"[President] Coolidge chose to celebrate July 4 [1927] -- which also happened to be his fifty-fifth birthday -- by remaining in South Dakota, where he was having the time of his life. In recognition of all the publicity he was generating with his trip, the state of South Dakota presented him on his birthday with a cowboy outfit and horse. Named Kit, the horse was charitably described as 'spirited.' It was in fact all but untamed. The President, who was by no means a horseman was prudently kept well away from it. Instead his delighted attention was focused on his other main present -- a cowboy outfit consisting of a ten-gallon hat, bright red shirt, capacious blue neckerchief, chaps, boots, and spurs. Coolidge retired to put it all on and emerged clankingly, and a little clumsily, in the full regalia a few minutes later. He looked ridiculous, but very proud, and posed happily for photographers, who could not believe their luck. 'Here was one of the great comic scenes in American history,' wrote Robert Benchley in The New Yorker that week.

Coolidge loved that outfit and wore it for the rest of the summer whenever he could. According to lodge staff, he often changed into it in the evening after his more formal day's duties were done, and for a few hours ceased to be the most important man in America and instead was just a happy cowpoke."

-- Bill Bryson, on President Calvin Coolidge's genuine love for an utterly goofy cowboy outfit given to him as a birthday gift during a vacation in the Black Hills of South Dakota in July 1927, recounted in Bryson's book One Summer: America, 1927 (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO).

The most remarkable part of all is your DNA. You have a metre of it packed into every cell, and so many cells that if you formed all the DNA in your body into a single fine strand it would stretch ten billion miles, to beyond Pluto. Think of it: there is enough of you to leave the solar system. You are in the most literal sense cosmic.

#Bill Bryson (The Body: A Guide for Occupants)

Dolly Parton with one of Country Music's greatest groups The Desert Rose Band

Photo by Disney

Fans Choose TOMORROW X TOGETHER & Jonas Brothers’ ‘Do It Like That’ as This Week’s Favorite New Music

The team-up between brought in nearly 89% of the vote.

TOMORROW X TOGETHER and the Jonas Brothers‘ “Do It Like That” has topped this week’s new music poll.

Music fans voted in a poll published Friday (July 7) on Billboard, choosing the collaboration between the K-pop group and the sibling trio as their favorite new music release of the past week.

“Do It Like That” brought in nearly 89% of the vote, beating out new music by Taylor Swift (Speak Now (Taylor’s Version)), NewJeans (“Super Shy”), FendiDa Rappa featuring Cardi B (“Point Me 2”), Rauw Alejandro (Playa Saturno), and others.

Produced by Ryan Tedder, the prolific creative behind such hits as OneRepublic’s “Counting Stars” and Beyoncé’s “Halo,” “Do It Like That” is the first team-up between TXT and the JoBros.

Accompanied by percussive bounce, snaps and pops for the song’s instrumentals, the groups find themselves marveling in the excitement of a new romance that keeps on surprising them. “Yeah, oh, my God/ Don’t know how you do it like that/ Blow my mind/ Then somehow you bring it right back,” they take turns singing on the chorus.

Trailing behind “Do It Like That” on the poll is Swift’s Speak Now (Taylor’s Version), the newly released re-recorded version of her 2010 album, with almost 9% of the vote.

Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you. We are each so atomically numerous and so vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of our atoms - up to a billion for each of us, it has been suggested - probably once belonged to Shakespeare.  A billion more each came from Buddha and Genghis Khan and Beethoven, and any other historical figure you care to name.

Bill Bryson

Pogo

* * * * *

“Because of social strictures against even the mildest swearing, America developed a particularly rich crop of euphemistic expletives - darn, durn, goldurn, goshdad, goshdang, goshawful, blast, consarn, confound, by Jove, by jingo, great guns, by the great horn spoon (a nonce term first cited in the Biglow Papers), jo-fired, jumping Jehoshaphat, and others almost without number - but even this cautious epithets could land people in trouble as late as the 1940s.”

― Bill Bryson, Made in America: An Informal History of the English Language in the United States

“Your lungs, smoothed out, would cover a tennis court, and the airways within them would stretch nearly from coast to coast. The length of all your blood vessels would take you two and a half times around Earth. The most remarkable part of all is your DNA (or deoxyribonucleic acid). You have a meter of it packed into every cell, and so many cells that if you formed all the DNA in your body into a single strand, it would stretch ten billion miles, to beyond Pluto. Think of it: there is enough of you to leave the solar system. You are in the most literal sense cosmic.”

— Bill Bryson, The Body: A Guide for Occupants

“Tutti hanno, intrappolata dentro di sé, dell’energia. Il fatto è che non siamo molto bravi a tirarla fuori.”

— Bill Bryson

Alexander von Humboldt… observed that there are three stages in scientific discovery: first, people deny that it is true; then they deny that it is important; finally they credit the wrong person.

—Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

February's reads

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

Winter's Gift by Ben Aaronovitch

Watchmen by Alan Moore

The Last Dragonslayer by Jasper Fforde

Red Side Story by Jasper Fforde

I had planned to read Wintersmith by Terry Pratchett but I've not quite finished yet so hopefully this month, but I did knock off 2 books from my goal.

Favourite book in February was Red Side Story I love Jasper Fforde anyway but this is by far my favourite.

