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So it's not about watching dogs play, and it's not about a boy made out of wood subbing for someone's dead pet? I am disappoint.

Here's a good explanation of how to start a fire with a gun by Mark Twain

I think there was this short story by O' Henry, written around 1900 about someone breaking shop windows to go to jail for the winter every year. The Cop and the Anthem. http://www.classicreader.com/book/1757/1/

I mean, in the same way that Earth is endangered by rogue meteorites and asteroids, the whole solar system is vulnerable to a rogue star or brown dwarf.

Here's a short story H.G. Wells wrote about the subject, called The Star.

Bertrand Russel has written some interesting stuff. I was required to do a paper for a (very interesting) philosophy class, disecting an argument of one of the philosophers that we had studied recently.
I chose Bertrand Russel's "Why I Am Not a Christian" largely for reasons of ease.
That lecture is so stuffed full of logical fallacies I had had more to write about than would fit in the assignment. Two of my favorites are his pervasive ad-hominem reasoning and the obvious self-contradiction in his dice example.
Still, as logically silly as the lecture is, it is still interesting.
Some of his math is interesting too.

http://www.classicreader.com/read.php/sid.6/bookid .1736/ to see the fallacies.

Man, talk about overkill! Who does this guy think he is, Captain Nemo?

Wouldn't it be easier just to get her some floor wax and some rumba lessons??

This machine is almost exactly the same as a device described in the obscure 1901 H.G. Wells short story Filmer, from 12 Stories and a Dream.

It's about a man who invents the world's first successful flying machine by combining the positives of lighter-than-air craft, which are stable but can't go against the wind, and heavier-than-air craft, which can go against the wind but just can't avoid disastrous crashes (this was before the Wright brothers' first successful flight).

Wells' machine even has a similar system of air chambers that compress to decrease buoyancy, and an air-filled hollow frame.

Aw crap, we've become Laputa.

After all, nobody would listen to Marx if he wrote this:

In civilized society, it is only among the inferior ranks of people that the scantiness of subsistence can set limits to the further multiplication of the human species ; and it can do so in no other way than by destroying a great part of the children which their fruitful marriages produce.... It is in this manner that the demand for men, like that for any other commodity, necessarily regulates the production of men, quickens it when it goes on too slowly, and stops it when it advances too fast.

The Wealth of Nations, Book I, Ch. VIII