Potpourri (not Popery)

Good nature, is good religion.

As to your joiner’s versatility, what is a coffin, really, if not simply the last piece of furniture you’ll ever need?

Exercise your brain each day. If you don’t, nobody does (your own, that is).

—Porridger’s Almanack (Breakfast of Ganglions)

“Like dark-meat chicken,” Mr. Proctor said, “stringy and gummy.” Well, I may not always eat unidentified rat parts, but when I do, you can be sure they’re fried in Crisco! Poor man’s tempura, we call it.

Afterwards, what you need is not so much a palate cleanser, as a palate scourer.

The technological conundrum of our day seems to be: we build machines for consistency of performance, but their performance doesn’t appear at all consistent, does it?

Two foreign words which sound misleadingly innocent to an English speaker are skitsnack (Swedish for bullshit) and pappekak (Dutch, whence the anglicized poppycock), from Middle Dutch pappe “soft food” (see pap) + kak “dung.”

Humans: they have the capricious wilfulness of cats, only without the intelligence.

Idea for a monograph:  Actors who don’t appear in a hit movie’s sequel, because they negotiated the new contract with a mistaken sense of how important they weren’t, to the project.

I’m not Amish, but I once dreamt that I’m Calmish. We were so poor those days, we didn’t have flies enough to make shoo-fly pie.

In sweetener news:  Big Sugar suppressed a study from 50 years ago connecting sugar to cancer; and a current study suggests a link between high-fructose corn syrup and opioid addiction.