Water

Buttercups

I know this sounds a little crazy, but one of the reasons I miss Alaska so much is the fact that Mississippi does not have any buttercups.  Switzerland is one of my favorite countries because... wait for it... it has buttercups. When I was little I was told that if you held a buttercup under your chin and you could see yellow under your chin that meant you liked butter.  I quickly found out that it was just the reflection of the yellow from the buttercup.

Anton Chekhov

I never knew that Anton Chekhov was this handsome.

See more attractive men from way back when at My Daguerreotype Boyfriend

The Smile of Death Becomes the Ideal of Feminine Beauty

In the late 1880s, the body of a 16-year-old girl was pulled from the Seine. She was apparently a suicide, as her body showed no marks of violence, but her beauty and her enigmatic smile led a Paris pathologist to order a plaster death mask of her face.

In the romantic atmosphere of fin de siècle Europe the girl’s face became an ideal of feminine beauty. The protagonist of Rainer Maria Rilke’s 1910 novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge writes, “The mouleur, whose shop I pass every day, has hung two plaster masks beside his door. [One is] the face of the young drowned woman, which they took a cast of in the morgue, because it was beautiful, because it smiled, because it smiled so deceptively, as if it knew.”

Ironically, in 1958 the anonymous girl’s features were used to model the first-aid mannequin Rescue Annie, on which thousands of students have practiced CPR. Though the girl’s identity remains a mystery, her face, it’s said, has become “the most kissed face of all time.”

From the Futility Closet

Inner Monologue

"As I'm sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your head."
by David Foster Wallace