Deda, I love threatened Nato Air strikes and will adopt it.

Kat, almost anything uttered by the elder shrub turned out to be meaningless and so should be out of bounds, too easy, like hunting cows. My own favorite was when in a debate, about pursuing tax evaders, he said he "preferred to trust the American people." Cool, no more IRS! Send what you think is fair.

Guest, "a good number" is a rare positive expression with no corresponding negative. The reverse is much more common. My clothes are shevelled, this place is in a total state of array, and I'm going up to bed at a godly hour, to read a bad number of books. (By the way, "Guest" is my cat's name!)

I wonder if it's off-topic to include comparisons which get plugged back into themselves like a figurative extension cord, an electrical snake-biting-it's-tail symbol for infinity. When in a sauna someone says It's like a sauna in here. When getting on a bike for the first time in years, "it's like riding a bike." My wife worries about taking baths during a storm, but I figure the odds are like being struck by lightning.

It's interesting how people take the Eleanor Rigby line,the face in the jar by the door, i.e. as make-up, or a happy face--I always took it that she had a look on her face like she'd been fucked with a dead cat.

On the sarcophagus of a mummy at the children's museum in Indianapolis, painted on the breastplate there is a round "face" with two dots for eyes and a deadpan mouth, from which the Happy Face may have evolved. The smile associated with the Happy Face is, to judge from somber old photographs, a fairly recent innovation. On faces and Paul McCartney: Paul McCartney is, I think, a Facetarian, and won't eat anything with a face. Also; Picasso scholars and art historians continue to neglet his significant "Paul McCartney" period in the twenties, including such works as The Pipes of Paul McCartney, Two Paul McCartneys Reading a Letter, and a silverpoint drawing, Paul McCartney Abducting a Woman.