After being called back to her childhood home of Toronto for a retrospective show of her art, Elaine reminisces about her childhood.One of the most important and controversial points is her brother's obsession with the rarest and most popular marbles. Each day he would bring five marbles of common rarity into school, that same day he would return with his pockets stuffed full of high-quality marbles with which he would fill numerous glass jars. Occasionally he would collect his very best marbles into a jar and bury it, then create a map, put this in a jar and bury it too. It is later found out what exactly the child's motives were. The reason for burying only the high-quality marbles is because the large amounts of colour in these actually contain the souls of the hapless children he has preyed upon. He would bury them as a sacrifice for his darkest of gods Ruul. He was supposed to turn his sister into another of Ruul's minions, she must look inside herself and decide whether or not she is willing to descend into the darkness that she's quickly figuring out may encompass all. The novel descends into a twisted adventure of cult worship, death, turning against ones siblings, dark gods and numerous other controversial topics.

From Greece it is probable that the use of the parasol passed to Rome, where it seems to have been commonly used by women, while it was the custom even for effeminate men to defend themselves from the heat by means of the Umbraculum, formed of skin or leather, and capable of being lowered at will.

The Sanskrit epic Mahabharata (about 4th century) relates the following legend: Jamadagni was a skilled bow shooter, and his devoted wife Renuka would always recover each of his arrows immediately. One time however, it took her a whole day to fetch the arrow, and she later blamed the heat of the sun for the delay. The angry Jamadagni shot an arrow at the sun. The sun begged for mercy and offered Renuka an umbrella.

In Fynes Moryson's "Itinerary" (1617) is a similar allusion to the habit of carrying umbrellas in hot countries "to auoide the beames of the sunne." Their employment, says the author, is dangerous, "because they gather the heate into a pyramidall point, and thence cast it down perpendicularly upon the head, except they know how to carry them for auoyding that danger."

John Macdonald relates that in 1770, he used to be greeted with the shout, "Frenchman, Frenchman! why don't you call a coach?" whenever he went out with his umbrella.

In March 2011 media outlets reveled that French president Nicolas Sarkozy has started using a £10,000 armor-plated umbrella to protect him from attackers.

In 1978 Bulgarian dissident writer Georgi Markov was killed in London by what many believed was a dose of ricin injected via a modified umbrella.

List of numbers
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This is an incomplete list, which may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness.

Funny, because when I was younger, I had a bunch of low-quality marble just sitting around useless, and they all looked like eyes.

Wikipedia hit TMI state yet, or are we just teasing with it now?

"Vladimir Putin" is
"Vladimir Poutine" in french

proof: http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Poutine

I'm guessing that they had to change the bro's last name (which is something I don't think would usually be done)
because otherwise it would be pronounced just like the word for "whore"