The grand leap of the whale up the Fall of Niagara is esteemed, by all who have seen it, as one of the finest spectacles in nature.

- Benjamin Franklin in a 1765 letter to a London newspaper

Oldest mathematical puzzle • dating from 1650 B.C..

As I was going to St. Ives,
I met a man with seven wives.
Every wife had seven sacks,
and every sack had seven cats.
Kitten, cats, sacks and wives,
How many were going to St. Ives?

Most Refractory Substance • Tantalum carbide TaC_0.88 melting at 3,990° C.

- The Guiness Book of Records 1991

IDIOT, n.

A member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant and controlling. The Idiot's activity is not confined to any special field of thought or action, but "pervades and regulates the whole." He has the last word in everything; his decision is unappealable. He sets the fashions and opinion of taste, dictates the limitations of speech and circumscribes conduct with a dead-line.

- Ambrose Bierce (The Devils Dictionary)

Alchohol and women can be great fun, if taken separately. If you mix 'em, they'll turn you into a dumbass.

- Red Forman

Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies.

- Groucho Marx

In politics, nothing is contemptible.

- Benjamin Disraeli

Ink, n. A villainous compound of tannogallate of iron, gum-arabic and water, chiefly used to facilitate the infection of idiocy and promote intellectual crime.

- Ambrose Bierce (The Devils Dictionary)

Hail to the Sun God
He sure is a Fun God
Ra! Ra! Ra!

- Ancient Egyptian

The sun is not yellow, it's chicken.

- Bob Dylan

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of Knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and instruction.

- Solomon

I bestow upon myself the "Doctorate of Cubicism", for educators are ignorant of Nature's Harmonic Time Cube Principle and cannot bestow the prestigious honor of wisdom upon the wisest human ever.

- Dr. Gene Ray

Just because I don’t care, doesn’t mean I don’t understand.

- Homer Simpson

Pretty soon I wanted to smoke and asked the widow to let me. But she wouldn't. She said it was a mean practice and wasn't clean, and I must try to not do it any more. That is just the way it is with some people. They get down on a thing when they don't know nothing about it. Here she was a-bothering about Moses, which was no kin to her and no use to anybody, being gone, you see, yet finding a power of fault with me for doing a thing that had some good in it. And she took snuff, too; of course, that was all right, because she done it herself.
- Huckleberry Finn

What of the Ladies?

An animal usually living in the vicinity of Man, and having a rudimentary susceptibility to domestication. It is credited by many of the elder zoologists with a certain vestigial docility acquired in a former state of seclusion, but naturalists of the postsusananthony period, having no knowledge of the seclusion, deny the virtue and declare that such as creation's dawn beheld, it roareth now. The species is the most widely distributed of all beasts of prey, infesting all habitable parts of the globe, from Greeland's spicy mountains to India's moral strand. The popular name (wolfman) is incorrect, for the creature is of the cat kind. The woman is lithe and graceful in its movement, especially the American variety (felis pugnans), is omnivorous and can be taught not to talk.

- Balthasar Pober

An angel cried out with a strong voice saying, "Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit, and the cage of every unclean and hateful bird. For all nations have drunk of the wine of the wrath of her fornication, and the kings of the earth have committed fornication with her, and the merchants of the earth are waxed rich through the abundance of her delicacies.

... And the kings of the earth, who have committed fornication and lived deliciously with her, shall bewail her, and lament for her, when they shall see the smoke of her burning."

- John The Revelator (c. A.D. 95)

Death, n. The last act of a squalid and rib rocking buffoonery.

Taxes, n. A charge (usually of money) imposed by authority (usually ill-gained) on persons or property (is there anything else?) for public purposes (building a means of private plunder).

REPORTER: Now, doctor, will you give me in a few words the low-down on all your investigations?
DIRAC: No.
REPORTER: Will it be all right if I put it this way --- "Professor Dirac solves all the problems of mathematical physics, but is unable to find a better way of figuring out Babe Ruth's batting average?"
DIRAC: Yes.
REPORTER: What do you like best in America?
DIRAC: Potatoes.

