Ditch Doc

OK, girls, here’s the deal. I doubt that King Arthur opened many doors for himself. But it wasn’t because anyone thought he couldn’t. It was because his subjects didn’t think such a glorious hero of battle should have to take care of such a mundane consideration as a door. It breaks our hearts that you should think we open doors to objectify you or because we think you’re weak. When a man opens a door for you, take it as it’s probably meant: as a gesture of homage to a being just a little elevated above his own dusty sphere.

I didn’t follow the trial closely enough to have a very well formed opinion of Conrad’s guilt or innocence. I did follow it closely enough to get an idea what I thought of the standard news coverage of it, and whatever you may say about the verdict, you have to admit that there’s something deeply unsettling about a legion of reporters making fun of a former lord of their profession for having too big a vocabulary.

You know a vehicle is either very good or very bad when one of the selling points is “Street legal.”

Next time a cow with BSE shows up in your country, kill all the cows you have to to make yourself feel safe. Don’t burn them though. Send them to African villages dying of starvation. But make sure that each crate has this warning on it:

Warning! Eating this meat will result in a 1 in 17,000,000 chance of developing a fatal brain disease. Consume at your own risk!

Maybe there should be a separate warning as well:

Warning! No matter how hungry they look, don’t feed this meat to cows!

The ancients thought of music as a branch of mathematics, which makes most of us say: “What a boring, stilted way to look at music.” But why not: “What a sublime way to look at math!”

There’s a particular kind of uncharity belonging to people who talk endlessly without offering any breaks in the conversation, because they know that you’d use the first one to get away. They don’t stop to get a response, they don’t seem to inhale, and they even maintain multiple plots, so that if they happen to reach a paragraph in one, you still can’t escape from the others. Then at the end, they always apologize, thus betraying that they knew all along that you weren’t interested.

Can anyone tell me what to do with such people? They’re usually the sort you feel sorry for, and so want to humour. This pretty well rules out interrupting in the middle of sentences, even hour-long ones, looking at your watch, or just walking away. But these conventions are based on polite conversation, which the ranter has already thoroughly trampled. They’re wasting both your time and their own. And yet I just can’t make myself cut them off at fifteen minutes. What to do? Maybe I should ask Max Fox.

Why is it that when you’ve stayed up til two to complete some great important task, it suddenly seems like the right time to take care of every little neglected job from replacing the burnt out lighbulb to cleaning the oven window?

Am I missing something, or are Muslims the world over using gasoline, machine guns, and Pope-effigies to protest Benedict XVI’s allusion to the violence of Mohammed?

Here’s a brief dialogue summarizing the principle of warranties:

Buyer: This looks like a pretty good camera. And it won’t break on me in the first year?

Seller: Well, we… uh…

B: OK, is there another model you’re more confident in?

S: Oh, certainly!

B: Can I see it?

S: You have. It’s the same one, it just costs more.

Many thousands of British football fans singing God Save the Queen in Frankfurt.