I et anfall av veldig aktiv prokrastinering i dag kom jeg over noen notater jeg har gjort meg fra diverse bøker underveis på universitetet. Fordi jeg er et godt menneske tenkte jeg at jeg skulle gjøre dem tilgjengelige for dere her.

Denne fra Palmer (boken heter A History of the Modern World, men jeg har aldri hørt den referert til som noe annet enn Palmer, selv om den i nyere utgaver har minst to andre medforfattere. Jeg tror man bruker niende eller tiende utgave på universitetet nå):

Abdul Hamid reigned for 33 years, from 1876 to 1909. For all this time he lived in terror, fighting back blindly and ferouciously against forces that he could not understand. Once when a consignment of dynamos reached the Turkish customs it was held up by fearful officials, because the contents were declared to make several hundred revolutions per minute. Again, chemistry books for use in the new American college were pronounced seditious, because their chemical symbols might be a secred cipher.

Denne kommer også fra Palmer (jeg ville funnet frem sidetall hvis boken ikke var i Trondheim med Tor. Jeg håper alle tar lærdom av hvor viktig det er at Camilla får ha bøkene sine hos seg):

Citing British abuses of international law in justification, the German government in February 1915 declared the waters surrounding the British Isles to be a war zone, in which Allied vessels would be torpedoed and neutral vessels would be in grave danger.

Three months later the liner Lusitania was torpedoed off the Irish coast. About 1200 people were drowned, of whom 118 were American citizens. The Lusitania was a British ship; it carried munitions of war manufactured in the United States for Allied use; and the Germans had published ominous warnings in the New York papers that Americans should not take passage on it. Americans then believed that they should be able to sail safely, on peaceful errands, on the ship of a belligerent power in wartime. The loss of life shocked the country.

Og her er et dikt jeg fant i The World of Athens, skrevet av Lucilius (Med en referanse 11.211 -- jeg er ikke sikker på hva det refererer til). Det skulle illustrere hvor sterke reaksjoner folk hadde da man innførte skyggelegging i gresk kunst:

Calpurnius, our favourite braggart soldier,
Strayed into an art gallery, and there
Ran into a mural of the Trojan War.
He goggled
swooned
crying "I yield
O comrade Trojans, belov'd of the War God."
We brought him to. He asked where he was wounded,
And insisted on paying ransom to the wall.

Har du lest noe rart i en bok i det siste?