Interview of Paul Dirac, founder of quantam electrodynamics, in the Wisconsin State Journal, April 31, 1929

Hangman, n. An officer of the law charged with duties of the highest dignity and utmost gravity, and held in hereditary disesteem by a populace having a criminal ancestry. In some of the American States his functions are now performed by an electrician, as in New Jersey, where executions by electricity have recently been ordered -- the first instance known to this lexicographer of anybody questioning the expediency of hanging Jerseymen.

- Ambrose Bierce (The Devil's Dictionary)

Bang, v.t. The cry of a gun. The arrangement of a woman's hair which suggests the thought of shooting her: hence the name.

- Ambrose Bierce (The Devil's Dictionary)

How can I find the time to do the things I want to do?

A busy man complained one day:
"I get no time!" "What's that you say?"
Cried out his friend, a lazy quiz;
"You have, sir, all the time there is.
There's plenty, too, and don't you doubt it --
We're never for an hour without it."

- Purzil Crofe

Reflections on War

I

The pacifists who now rant in the open forums and suffragette magazines all seem to ground their case on the thesis that the people of the United States naturally abhor war and shrink from its horrors as an I. W. W. shrinks from soap. The notion, it seems to me, has a flavor of applesauce. It would be far more accurate, though plainly not the whole truth, to say that they delight in war and enjoy its gaudy uproar as a country boy enjoys circus day. Were they unhappy during the late heroic crusade for democracy? Then so is a Methodist unhappy at a revival.

There was, to be sure, a minority of Americans who found war unpleasant, but they never ran to as much as one per cent, of the population, and most of them have learned to enjoy it vastly in retrospect, however much it may have fevered them while it was going on. I allude, obviously, to the young gentlemen who were assisted into the trenches by the draft. The records show, I believe, that fully seventy-five percent, of them tried, by one dodge or another, to avoid service. But that is not saying that they disliked war, once they had got into it. On the contrary, a great many of them enjoyed it immensely, and are among the most ardent warlocks now in practice among us.

To a young man, indeed, war is far more pleasant than unpleasant, especially if he be of simple mind ---which is to say, especially if he be the normal infant of his species. The highly sophisticated youth, accustomed to ease and civilized society, finds it gross and filthy, but certainly those objections to it do not rest heavily upon the mind of a yokel from the cow belt or a youngster from a city slum. As poor men go in this world, soldiers are well fed and well clothed, and have very little work to do. Is the discipline irksome? Then certainly it is not half so irksome as the discipline of the rolling mill, the tannery, the flivver factory or the run-down farm. Is it even as irksome as the discipline of the office? I doubt it.

II

During the war I had occasion to make a journey in Western Pennsylvania, in the coal region. At the bottoms of the naked, frowning hills, alongside the railroad track, ran the straggling villages of the miners. The houses, on a winter day, looking extraordinarily forlorn and forbidding. Most of them stood up from the cinders on absurd stilts, and all of them were without paint. Wretched children played about their doors, waving their hands as the train rushed by. Slatternly women gaped from the windows. Sometimes there was a senile cow in a grassless yard. Every such house, absolutely without exception, flew a service flag. The draft got all the miners boys.

But did it work any oppression upon them? Plainly it did not. It took them out of filth and introduced them to the bracing, highly agreeable feeling of being clean. It made them acquainted with clean food, decently cooked. It converted them into travelers, grandly seeing the world. It taught them the elements of decent manners. In brief, it civilized them --- and if, in the course of that business, it civilized some of them to death, then surely the gain was worth the loss. The dead are remembered as heroes. The living have glorious memories, some of them authentic, and are at least a shade less degraded and miserable than they were.

