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A diplomat is a man who can convince his wife she'd look stout in a fur
coat.
Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow they may make it illegal.
The warning message we sent the Russians was a calculated ambiguity
that would be clearly understood.
-- Alexander Haig
"The Schizophrenic: An Unauthorized Autobiography"
A Severe Strain on the Credulity
As a method of sending a missile to the higher, and even to the highest
parts of the earth's atmospheric envelope, Professor Goddard's rocket
is a practicable and therefore promising device. It is when one
considers the multiple-charge rocket as a traveler to the moon that one
begins to doubt ... for after the rocket quits our air and really
starts on its journey, its flight would be neither accelerated nor
maintained by the explosion of the charges it then might have left.
Professor Goddard, with his "chair" in Clark College and countenancing
of the Smithsonian Institution, does not know the relation of action to
re-action, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum
against which to react ... Of course he only seems to lack the
knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.
-- New York Times Editorial, 1920
Incumbent, n.:
Person of liveliest interest to the outcumbents.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
"Ubi non accusator, ibi non judex."
(Where there is no police, there is no speed limit.)
-- Roman Law, trans. Petr Beckmann (1971)
So she went into the garden to cut a cabbage leaf to make an apple
pie; and at the same time a great she-bear, coming up the street pops
its head into the shop. "What! no soap?" So he died, and she very
imprudently married the barber; and there were present the Picninnies,
and the Grand Panjandrum himself, with the little round button at top,
and they all fell to playing the game of catch as catch can, till the
gunpowder ran out at the heels of their boots.
-- Samuel Foote
Tuesday, 7 April 2026 Michael J. Chappell Contact me at:
mcsuper5@freeshell.org
