashion act of all was the male habit for 150 years of wearing wigs. Samuel Pepys, as with so many things, was in the vanguard, noting with some apprehension the purchase of a wig in 1663 when wigs were not yet common. It was such a novelty that he feared people would laugh at him in church; he was greatly relieved, and a little proud, to find that they did not. He also worried, not unreasonably, that the hair of wigs might come from plague victims. Perhaps nothing says more about the power of fashion than that Pepys continued wearing wigs even while wondering if they might kill him.

The youth of Idaho falls should be encouraged to take drugs in order to cope up with the fact that there is plutonium in their drinking water.

For the moment we might very well can them DUNNOS (for Dark Unknown Nonreflective Nondetectable Objects Somewhere).

One idea to a sentence is still the best advice that anyone has ever given on writing.

Why is it, I wondered, that old people are always so self-centered and excitable? But I just smiled benignly and stood back, comforted by the thought that soon they would be dead.

Noting the lack of crime or security in the Netherlands, the author asked a native who guarded a national landmark. He got the replay, "We all do.

The current best estimate for the Earth__ weight is 5.9725 billion trillion tonnes, a difference of only about 1 per cent from Cavendish__ finding.

Less than a decade after the Great Exhibition, iron as a structural material was finished__hich makes it slightly odd that the most iconic structure of the entire century, about to rise over Paris, was made of that doomed material. I refer of course to the soaring wonder of the age known as the Eiffel Tower. Never in history has a structure been more technologically advanced, materially obsolescent, and gloriously pointless all at the same time.

It may not look it, but all the glass on Earth is flowing downwards under the relentless drag of gravity. Remove a pane of really old glass from the window of a European cathedral and it will be noticeably thicker at the bottom than at the top.

I refer of course to the soaring wonder of the age known as the Eiffel Tower. Never in history has a structure been more technologically advanced, materially obsolescent, and gloriously pointless all at the same time.

Our instinct may be to see the impossibility of tracking everything down as frustrating, dispiriting, perhaps even appalling, but it can just as well be viewed as almost unbearably exciting. We live on a planet that has a more or less infinite capacity to surprise. What reasoning person could possibly want it any other way?

And now here I was in McDonald's again for the first time since my earlier fracas. I vowed to behave myself, but McDonald's is just too much for me. I ordered a chicken sandwich and a Diet Coke.'Do you want fries with that?' the young man serving me asked.I hesitated for a moment, and in a pained but patient tone said: 'No. That's why I didn't ask for fries, you see.''We're just told to ask like,' he said.'When I want fries, generally I say something like, "I would like some fries, too, please." That's the system I use.''We're just told to ask like,' he repeated.'Do you need to know the other things I don't want? It is quite a long list. In fact, it is everything you serve except for the two things I asked for.''We're just told to ask like,' he repeated yet again, but in a darker voice, and deposited my two items on a tray and urged me, without the least hint of sincerity, to have a nice day.I realized that I probably wasn't quite ready for McDonald's yet.

You may not feel outstandingly robust, but if you are an average-sized adult you will contain within your modest frame no less than 7 X 10^18 joules of potential energy__nough to explode with the force of thirty very large hydrogen bombs, assuming you knew how to liberate it and really wished to make a point.

It__ a bit burned,_ my mother would say apologetically at every meal, presenting you with a piece of meat that looked like something _ a much-loved pet perhaps _ salvaged from a tragic house fire. __ut I think I scraped off most of the burned part,_ she would add, overlooking that this included every bit of it that had once been flesh. Happily, all this suited my father. His palate only responded to two tastes - burned and ice cream _ so everything suited him so long as it was sufficiently dark and not too startlingly flavorful. Theirs truly was a marriage made in heaven, for no one could burn food like my mother or eat it like my dad.

Tunney has all the makings of a hero _ he was clean living, intelligent, polite, reasonably good-looking _ but, like Lou Gehrig, he lacked the chemistry that stirred affection.

[Americans] were, for one thing, so smitten with the idea of progress that they invented things without having any idea whether those things would be of any use.

Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result -- eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly -- in you.

In terms of adaptability, humans are pretty amazingly useless.