The effect of war upon such young men, in fact, is mainly excellent, though their employers, when they get back, probably don’t think so. They may be doomed to slavery, but they have at all events got some spirit of revolt in their blood. Some of them, perhaps, unable to return to the brutal routine of their fathers, take to the high road and engage the Polizei; many more go in for bootlegging, or some other such spacious, stimulating science. Moralists deplore the change, but moralists are seldom as wise as they look. Try to imagine a race so broken to the yoke that it no longer produced highwaymen! God help the United States if it ever comes to that.

III

But it is the general population, not the soldiers, that gets the most fun out of war. Who will forget the way the gals of this imperial republic, and especially the fat and faded ones, reacted to the late crusade? I can see them yet, prancing around in their pretty costumes, hobnobbing legally with the handsome conscripts, and keeping their weather eyes upon the even handsomer lieutenants, captains, majors, colonels ---- yes, and generals. The war got many such a gal a husband, and even those who missed husbands at least enjoyed the thrills of an open and hearty chase, with all the usual rules suspended.

The Babbitts of the land got even more out of it than the fair. The years between 1916 and 1920, in fact, were their golden age, and they will never see another such until there is another war. Men of mark were made overnight, and hundreds of thousands of them survive, in all the far-flung towns of the realm, as men of vision. Congress is full of such fiery stay-at-homes today, and some of them are in places higher still. The demand for patriotic speakers in the movie parlors was insatiable, and every novice who got through his four minutes without fainting was practically sure of fame ---- at least, locally.

Moreover, the business paid. A few stimulating yells, to the applause of the commonalty --- and the rest of the day was free for enlightened self-interest. I used to travel a good deal in those days, and so had to listen to the gabble of these idealists in the Pullman smokers. Their air was that of mem who had struck it rich. They talked in large figures and smoked large cigars. They were crusaders shinning up the walls of a new and glittering Jerusalem, and every ten seconds they were showered with gold. Some of them, later on, went to jail, and many more went broke. But the majority hung on to their just and righteous rewards. They constitute the backbone of the right thinking, conservative bloc today, and are unanimously in favor of another war, if necessary, to put down Bolshevism.

IV

It is hard, indeed, to recall a class of Americans to whom the late war was unpleasant. There were, of course, others at home who watched and waited and feared and hoped, and some of them, alas! hoped in vain, but they were fewer than the soldiers and nothing much was heard from them. If they had made any protest, there would have been four minute men to caution them sharply and teach them the high privileges of patriotism. No other class showed any sign of discontent. The jobholders were safe, busy and happy. The honest workingman saw his wages multiply like magic and bought himself a phonograph, a still and a tin lizzie. The banker prepared for a killing in Liberty bonds. The publicist had an audience at last, rounded up to hear him, and forbidden to escape.

It is thus nonsense, and perhaps even libel, to say that the American people detest war. If they detest it, then they are idiots. Life was never so pleasant in America as it was during those three years. There was a gaudy show going on all the time, and parts in it for everyone. Even the pacifists themselves, going grandly to jail, enjoyed themselves immensely. It was not the publicity that delighted and soothed them but the inward thrill. For the first time in a generation they were able to do something dramatic and satisfying to the Holy Cause. No prohibitionist was ever happier, spying through a knothole at his neighbor.

My belief is that the next war will be just as merry. The United States is now so populous and so powerful that no enemy nation, or combination of enemy nations, could hope to tackle it head on. Our next ten or twelve wars will all be fought on foreign soil and in a safe and sanitary manner. No despot’s heel will ever mark these virtuous shores in our time. War, to the soldiers told off to fight it, will be a junket, a picnic, a free foreign excursion --- and to the heroes nominated to keep the home fires burning it will be a thrilling and magnificent show, with the spectators well paid for their applause. I believe that these facts are obvious to most Americans. And so believing, I am convinced that it is a gross slander upon their common sense to argue that they are pacifists at heart. But are they stayed by God’s command, issued through His agents, the rev. clergy? Well, go read again what the rev. clergy had to say in 1917.

