Some people believe they’re boring. They have no story to tell. They’ve done nothing interesting.
But a wise man named Ryter thinks they’re wrong.
In Rodman Philbrick’s The Last Book in the Universe, old man Ryter is talking to the young teen Spaz, the main character. Here’s what Ryter says to him:
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Japanese scientists are hot on the trail of the extinct wooly mammoth’s DNA, which is available from tissue preserved in Russia. What do they want to do with the DNA?
They want to clone it and, in about five years, make a modern mammoth.
Ryan Phelan of Revive & Restore would like to bring back
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In “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment” by Nathaniel Hawthorne, four old friends who have wasted their lives are given water from the supposed Fountain of Youth. After they drink the water, the three men begin to fight over the woman, whom they all had fancied in their youth, and in their tussling, they knock over the vase with the precious water.
Dr. Heidegger learns his lesson. He is finished with trying to make people young again, but the three old folks come away from the experiment with a different idea. They want to travel to Florida to drink from the original Fountain of Youth. You can read the whole clever story here.
By the way, I’ve drunk from the Fountain of Youth in St. Augustine, Florida. The water tastes like it has sulfur in it (stinky-egg scent). And I can assure you that it has not worked.
Nathaniel Hawthorne never could have imagined a real company that freezes people to somehow revive them later. Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Arizona, freezes bodies in the hopes of
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Dr. Seuss’s real name is Theodor Seuss Geisel, and he’s the author of The Cat in the Hat, Green Eggs and Ham, Horton Hears a Who, and many other books.
A commemorative postage stamp, which you see here, was issued by the United States in 2004 on the anniversary of his 100th birthday.
And now, more than a quarter of a century after his death, Dr. Seuss was published again! The complete manuscript and sketches for What Pet Should I Get? was found in an old box and was published in 2015. It became a #1 New York Times Bestseller!
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Jules Verne, considered one of the fathers of science-fiction (sci-fi), liked to write about going places people couldn’t actually go to or had not been before.
He wrote about exploring the core of the earth in Journey to the Center of the Earth. His fantastic tale 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea takes readers deep, deep into the ocean in a submarine, a fairly new invention. From the Earth to the Moon shoots adventurers to the moon in a metal rocket long before space travel had been invented.
Sci-fi writers like to
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Melba was fifteen years old when she was chased by men who wanted to hang her. It was the first day of racial integration in Little Rock, Arkansas, in September 1957, and fighting for her life was just the first of her year of torture at the hands of students, parents, teachers, and members of the town.
And when I say torture, I mean
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`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
What?!
That’s the first verse of the poem “Jabberwocky” by Lewis Carroll. You can read the whole crazy poem by clicking here.
Surprisingly, if you read the whole poem, you really can tell what is going on, despite all the new words.
Lewis Carroll, author of the Alice in Wonderland stories, enjoyed making up words, as you can tell by his poem. In fact, one of the words he concocted for this poem is a word we still use today:
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If you had been alive during the time of the American Revolutionary War and had the chance to secrete something for others to discover centuries later, what would you have put into your box?
It turns out that two famous men from that period created a time capsule and placed it inside one of the cornerstones of the Massachusetts State House in Boston in 1795, and the box was recently found. You can read more about how it was found here.
The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, was honored to open this special time capsule to find out what was in it. Here’s a list of items found in the brass box:
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In a story, clothing can be the author’s way of telling us what kind of character we’re reading about.
Judging real people by their clothing might not be too smart, but authors rely on readers to judge characters based on their characters’ clothing.
For instance, someone in a black leather jacket with a skull embroidered on the back and chains hanging from a pants pocket is going to be very different from someone in a light aqua-colored jacket carrying an umbrella with pink flowers on it. We make assumptions of people according to their appearance.
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Have you ever read any books about Amelia Bedelia, the young housemaid who takes everything literally?
When Amelia Bedelia is instructed to pitch a tent, she throws the tent into the woods! When she bakes a sponge cake, she uses real sponges, according to publisher HarperCollins Children’s.
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