In the XIX century, a highwayman called William E. Henley was sentenced to death and asked that his memoirs be bound in his own skin and that two copies are made: one for his doctor and one for a surviving victim. From May 1924 Boston Transcript [scroll down]:

This is all a matter of ancient record, but a present fillip is given to it by the fact that Mr. Nathaniel D. Chapin, of the well-known Cleveland manufacturing firm of Billings, Chapin Company has just been in Boston in search of this very volume, by reason of his family connection therewith.

As a boy Mr. Chapin had cherished very lively recollections of the book, for in the days of his grandfather, and even later, it had been often used in place of the family slipper, as an instrument of punishment, on the theory, probably, that the skin of a bad man was particularly adapted for warming that of a bad child.

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Q. You’re gonna love this: Sciencedaily.com has an article stating, “Worker bees, wasps, and ants are often considered neuter. But in many species they are females with ovaries, who although unable to mate, can lay unfertilized eggs which turn into males if reared. For some species, such as bumble bees, this is the source of many of the males in the species. But in others, like the honeybee, workers “police” each other — killing eggs laid by workers or confronting egg-laying workers.” You have opened a Pandora’s box. Although what just occurred to me is that this article, or even just that paragraph, could have been the genesis for a very interesting movie about bees.
Raymond Ogilvie, Philadelphia

A. What I have learned from this whole “Bee Movie” discussion is that bees have very confused and sad sex lives, and are much in need of intelligent design.

From Русский Журнал [RU] in a review of a Russian bookfare, my translation:

That [novel] which is now called a mystery is usually a mix of thriller, social commentary drama and elements of fantasy. Moreover, readers expect exactly this from a mystery. The famed “Menippean satire,” a type of dramedy that thirty years ago existed only in Master and Margarita and Altoist Danilov, seems to be becoming hegemonic.

In general, an average contemporary anthology would resemble some Afghan souvenir–a traditional rug, on which, along with ethnic motiffs, are weaved the conditionally-realistic automatic rifles and helicopters with humanitarian aid.

Over at Post Road, Brock Clark had written a review that had compelled me to get my butt over to the nearest bookstore without stopping for coffee or passing go.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is a great, great novel, the kind of novel you wish you’d written, the kind of novel that makes other superficially similar novels seem bloated, lumbering, and besides the point…. Briefly (and it is a brief novel: 137 pages), it is about Miss Jean Brodie…who constantly talks about being in her “prime,” who says the girls are (or could be) the “crème de la crème,” who reminds them there “needs must be a leaven in the lump,” and, finally, is reduced to repeatedly asking the girls (as adults) which one them of them “betrayed” her…

And I haven’t even talked about the prose yet, which is hilarious, biting, lovely, usually at the same time. How can you not love a character like Sandy who, when an aged Miss Jean Brodie moans, “I am past my prime,” reassures her that, “It was a good prime”? How could you not love abook in which “The evening paper rattle-snaked its way through the letter boxand there was suddenly a six-o’clock feeling in the house”? How could you not love a novelist who gives her characters only a handful of ways to talk about the world, and have that be more than enough? How could anyone not love such a book? It’s enough to make you hate the people you don’t, enough to make a man forget, momentarily, his broken pinky.

Lastly, but not leastly, the comics over at the Perry Bible Fellowship are delicious. Think Far Side.