H.L. Mencken (The Chicago Sunday Tribune, September 26, 1926)

There once was a Fellow named Hall
Who fell in the Spring in the Fall
T’would have been a sad Thing
Had he died in the Spring
But he didn’t, he died in the Fall

85% of American men think midgets are funny.

- Man Show Poll

How shall I recognize an honest, hard working Frenchman?

A Frenchman used to accost English and other Strangers on the Pont-Neuf, with many Compliments, and a red hot Iron in his Hand; Pray Monsieur Anglois, says he, Do me the Favour to let me have the Honour of thrusting this hot Iron into your Backside? Zoons, what does the Fellow mean! Begone with your Iron, or I'll break your Head! Nay, Monsieur, replies he, if you do not choose it, I will not insist upon it. But at least, you will in Justice have the Goodness to pay me something for the heating of my Iron.

- Benjamin Franklin, 1766

Is Operation Iraqi Freedom really ahead of schedule?

When you’re dealing with the Middle East, 2,000 years is the normal wait for things to happen.

- Marlin Fitzwater

Where can I find solace in these troubled times?

In the Church of Aphrodite
The Priestess wears a see through Nightie
She's a mighty righteous sightie
It’s good enough for me

Gimme that Old Time Religion
Gimme that Old Time Religion
Gimme that Old Time Religion
It’s good enough for me

We will worship like the Druids
Drinking strange fermented fluids
Dancing naked through the woods
It’s good enough for me

Gimme that Old Time Religion
Gimme that Old Time Religion
Gimme that Old Time Religion
It’s good enough for me

We will worship Zarathustra
We will worship like we used to
Be a Zarathustra booster
It’s good enough for me

Are the French really that bad?

The Assocated Press reports that French protesters have ransacked a McDonalds restaurant in Paris. There's McEgg on my face.

How difficult will it be to defeat the Iraqi Army?

The initial tally of surrendering and defecting soldiers indicates that the Iraqi Army is more formidable than the French.

Should I be critical of the French position on the Iraq crisis?

Do not be critical. If you hurt their feelings, they might surrender. To us.

Should I introduce myself to the new neighbor?

The farmer had to go to town so he hitched up the wagon and called for the dog to go along. The farmer cracked the whip on the horses back and yelled ‘Giddyup!’. The horse looked back over his shoulder and exclaimed ‘Hey, don't crack that whip so hard!’ The farrmer, astonished, says to himself ‘I didn’t know that horse could talk!’ The dog says ‘Me neither!’

Should I accept a challenge at dueling?

I have two objections to this duel matter.

The one is, lest I should hurt you; and the other is, lest you should hurt me.

I do not see any good it would do me to put a bullet through any part of your body. I could make no use of you when dead for any culinary purpose as I would a rabbit or turkey. I am no cannibal to feed on the flesh of men. Why, then, shoot down a human creature of which I could make no use? A buffalo would be better meat. For though your flesh may be delicate and tender, yet it wants that firmness and consistency which takes and retains salt. At any rate, it would not be fit for long sea voyages. You might make a good barbecue, it is true, being of the nature of a racoon or an opossum, but people are not in the habit of barbecuing anything human now. As to your hide, it is not worth taking off, being little better than that of a year-old colt.

It would seem to me a strange thing to shoot at a man that would stand still to be shot at, inasmuch as I have heretofore been used to shoot at things flying or running or jumping. Were you on a tree now like a squirrel, endeavoring to hide yourself in the branches, or like a racoon that after much eyeing and spying, I observe at length in the crotch of a tall oak with boughs and leaves intervening, so that I could just get a sight of his hinderparts, I should think it pleasurable enough to take a shot at you. But, as it is, there is no skill or judgment requisite to discover or take you down.

As to myself, I do not much like to stand in the way of anything harmful. I am under apprehension that you might hit me. That being the case, I think it most advisable to stay at a distance. If you want to try your pistols, take some object, a tree or a barn door, about my dimensions. If you hit that, send me word and I shall acknowledge that if I had been in the same place, you might also have hit me.

