Agatha Christie was kind of a grouch.

Shocking news that a woman who largely only wrote about murder and death was not a lighthearted soul, but letters on display reveal Agatha Christie was generally irked by life.

The letters, which will be on exhibition at the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival held in Harrogate, North Yorkshire, England, show Christie was annoyed by most anything, like over the covers of her books.

According to The Guardian, for her 1947 book The Labours of Hercules, a Pekingese was featured on the cover. Harmless, you might say. Her family found laughs in it, but Christie was furious and wrote her publisher:

"The wrapper design for Hercules has occasioned the most ribald and obscene remarks and suggestions from my family – All I can say is – Try again!!" (sic).

Another time, she complained the cover of another book made the main character look like he was "going to a funeral and dressed accordingly."

In 1967, she apparently found out her latest book was already released without her receiving an advanced copy. She was in a "fury" when she found out the book was already on sale in Helsinki, of all places.

"It’s usually [available] in November and then it comes in very handy for sending to friends at Xmas time – but one can hardly send it as that now? I do think it’s treating your authors disgracefully."

More than anything, Christie was annoyed by aging. As a 59-year old, she wrote to a friend, Bertie Meyer, who was staging a play based on one of her books. "I've had letters now from different fans expressing surprise that I am 'such an old lady'," she wrote, adding about pictures of herself:

"Nobody likes [the photos], possibly, perhaps, because they don’t seem to have been touched up at all? All lines and wrinkles – and dash it all, I'm not 70 – not yet 60."

If you want to read more of Christie's moaning and complaining (so, you know, you feel like a cheery lad by comparison), the festival will be held July 20-23.

This Week in Science!!!

A career in writing will lead to premature aging and a healthy dose of personal humiliation. But science and medicine is where you'll make money, fame, and the respect of your parents. As a result, we might as well pay attention to what they're doing in those fields.

So if you've put down your Jane Austen and William Faulkner for a moment, it's time to take another peak at anything going on in the world of science and medicine this week.

Starting off with: Lassie and Rin Tin Tin were onto something.


story one:
Fido can detect your emotions just like your significant other!!!

He's looking into your soul.

And both Fido and your significant other are, to be honest, a little tired of you.

A study from the University of Helsinki (the Harvard of Helsinki) finds that dogs' social gazing behavior is similar to humans, preferring to look at a person's eyes to figure out their mood. Moreover, dogs are most responsive to tense, threatening faces than they are to any other emotion.

You know when you mistakenly walk into a biker bar with a ton of guys with prison tats who just got out of the slammer for involuntary manslaughter, and they give you "that look"? Happens to the best of us. But, yeah, it's kind of like that for Fido. It's believed to be an evolutionary response, as being able to detect a threat, real or imagined, allowed for survival.

What does this all mean then? Take your dog if you want to avoid a biker bar, I think.



story two:
Cocaine can make your brain eat itself!!!

He took three bumps of coke before this photo.

Sure, the pick-me-up favored by investment bankers and second-rate Miami speedboat enthusiasts has been around for ages--but research now says the drug can cause your brain cells to eat themselves. I believe you see that happen to Tony Montana in a deleted scene from the director's cut of Scarface.

In essence, researchers knew cocaine wasn't good for the brain (gasp!), but wanted to know specifically why. A team at Johns Hopkins University performed a study which resulted in learning that the activation of a pathway involving nitric oxide (a gas that cells use to communicate) and an enzyme called GAPDH, which nitric oxide can modify the activity of, resulted in cell destruction.

Cue the coked-out mice!

As if mice didn't look hyped-up on a good day, a range of cocaine doses was administered to the mice. Researchers then dissected the mouse brains and found a series of markers to cell-death pathways revealed. Called autophagy--literally "eating oneself"--it entails, as IFLScience explains, "packaging bits of the cell, such as debris, into membrane-bound sacs and then fusing these with acid-filled compartments that degrade the contents." Or, you know, eating itself.

Being addicted to heroin never looked so appealing!



story three:
Now we have problem gambler rats!!!

I suddenly feel the need to bet on black, baby!

First a little nose candy, now we have rodents addicted to the sexy, sexy thrill of casino gambling.

Scientists at the University of British Columbia have published an article in the Journal of Neuroscience stating that when they administered flashing lights and music mimicking a casino to rats, the rats became "problem gamblers."

Trained with sweet treats and given an option to "gamble" on receiving that treat, the rats typically avoided risk. But once researchers flipped the lights on and pumped up the club beats, the rats were down for some hot gambling action apparently. I assume it wasn't long until an ecstasy-fueled quickie wedding to a showgirl named Honey occurred for the rats.

The researchers point out that when they gave the rats a drug to block a certain dopamine receptor, the gambling jones wore off, and the rats went back to a boring, meaningless life in the suburbs driving a station wagon.



story four:
North Korean scientists claim to have made a hangover-free alcohol!!!

Everyone in North Korea lines up for some booze.

Always at the forefront of revolutionary scientific and superhuman advancements, one of North Korea's leading media outlets, The Pyongyang Times, is reporting scientists from the country have created a hangover-free alcohol. Party at Kim Jong-un's house, amiright??

Distilled to a range of 30-40% alcohol (because you always want a wide range on your finer spirits), the Times reports, "Koryo Liquor, which is made of six-year-old Kaesong Koryo insam [ed: a type of ginseng], known as being highest in medicinal effect, and the scorched rice, is highly appreciated by experts and lovers as it is suave and causes no hangover.”

If there's anything I know, it's about being suave--and nothing channels my inner globe trotting gentleman of leisure quite like thoughts of those sun-kissed beaches ski chalets penthouse suites prison camps of North Korea. The Times article also reports that the alcohol "exudes national flavour," which I assume is a delicious blending of despair and the tears of weeping mothers.

Weeping in happiness over hangover-free alcohol!

Germans are heavily borrowing English words, and this has some German linguistics experts worried.

Germany has borrowed or adopted 10,000 English words into their own language since 1990. At least that's what NPR authoritatively says, as they apparently stood listening at the Berlin Wall as it fell and haven't stopped counting since.

Holger Klatte, the spokesman for the German Language Society, explains his concern to NPR.

"Languages do tend to affect one another, but the influence of English in Germany is so strong that Germans are having a hard time advancing their own vocabulary," he says.

Klatte says that can be a problem for Germans who may not know any English.

"The second world war and Nazi times have led Germans to downplay the importance of their language," he says. "Unlike the French, Finns and Poles — they promote their languages a lot more than we do."


If I'm Finnish, I'm suing whoever's promoting my language and demanding a refund. Even the Muppets chose the Swedish Chef over anything Finnish.

Anatol Stefanowitsch, an English linguistics professor at the Free University of Berlin, tells NPR that Germans are just overemphasizing the matter. As Stefanowitsch notes, roughly 25% of the German language comes from borrowed words. English, by comparison, borrows 40-80% of its words from other languages--and it's a healthy, robust language doing just fine.

"No language has ever disappeared because it borrowed words," Stefanowitsch says.

Quite true. It might become a hot mess like English, but it never disappeared.