David Foster
Help. Wei Under Par. Operation Mincemeat and spycraft in World War Two : The New York. On April 30, 1943, a fisherman came across a badly decomposed corpse floating in the water off the coast of Huelva, in southwestern Spain. The body was of an adult male dressed in a trenchcoat, a uniform, and boots, with a black attaché case chained to his waist. His wallet identified him as Major William Martin, of the Royal Marines.
The Spanish authorities called in the local British vice-consul, Francis Haselden, and in his presence opened the attaché case, revealing an official-looking military envelope. The Spaniards offered the case and its contents to Haselden. It did not take long for word of the downed officer to make its way to German intelligence agents in the region. The Germans did not realize—until it was too late—that “William Martin” was a fiction. The story of Major William Martin is the subject of the British journalist Ben Macintyre’s brilliant and almost absurdly entertaining “Operation Mincemeat” (Harmony; $25.99). Cicero, it turned out, was the real thing.
5 Things You Didn't Know You Could Do With Google Apps - CIO. CIO — You're probably familiar with the Google Apps basics: Perhaps you use Gmail or have uploaded some files to Google Docs, and maybe you've tinkered in Google Sites to develop your own website. But whether you're new to Google (GOOG) Apps or you're a seasoned user, it's worth taking a deeper look: Google has built into their suite some lesser-known shortcuts and tricks that make your use of Google apps more customized, streamlined and simple.
Consider these five to start. 1. Enable Shortcuts in Gmail for Faster Use. Google's Gmail shortcuts—almost 50 of them available in total—help you save time while reading, composing, deleting and archiving e-mails in your inbox. By default, this shortcuts feature is turned off. Take a look at a longer set of Gmail shortcuts here. [Have you checked out Google Apps lately? 2. If you're at the airport and forgot to schedule a meeting in your Google Calendar, don't worry: You can easily add events via your cell phone in a few quick steps. 3. Mother Earth Mother Board. The hacker tourist ventures forth across the wide and wondrous meatspace of three continents, chronicling the laying of the longest wire on Earth.
In which the hacker tourist ventures forth across the wide and wondrous meatspace of three continents, acquainting himself with the customs and dialects of the exotic Manhole Villagers of Thailand, the U-Turn Tunnelers of the Nile Delta, the Cable Nomads of Lan tao Island, the Slack Control Wizards of Chelmsford, the Subterranean Ex-Telegraphers of Cornwall, and other previously unknown and unchronicled folk; also, biographical sketches of the two long-dead Supreme Ninja Hacker Mage Lords of global telecommunications, and other material pertaining to the business and technology of Undersea Fiber-Optic Cables, as well as an account of the laying of the longest wire on Earth, which should not be without interest to the readers of Wired. Information moves, or we move to it. During the decades after Morse's "What hath God wrought! " FLAG facts. Google News. Nick Tosches on Opium Dens. “Arthritis,” my friend observes to me by way of explanation.
“Good live bladder. Top dollar.” This—what we have witnessed here in the Hong Kong night—is true connoisseurship, pure of any note of bell pepper lurking in the cassis. It is the same, true connoisseurship that surrounds the secret brewing techniques of the best snake soups, the pickling techniques and proper extraction, morseling, and savoring of delicacies such as pig-face.
Surely, I figure, if this sort of rare and fine connoisseurship lingers furtively on, there must yet exist somewhere amid the labyrinths of this vast city at least one last sanctum of that greatest of connoisseurships. Hua-yan jian, they were called: flower-smoke rooms. The flower-smoke rooms, which thrived in Shanghai and Hong Kong from the 19th century until the early 1930s, were of all sorts, from lowly brothels to chambered quarters of sybaritic splendor. My friend told me that the last and lowliest of the hua-yan jian had shut down many years ago.