March I definitely want to finish Wintersmith, Death in Heels by Kitty Murphy from my New Year's reading goals and Simul by Andrew Caulecott and The Stardust Thief by Chelsea Abdullah

Happy reading

Dagnabbit.

From “Bryson’s Dictionary of Troublesome Words” by Bill Bryson

In 1919, his work in Europe done, [Herbert] Hoover returned permanently to the United States. He had lived abroad for twenty years and was something of a stranger in his own land, yet he was so revered that he was courted as a potential Presidential candidate by both political parties. It has often been written that Hoover had been away so long that he didn't know whether he was a Republican or a Democrat. That is not actually true. He had joined the Republican Party in 1909. But it is true that he wasn't terrifically political and had never voted in a Presidential election. In March 1921, he joined Warren G. Harding's Cabinet as Secretary of Commerce. After Harding died suddenly in 1923, he continued in the same post under Calvin Coolidge.

Hoover was a diligent and industrious presence in both administrations, but he was dazzlingly short on endearing qualities. His manner was cold, vain, prickly, and snappish. He never thanked subordinates or inquired about their health or happiness. He had no visible capacity for friendliness or warmth. He did not even like shaking hands. Although Coolidge's sense of humor was that of a slightly backward schoolboy -- one of his favorite japes was to ring all the White House servant bells at once, then hide behind the drapes to savor the confusion that followed -- he did at least have one. Hoover had none. One of his closest associates remarked that in thirty years he had never heard Hoover laugh out loud.

Coolidge kept an exceedingly light hand on the tiller of state. He presided over an administration that was, in the words of one observer, "dedicated to inactivity."...By 1927, Coolidge worked no more than about four and a half hours a day -- "a far lighter schedule than most other Presidents, indeed most other people, have followed," as the political scientist Robert E. Gilbert once observed -- and napped much of the rest of the time. "No other President in my time," recalled the White House usher, "ever slept so much." When not napping, he often sat with his feet in an open desk drawer (a lifelong habit) and counted cars passing on Pennsylvania Avenue.

All this left Herbert Hoover in an ideal position to exert himself outside his areas of formal responsibility, and nothing pleased Herbert Hoover more than conquering new administrative territories. He took a hand in everything -- labor disputes, the regulation of radio, the fixing of airline routes, the supervision of foreign loans, the relief of traffic congestion, the distribution of water rights along major rivers, the price of rubber, the implementation of child hygiene regulations, and much else that often seemed only tangentially related to matters of domestic commerce. He became known to his colleagues as the Secretary of Commerce and Undersecretary of Everything Else...

Coolidge didn't like most people, but he seemed especially not to like Hoover. "That man has offered me unsolicited advice for six years, all of it bad!" Coolidge once barked when the subject of Hoover came up. In April 1927, Coolidge puzzled the world by issuing a statement proclaiming that Hoover would never be appointed Secretary of State...Why Coolidge issued the statement at all, and why with such finality, was a matter that puzzled every political commentator in the country. As Hoover had indicated no desire for the role, and the incumbent, Frank B. Kellogg, no inclination to leave it, they were as bewildered as everyone else.

With withering disdain Coolidge referred to his tireless Commerce Secretary as Wonder Boy, but though he sneered, he was glad to have someone to do so much of his work for him....(W)hen the Mississippi flooded as it never had before, it was to Herbert Hoover that President Coolidge turned. One week after making his enigmatic promise not to promote Hoover to the role of Secretary of State, Coolidge appointed him to head the relief efforts to deal with the emergency. Apart from that one act, Coolidge did nothing. He declined to visit the flooded areas. He declined to make any federal funds available or to call a special session of Congress. He declined to make a national radio broadcast appealing for private donations. He declined to provide the humorist Will Rogers with a message of hope and goodwill that Rogers could read out as part of a national broadcast. He declined to supply twelve signed photographs to be auctioned off for the relief of flood victims.

-- The weird relationship between the equally weird Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover, via One Summer: America, 1927 by Bill Bryson (BOOK | KINDLE | AUDIO), courtesy Anchor Books (2014).

The best nonfiction books I've read so far this year

Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley by Charlotte Gordon

Direct Action: Protest and the Reinvention of American Radicalism by L.A. Kauffman

Shakespeare: The World as Stage by Bill Bryson

Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible Again by Rachel Held Evans

The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper by Hallie Rubenhold

Let's just say that, for whatever reason, you wanted to build your very own live version of Benedict Cumberbatch, from all the chemical elements that make up the British heartthrob. It would cost you precisely $151,578.46 US — excluding labour, according to author Bill Bryson.

That's just one of the surprising facts about our physical selves that Bryson gathered for his latest book, The Body: A Guide for Occupants.

(via Here's how much it would cost to build your very own Benedict Cumberbatch | CBC Radio)

Just sitting quietly, doing nothing at all, your brain churns through more information in thirty seconds than the Hubble Space Telescope has processed in thirty years. A morsel of cortex one cubic millimeter in size-about the size of a grain of sand-could hold two thousand terabytes of information, enough to store all the movies ever made, trailers included, or about 1.2 billion copies of this book.

#Bill Bryson (The Body)

Just came in the mail! 😍

Had to order from the UK. This edition isn't available in the US, weirdly.