“you’re as ugly as the mornin’ after payday in a minin’ town.”
“Milligan” in Louis L’Amour The Trail to Seven Pines
“This positions us as a grand city where grand things happen.”
Alejandro Rojas Diaz, Mexico City’s tourism secretary, “who organized an event at which 12,937 people danced to Michael Jackson's ‘Thriller’ in pursuit of a world record”, as the “Quotation of the Day” in “Today’s Headlines” e-mail from New York Times September 8 2009
“Most men are bad.”
“A saying often attributed to” Bias of Priene according to Peter D’Epiro and Mary Desmond Pinkowish What are the Seven Wonders of the World? (“along with the advice to live as if our live span will be both long and short.”)
“Nous n’avouons de petits défauts que pour persuader que nous n’en avons pas de grands.”
Réflexions morales #327 in La Rochefoucauld Maximes
“Hair-dos and hair-don’ts.”
Quoting myself again, a thought inspired by I recall not what in August 2001 but certainly reinforced by my own appearance during the lockdown.
“Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.”
Charlie Chaplin, quoted in Globe & Mail March 24, 1999
“by what I have gathered from your own relation, and the answers I have with much pains wrung and extorted from you, I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.”
The king of Brobdingnag in Jonathan Swift Gulliver’s Travels
In my latest National Post column I call for environmental action at the yard level, allowing a micro “rewilding” return of nature to our cities in the form of flowers, bugs, birds and healthy soil.