and on a lighter note

Mrs. Bennet rang the bell, and Miss Elizabeth was summoned to the library.

``Come here, child,'' cried her father as she appeared. ``I have sent for you on an affair of importance. I understand that Mr. Collins has made you an offer of marriage. Is it true?'' Elizabeth replied that it was. ``Very well -- and this offer of marriage you have refused?''

``I have, Sir.''

``Very well. We now come to the point. Your mother insists upon your accepting it. Is not it so, Mrs. Bennet?''

``Yes, or I will never see her again.''

``An unhappy alternative is before you, Elizabeth. From this day you must be a stranger to one of your parents. -- Your mother will never see you again if you do not marry Mr. Collins, and I will never see you again if you do.''

Good one, Simon. I've always loved that last line. This one is from The 5-Minute Iliad and Other Instant Classics by Greg Nagan. It's a funny book.

"Rosy-fingered Dawn then brought another day: more fighting,
more Trojan victories, more dead Greeks, Achaeans, and Argives.
It was really bad and Agamemnon didn't know what to do.
So he retreated again. And sent another guy to Achilles.
Phoenix, this time. Old Phoenix, wise Phoenix,
Phoenix with arthritis he wouldn't wish on a dog.

Phoenix went to Achilles and talked abut the weather,
and his bunions, and his digestion, and how it wasn't the heat,
if was the humidity."

From a letter to Professor Edward S. Morse written by Thomas Bailey Aldrich:

My Dear Morse: It was very pleasant to receive a letter from you the other day. Perhaps I should have found it pleasanter if I had been able to decipher it. I don't think I mastered anything beyond the date, which I knew, and the signature, at which I guessed. There is a singular and perpetual charm in a letter of yours; it never grows old, and it never loses its novelty. One can say every morning, as one looks at it: "Here's a letter of Morse's I haven't read yet. I think I shall take another shy at it today; and maybe I shall be able in the course of years to make out what he means by those "t's" that look like "w's" and those "i's" that haven't any eyebrows." Other letters are read, and thrown away and forgotten; but yours are kept forever - unread. One of them will last a reasonable man a lifetime.

LOL Thanks for that

Glad you liked it, Simon. :)

And another, just for fun:

"If it's good enough for druids
Running nekkid through the woids
Drinking strange fermented fluids
Then it's good enough for me."

Sorry, I tried to find the author once, but failed. Maybe one of you can find him/her.

I think it's a filk verse for "Gimme That Old Time Religion."

Yep, just did some research. Check out a gadzillion verses here

Shall we sing a verse for Venus,
Of the Gods she is the meanest,
Cause she bit me on my...elbow!
And it's good enough for me!

How funny! I'm glad you recognized it, Morphi. Thanks and thanks, too, for the link. Have you seen the t-shirt with Stonehenge on it that has "Give me that old time religion" as a caption? No wonder they put in a verse about Druids. lol.

It was a beautiful day today, which made me think spring is almost here, which made me think of Ambrose Bierce:

"Spring is with us with its oldtime stock of horrors - birds blaspheming in the trees; flowers loading the lukewarm air with odious exhalations; grass with snakes in it; matronly cows to gore the unwary. The blue of the sky and the green of the earth renew their immemorial feud, murdering one another in cold blood all along the line of the horizon. Hideous ferns erect themselves in the gulches where the poison oak unsheathes his leaves to work his ghastly joke upon the culler of simples. Fleas call the roll and perfect their ogranization; spiders hang their poddy carcasses face-high above the trail. 'Come, gentle spring, ethereal mildness, come.' Come with lute, come with clamor of geese, yelling of dogs, deep diapason of the strolling bull, and frequent thud of country asses falling over their own feet."

The use of Zoloft in the artistic community has had a worrying effect on art dealers selling to the "anger market."

"I can sell anti-parent symbolist stuff all day," said an unidentified dealer, "but the artists aren't delivering it anymore. One artist, who used to give me birth canals with fangs, now sends me paintings of dogs playing poker."

-- Steve Martin, Pure Drivel

I recently returned to an old favourite of mine, George Bernard shaw`s An Unsocial Socialist.

I can`t truthfully say it`s a good novel, but I`ve read it half a dozen times, so obviously it works fr me.

Here are some good bits -

"She had concluded that marriage was a greater folly, and men greater fools, than she had supposed ; but such beliefs rather lightened her sense of responsibility than disappointed her, and..her time passed pleasantly enough."

"Agatha...proceeded to study pathology from a volume of clinical lectures. Finding her own sensations exactly like those described in the book as symptoms of the direst diseases, she put it by in alarm, and took up a novel, which was free from the fault she had found in the lectures, inasmuch as none of the emotions it described in the least resembled any she had ever experienced."

"Erskine intercepted her in the hall as she passed out, told her that he should be desolate when she was gone, and begged her to remember him, a simple plea which moved her a little, and caused her to note that his dark eyes had a pleading eloquence which she had observed before in the kangaroos at the Zoological Society`s gardens."