Oop!

Not so ‘elementary’

This search really demonstrates that Sherlock Holmes never said 'Elementary, my dear Watson' in any novel. It's an Amazon ‘search inside the book’ in the Complete Sherlock Holmes (the full works, that is, all the novels) by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

By the way, the Amazon team really did a good job with the new visualization of the inside the book pages, it's really fast.

The 50 Weirdest Guiness World Records

The full list is in this article from The Mirror: The 50 Weirdest Guiness World Records, including some really interesting, as:

4. Breath Held Voluntarily: The USA's Robert Foster held his breath for 13mins 42.5secs in 1959. [I heard about 9 or 10 minutes under water, but... Almost 14?]
13. Highest G-Force endured voluntarily: 82.6 G for 0.04 seconds by Eli L. Beeding Jr of the USA in 1958. He spent three days in hospital afterwards. [The question is: what kind of device was used to achieve that G-Force?]
18. Most lighting strikes survived: Roy C. Sullivan from Virginia, USA, was struck for the seventh time in 1977. [And they say that is really improbable...]
48. Most tennis balls held in one hand: Francisco Peinado Toledo of Spain held 18 for 10 seconds last year. [I saw this on TV!]

The Guiness World Records Book deserves a re-reding at least every five or ten years. Is one of those books that you have to finish once you've started it.

There's a also a Spanish version of this post available
También existe una versión en castellano de esta anotación

Old Maps Shop

Some marvelous antique maps from Monika Schmidt's Antiques at Munich, with lots of them about Europe. The shop web is both in English and German [via mismamente.net, spanish].