Once, many years ago, when I was working in a junk-mail mill, I got some joy out of a simple sign just about a mile away from the site of this employment. The sign, on a smallish road, warned drivers that racoons and other small critters were crossing thereabouts, so it would be wise to proceed with caution. Or, at least, that is what I imagine was the point of posting the sign. It said simply, "Slow animals crossing". I found it joyful because I would always say to myself while passing, "Gee, I guess the smarter animals cross a little further down the road." I guess we're supposed to imagine a punctuation point after the word "slow" to foreclose such an interpretation.
Posts
This is poignant stuff. I recognize when I'm outclassed. I can think of no improving commentary on what follows. So I'll simply steal it from The Irish Times where it first appeared. An Irish philosopher is writing about her infatuation with the long dead Dutchman. However, I realised in that moment that all of the serious relationships I had had in my early 20s were with long-dead philosophers and were conducted entirely inside my own head. Fortunately for me, that didn’t constitute any diagnosable mental-health condition that there was an existing medication to cure. It’s simply the case that no young man I had ever encountered was sufficient competition to threaten my devotion to Baruch Spinoza. Of all the gin joints he could have sauntered into, he had to choose mine. That certainly isn’t to imply that he physically did anything much at all. Dying in 1677 will limit you that way. However, with liquid brown eyes that implied his parents were a giraf...
"I still live." Those were the last words of Daniel Webster. They were later quoted as inspirational, as meaning, "Yet though I am dying, my legacy will go on and on." In fact, he was engaging in a final bit of braggadocio -- one of his bedside doctors had apparently said he would probably be dead by midnight. He woke from his penultimate slumber and asked the time. Someone told him it was 1 AM. He said brightly, "I still live," then sank into his ultimate slumber. I've heard that NOAH Webster's last words were somewhat more enigmatic. "Zoology, Zoroaster ... Zygote!"
Back in the ancient days, the before times, there was a very corny television show called Bonanza, about a rancher and his sons. There was also a magazine called MAD that did parodies of such shows. Their parody of Bonanza was especially inspired, and has stuck in my mind from that day to this. It begins with the father and his sons in a big bathtub. One of the sons says, "The family that bathes together, stays together." Variations of that quote recur in the story, getting increasingly corney. At the end of what passes for a plot, the paterfamilias is getting married and going on a honeymoon. The sons invite themselves along. This causes the final bit of dialog between two of them: "The family that honeymoons together eats prunes together." "That doesn't even make sense." "They can't all be gems." I can't believe I've been blogging for as long as I have and have never mentioned that episode. It haunts me....