"The relationship between coffee and risk of death was even more dramatic in women. Those who drank one cup per day had 5% lower odds of dying during the study compared with women who drank none. Those who consumed two or three cups a day were 13% less likely to die, those who downed four or five cups were 16% less likely to die, and those who drank six or more cups had a 15% lower mortality rate."

"It costs about $1,500 to print one copy of a movie on 35 mm film and ship it to theaters in its heavy metal canister. Multiply that by 4,000 copies — one for each movie on each screen in each multiplex around the country — and the numbers start to get ugly. By comparison, putting out a digital copy costs a mere $150." —LA Weekly – who else? — foretells the death of 35mm film and everything it'll take to the grave with it including your local art-house theater. Oh, and all the prettiest moving images imaginable. 

"Hopefully, the control tower will then be able to send up a plane to fly alongside and hand signal instructions to you." —The Guardian has some incredibly short — five steps! — instructions today for landing an airplane in an emergency. What are the hand signals, do you think? Here are some more words pulled from the piece: failing that, cafetiere(?), practice, probably, crash, good luck.

My reminders of Clark, who died nearly three years ago, are still visible, but as my life adjusts to a world without him, I've moved a few things so they're a bit more out of the way. Instead of keeping my favorite photo of us right by my bedside, I've put it on the bookshelf on the opposite wall, angled so I don't face it head-on every time I'm in my room. And that's fine, to create nooks for my keepsakes, though it took me a while to get over the guilt I felt for removing them from the front lines.

My therapist taught me that it's okay to [...]

In 2007, contractor Bob Kinghorn pulled a mummified baby from the floorboards of a home in East Toronto. The baby was wrapped in newsprint dated September 12, 1925, and when Kinghorn unwittingly unswaddled the baby, he was furious. "No! No! No! I got mad, threw off my headgear, kicked something and bounced out of the house," Kinghorn told CBC news. "My first thought was murder. I thought: How could you do that? You sons of bitches!" Five years later, the police are still unable to determine the so-called Baby Kyntre's cause of death.

Also in 2007, a woman in Florida discovered a mummified child in an old suitcase in her [...]

I love to travel, despite being one of the more accident- and injury-prone people you could ever encounter. I’ve visited clinics in three different countries for emergency sinus infection treatment (Barbados, Costa Rica, and Thailand). I was bitten by a donkey in Bonaire. I broke a toe in Paris. The Dead Sea in Jordan made my nipples burn and I had to find a special ointment. I am pretty awesome.

I’ve been suffering from chronic sinus pain for about eight years, and I came down with a severe sinus infection right before I went to Iceland in February. Ever since I returned, I’ve had a migraine every day, which [...]

The wonderful poet Adrienne Rich has died. Here's an excerpt from her Twenty-One Love Poems from 1977, via Richard Lawson. (And here are several more, from The New Yorker.)

No one’s fated or doomed to love anyone. The accidents happen, we’re not heroines, they happen in our lives like car crashes, books that change us, neighborhoods we move into and come to love. Tristan und Isolde is scarcely the story, women at least should know the difference between love and death. No poison cup, no penance. Merely a notion that the tape-recorder should have caught some ghost of us: that tape-recorder not merely played but should have listened [...]

CRIMINAL MINDS LOVES SERIAL KILLERS

In the entire history of the United States there have been 183 identified serial killers and 25 unidentified. Meanwhile, the Criminal Minds team has managed to identify and/or catch more than 150 of them in just seven years. This is terrifying; if this trend continues, there will be several thousand psychokillers qu'est-ce que c'est-ing around, hanging, stabbing, torturing, and enslaving us in the coming decades. On the plus side, TV serial killers tend to be a lot better looking than their real-life counterparts; I’d rather be abducted by James Van Der Beek or Eddie Cibrian than John Wayne Gacy, even if Eddie was cutting [...]

Previously: Text Messages From a Ghost. April 22

hello Hi, who’s this? ill give you a hint i brought you some candy babies Ghost? ghost! Ghost? Ghost! ghost!! i really did bring you candy babies though they’re on the counter not to brag or anything but i poltergeisted them there all by myself I thought you were gone, I thought I had broken you or sent you somewhere I couldn’t see or hear Where have you been? hoo boy well all over really i spent some time in an egg i had to wait to get hatched out of that so that was probably a [...]