“I got an invitation from Carleton University’s College of the Humanities and College Anniversary Committee to a 10th anniversary celebration with a lecture from professor Roy Mottahedeh of Harvard on ‘Pluralism in Non-Western Traditions: the Case of Islam’ which added (generically) ‘Your presence will enrich this momentous occasion for us.’ And I thought ‘Sorry, I’m having my leg pulled that night.’”
One of mine, from September 15, 2006
“Man Unsure If He’s Becoming More Virtuous With Age Or Just Too Tired To Sin”
Babylon Bee headline August 27, 2024
“If you spell ‘absolutely nothing’ backwards, you get gnihton yletulosba which means absolutely nothing.”
Emailed by a friend without attribution; it seems to be widely available online.
“he has occasional flashes of silence that make it quite delightful.”
Sydney Smith, quoted in Jacques Barzun From Dawn to Decadence [on the historian Macaulay’s tendency to monopolize conversations]
“There are two kinds of statistics, the kind you look up and the kind you make up.”
Archie Goodwin’s internal monologue in Rex Stout Death of a Doxy [setup for admitting he made one up to do with murders].
“Keep dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Start with typewriters.”
Frank Lloyd Wright, quote in “Random Foolish Quotations” in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 7 # 7 (June 2004)
“It brings to mind the P.G. Wodehouse story about a ‘confusion of ideas’ between the late A.B. Spottsworth and a lion he was hunting in Kenya. The confusion was that Spottsworth thought the lion was dead and the lion thought that it wasn’t.”
John Ivison in National Post July 12, 2024 [“It” being uncertainty whether the WestJet strike was on or off]
“Trouble is, we’re on a dead reckoning toward an election that will be about whether it’s Justin Trudeau or Pierre Poilievre who will destroy Canada and leave it a charred ruin full of irradiated zombie mutants. And that really, really isn’t the election we need.”
Chris Selley in National Post July 18, 2024