I didn’t start it, but you might say I carried my weight as best I could during the cold war. So I have earned the right to speak plainly to you, as thou art either the best of men or the better half of women — exclusions may apply in some jurisdictions. We thy servants must be a sorry flock to set before the king.

Please to forgive these scholarly blind alleys — I don’t have time to become immortalized as a poet of the first magnitude. But someday, if my ship comes in and I can afford to become a philosopher, I would like to solve once and for all the riddle of existence. And if it was in my genes to become a that molecular biologist who can put it all togetjher, I would trace my ancestries to the skin of a virus. If I could get into psychoanalysis, given my upbringing, I would make your head spin. Figuratively, of course.

I was tone deaf half my life, until I fell out of the crow’s nest and woke up with perfect pitch. There are no other cases in the annals or in their executive summaries.

In the beginning I could make nor head nor tail of it, but when the nor’westers blew, and the trees began to sing, I noticed that Forty Mile Creek was in the same key as the Magic Flute. Down at the switching yard, the locomotives were idyling in C, but not a well-tempered sea. The vibrations are arbitrary, but the harmonics are pythagorean. Abstain from beans.

He fancied himself a great lover, and maybe he was because his noodle was almost bald.

He fancied himself a doctor of divinity, but he could never get the hang of the mother church.

He fancied himself endowed with as much common sense as anyone in the land, and the truth of this could be rigourously proved to be the case. Except where prohibited by law.

Cotgrave says a Crosse-bow; also, the sinewie Cross-bow, wherewith a man shoots, not deere, but his deerest.

You know how much smarter we are than those dummies of days gone past? You can store the whole works of a supposed big shot like Issac Newton in under a gigabyte (for example). But it would take a thousand gigabytes to do justice to Woody Allen, and that’s with extreme compression. And 500 years from now, nobody will know nothing about Newton, but Woody will be on the tip of their tongues. As we say in the mother language.