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Elon musk has promised to make Twitter a safe place for comedy again. God Bless Him. This is in the spirit of Mark Twain. And Donald Trump.

We can't know what Mark Twain, who died 110 years ago today, would have said about the Coronavirus but here is what he had to say about truth in newspapers and about buying life insurance for railroad travel: https://freedom-demokrasi-and-civilised-humanity.com/2020/04/21/remembering-mark-twain-and-media-driven-fear-of-death/ “Where we have one newspaper that does good, I think we have fifty that do harm.” “....... the stupid people — who constitute the grand overwhelming majority of this and all other nations — do believe and are moulded and convinced by what they get out of a newspaper, and there is where the harm lies.” Was Mark Twain better than...

Shania Twain apologized for her comments and clarified she does "not hold any common moral beliefs with the current President": I would like to apologise to anybody I have offended in a recent interview with the Guardian relating to the American President. The question caught me off guard. As a Canadian, I regret answering this unexpected question without giving my response more context I am passionately against discrimination of any kind and hope it’s clear from the choices I have made, and the people I stand with, that I do not hold any common moral beliefs with the current President...

A natural skeptic, Twain was not taken by the splendor of the Holy Land. He wrote irreverently about the country’s legendary sites. At his peak, Mark Twain was probably the most popular American celebrity of his time. What few realize is that it was an unlikely trip to the Holy Land that established his fame as an author. A century and a half ago, Twain traveled on an excursion with his American church group to Europe and the Middle East. The material he gathered, first published in a San Francisco newspaper, formed the basis of the humorous book that made...

1. bicentennial Usage of the word bicentennial, meaning occurring every 200 years, has been steadily increasing since the 1880s. The usage rose sharply in the 1970s, probably due to the United State Bicentennial, and then again in the mid-1980s, perhaps due to the bicentennial of the Statue of Liberty. Example: "New Orleans intended to fittingly celebrate, this present year, the bicentennial anniversary of this illustrious event; but when the time came, all her energies and surplus money were required in other directions, for the flood was upon the land then, making havoc and devastation everywhere." — Life on the Mississippi,...

It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so. Mark Twain

Mark Twain & Helen Keller’s Special Friendship: He Treated Me Not as a Freak, But as a Person Dealing with Great Difficulties Sometimes it can seem as though the more we think we know a historical figure, the less we actually do. Helen Keller? We’ve all seen (or think we’ve seen) some version of The Miracle Worker, right?—even if we haven’t actually read Keller’s autobiography. And Mark Twain? He can seem like an old family friend. But I find people are often surprised to learn that Keller was a radical socialist firebrand, in sympathy with workers’ movements worldwide. In a...

Will Mark Twain’s irony of wit work for Hilary’s peccadilloes? Samuel Clemens is America’s seminal author of the 20th Century; from his pen, the American author was defined. Armed with imagination and an orator's wit, he is more well known and remembered by his pen name Mark Twain. Ernest Hemingway said of Twain: “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.” Hopefully most readers have read some of Hemingway’s novels and Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn”; since, you will...

**SNIP** She quoted Mark Twain. "A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes." **SNIP** Sen. Jim Risch, R-Idaho, the top Republican on the Small Business Committee, said she admired Landrieu's courage, particularly for acknowledging her role in helping develop provisions of the Affordable Care Act related to small business,

A federal judge showed little sympathy Monday to an East Hartford grandmother who claimed she embezzled more than $1 million from the Mark Twain House and Museum to support her struggling, extended family. Senior U.S. District Judge Warren W. Eginton allowed Donna Gregor, who faced fraud and tax charges, to address him to apologize for eight years of theft she committed while employed as controller of the national landmark museum on Hartford's west side. He watched a brief, video plea from Gregor's mother, who has been diagnosed with cancer and is being cared for by her daughter.

Shania Twain, formerly Eilleen Regina Edwards, and Frederic Thiebaud have tied the knot! The couple exchanged vows on News Year's Day in Puerto Rico with 40 friends and family in attendance. Shania Twain and Frederic Thiebaud, who found comfort in each other after learning that both of their spouses were allegedly unfaithful, started dating back in 2009. The weird twist in this is, supposedly Shania Twain's ex-husband, Robert Lange, cheated on her with guess whose wife..? Answer: Frederic Thiebaud's ex-wife, Marie-Anne Thiebaud

<p>What is a word worth? According to Publishers Weekly, NewSouth Books' upcoming edition of Mark Twain's seminal novel "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" will remove all instances of the N-word -- I'll give you a hint, it's not nonesuch -- present in the text and replace it with slave.</p>

Mark Twain wrote that "the difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter." A new edition of "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" and "Tom Sawyer" will try to find out if that holds true by replacing the N-word with "slave" in an effort not to offend readers. Twain scholar Alan Gribben, who is working with NewSouth Books in Alabama to publish a combined volume of the books, said the N-word appears 219 times in "Huck Finn" and four times in "Tom Sawyer." He said the word puts the books in danger of joining the...

As an example to others, and not that I care for moderation myself, it has always been my rule never to smoke when asleep, and never to refrain from smoking when awake. When they used to tell me I would shorten my life ten years by smoking, they little knew the devotee they were wasting their puerile word upon---they little knew how trivial and valueless I would regard a decade that had no smoking in it! Mark Twain made that first quip at a public lecture more than a century ago, a time in which bureaucracy was still a benign...

IF you ever secretly think some books by famous authors are unreadable or just plain rubbish, take comfort. Many writers have thought the same. A new book of “literary invective” has brought together evidence of how writers really view other writers. It shows that some authors are at their most inventive and scabrous when sinking their teeth into other literary stars. Take Jane Austen, one of the most revered and enduring English authors. Mark Twain, the American writer, was so irritated by Austen that he wrote in one letter: “Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig...

<p>Three weeks after getting a standing ovation for her surprise appearance at the CMA Awards, Shania Twain turned up in Manhattan Thursday with a number of friends from Switzerland, Nashville and Virginia for a weekend of Christmas shopping.</p> <p>Among her group of pals? Frederic Thiébaud, the ex-husband of Twain's former best friend who sources say broke up the country star's marriage to Robert "Mutt" Lange. Twain and Thiébaud were photographed arriving from Switzerland at JFK airport together.</p>

Robert “Mutt” Lange is no longer still the one for Shania Twain. The country/pop superstar and her music producer husband are splitting after 14 years of marriage, her rep confirms to OK!. “Shania Twain and her husband, music producer Robert “Mutt” Lange, are separating after 14 years of marriage,” Jason Owen tells OK!. “This is a private matter and there will be no further comment at this time.” The 42-year-old singer met Mutt when he was recruited to work on her album in the early 1990s. They married on December 28, 1993 and have a 6-year-old son, Eja D’Angelo. At...

When all government, in little as in great things, shall be drawn to Washington as the Center of all power, it will render powerless the checks provided of one government on another and will become as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated. -- Thomas Jefferson, 1821 Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself. -- Mark Twain, quoted in A.B. Paine's Mark Twain: A Biography (Harper, 1912, Vol. 2, page 724). The mystery of government is not how Washington works but how to make it stop. --...

ADDRESS AT A GATHERING OF AMERICANS IN LONDON, JULY 4, 1872 MR. CHAIRMAN AND LADIES AND GENTLEMEN,--I thank you for the compliment which has just been tendered me, and to show my appreciation of it I will not afflict you with many words. It is pleasant to celebrate in this peaceful way, upon this old mother soil, the anniversary of an experiment which was born of war with this same land so long ago, and wrought out to a successful issue by the devotion of our ancestors. It has taken nearly a hundred years to bring the English and Americans...