- Hugh Henry Brackenridge (1748-1816), Modern Chivalry, or the Adventures of Captain John Farrago and Teague O'Ryan his Servant

What shall I do with my money?

Buy low, sell high.

When you draw an 8 and a 3, double down.

When a jockey is riding for his 3rd win on the same card, he wins at twice his normal percentage.


There once was a man from Nantucket
Who kept all his cash in a bucket
His daughter named Nan
Ran off with a Man
And as for the bucket, Nantucket

Where can I find a good woman?

They are everywhere.

Should I start a family?

Moving, as I do, in what would kindly be called artistic circles, children are an infrequent occurence. But even the most artistic of circles includes within its periphery a limited edition of the tenaciously domestic.

As I am generally quite fond of children I accept this condition with far less displeasure than do my more rarified acquaintances. That is not to imply that I am a total fool for a little grin but simply that I consider myself to be in a position of unquestionable objectivity and therefore eminently qualified to deal with the subject in an authoritative manner.

From the number of children in evidence it appears that people have them at the drop of a hat - for surely were they to give this matter its due attention they would act with greater decorum. Of course, until now prospective parents have not had the opportunity to see the facts spelled out in black and white and therefore cannot reasonably be held accountable for their actions. To this end I have careully set down all pertinent information in the fervent hope that it will result in a future populated by a more attractive array of children than I have thus far encountered.

Pro

1. I must take issue with the term ‘a mere child’, for it has been my invariable experience that the company of a mere child is infinitely preferable to that of a mere adult.
   
2. Children are usually small in stature, which makes them quite useful for getting at those hard-to-reach places.
   
3. Children do not sit next to you in restaurants and discuss their preposterous hopes for the future in loud tones of voice.
   
4. Children ask better questions than do adults. ‘May I have a cookie?’ ‘Why is the sky blue?’ and ‘What does a cow say?’ are far more likely to elicit a cheerful response than ‘Where’s your manuscript?’ and ‘Who’s your lawyer?’
   
5. Children give life to the concept of immaturity.
   
6. Children make the most desirable opponents in Scrabble as they are both easy to beat and fun to cheat.
   
7. It is still quite possible to stand in a throng of children without once detecting even the faintest whiff of an exciting, rugged after-shave or cologne.
   
8. Not a single member of the under-age set has yet to propose the word chairchild.
   
9. Children sleep either alone or with small toy animals. The wisdom of such behaviour is unquestionable, as it frees them from the immeasurable tedium of being privy to the whispered confessions of others. I have yet to run across a teddy bear who was harbouring the secret desire to wear a maid’s uniform.
   

Con

1. Even when freshly washed and relieved of all obvious confections, children tend to be sticky. One can only assume that this has something to do with not smoking enough.
   
2. Children have decidedly little fashion sense and if left to their own devices will more often than not be drawn to garments of unfortunate cut. In this respect they do not differ greatly from the majority of their elders, but somehow one blames them more.
   
3. Children respond inadequately to sardonic humor and veiled threats.
   
4. Notoriously insensitive to subtle shifts in mood, children will persist in discussing the color of a recently sighted cement-mixer long after one’s own interest in the topic has waned.
   
5. Children are rarely in the position to lend one a truely interesting sum of money. There are, however, exceptions, and such children are an excellent addition to any party.
   
6. Children arise at an unseemly hour and are oftimes in the habit of putting food on an empty stomach.
   
7. Children do not look well in evening clothes.
   
8. All too often children are accompanied by adults.
   

- Fran Lebowitz

What offense should be taken with ill manners?

This Earl of Oxford, making of his low obeisance to Queen Elizabeth, happened to let a Fart, at which he was so abashed and ashamed that he went to travel, 7 years. On his return the Queen welcomed him home, and said, My Lord, I had forgot the Fart.

- John Aubrey