Guy Fawkes, contemporary engraving (1605)
"Remember, remember the Fifth of November, / Gunpowder, treason and plot." —traditional Guy Fawkes rhyme
I chanted this ditty as a boy,
Pulling Guy on my little wagon,
To meet his bonfire fate.
Grownups smiled at my toy.
They'd taught me the tradition.
—I was, you see, just eight!
November 5, 2024
Four-part report of a Stalin-era Soviet delegation to a scientific conference on elephants:
Classics of Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism on Elephants;
Russia—the Elephant’s Homeland;
The Soviet Elephant: The Best Elephant in the World;
The Belorussian Elephant—Little Brother to the Russian Elephant.
—Soviet-era joke recorded in Andrei Sakharov, Memoirs (London, 1990), p. 123, cited in Orlando Figes, Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia (New York, 2002), p. 504n.
Women make up only 6.8% of federal prison inmates in the United States.*
Men evolved to be dangerous.
For every MILF
There's a FILK—
A "father that I'd like to kill."
In most of us, thank Mars, that monkeyfucking gene's by now attenuated—
at least we do the best we can!
"Lies, damned lies, and statistics,"
Mark Twain thought the triple curse of modern man.