I don’t know why religious zealots have this compulsion to try to convert everyone who passes before them – I don’t go around trying to make them into St Louis Cardinals fans, for Christ’s sake – and yet they never fail to try.
Nowadays when accosted I explain to them that anyone wearing white socks with Hush Puppies and a badge saying HI! I’M GUS! probably couldn’t talk me into getting out of a burning car, much less into making a lifelong commitment to a deity, and ask them to send someone more intelligent and with a better dress sense next time, but back then I was too meek to do anything but listen politely and utter non-committal ‘Hmmmm’s’ to their suggestions that Jesus could turn my life around. Somewhere over the Atlantic, as I was sitting taking stock of my 200 cubic centimetres of personal space, as one does on a long plane flight, I spied a coin under the seat in front of me, and with protracted difficulty leaned forward and snagged it. When I sat up, I saw my seatmate was at last looking at me with that ominous glow.
‘Have you found Jesus?’ he said suddenly.
‘Uh, no, it’s a quarter,’ I answered and quickly settled down and pretended for the next six hours to be asleep, ignoring his whispered entreaties to let Christ build a bunkhouse in my heart.
Tag: humor
On the morning of our second day, we were strolling down the Champs-Elysées when a bird shit on his head. ‘Did you know a bird’s shit on your head?’ I asked a block or two later.
Instinctively Katz put a hand to his head, looked at it in horror – he was always something of a sissy where excrement was concerned; I once saw him running through Greenwood Park in Des Moines like the figure in Edvard Munch’s ‘The Scream’ just because he had inadvertently probed some dog shit with the tip of his finger – and with only a mumbled ‘Wait here’ walked with ramrod stiffness in the direction of our hotel. When he reappeared twenty minutes later he smelled overpoweringly of Brut aftershave and his hair was plastered down like a third-rate Spanish gigolo’s, but he appeared to have regained his composure. ‘I’m ready now,’ he announced.
Almost immediately another bird shit on his head. Only this time it really shit. I don’t want to get too graphic, in case you’re snacking or anything, but if you can imagine a pot of yoghurt upended onto his scalp, I think you’ll get the picture. ‘Gosh, Steve, that was one sick bird,’ I observed helpfully.
Katz was literally speechless. Without a word he turned and walked stiffly back to the hotel, ignoring the turning heads of passers-by. He was gone for nearly an hour. When at last he returned, he was wearing a windcheater with the hood up. ‘Just don’t say a word,’ he warned me and strode past. He never really warmed to Paris after that.
Tag: humor
Is that dog shit on the bottom of your shoe?’
I sat up a fraction. ‘What?’
‘Is that dog shit on the bottom of your shoe?’
‘I don’t know, the lab report’s not back yet,’ I replied drily.
‘I’m serious, is that dog shit?’
‘How should I know?’
Katz leaned far enough forward to give it a good look and a cautious sniff. ‘It is dog shit,’ he announced with an odd tone of satisfaction.
‘Well, keep quiet about it or everybody’ll want some.’
‘Go and clean it off, will ya? It’s making me nauseous.’
And here the bickering started, in intense little whispers.
‘You go and clean it off.’
‘It’s your shoes.’
‘Well, I kind of like it. Besides, it kills the smell of this guy next to me.’
‘Well, it’s making me nauseous.’
‘Well, I don’t give a shit.’
‘Well, I think you’re a fuck-head.’
‘Oh, you do, do you?’
‘Yes, as a matter of fact. You’ve been a fuck-head since Austria.’
‘Well, you’ve been a fuck-head since birth.’
‘Me?’ A wounded look. ‘That’s rich. You were a fuck-head in the womb, Bryson. You’ve got three kinds of chromosomes: X, Y and fuck-head.
Tag: humor
For the moment we might very well can them DUNNOS (for Dark Unknown Nonreflective Nondetectable Objects Somewhere).
Bill BrysonTag: science humour space physics dark-matter
Of course, you’ll have to fly to the refugee camp at Dadaab,” Will observed thoughtfully at one point. He glanced at me. “To avoid the bandits,” he explained.
Dan and Nick nodded gravely.
“I beg your pardon?” I said, taking a sudden interest.
“It’s bandit country all round there,” Will said.
“Where?” I asked, peering at the map for the first time.
“Oh, just there,” Will said, waving a hand vaguely across most of east Africa. “But you’ll be fine in a plane.”
“They only rarely shoot at planes,” Nick explained.
Tag: humor
On a cooler sun on a primordial earth:
"I later learned that biologists, when they are feeling jocose, refer to this as the 'Chinese Resaturant Problem'--because we has a dim sun.
I used to give X-ray vision a lot of thought because I couldn’t see how it could work. I mean, if you could see through people’s clothing, then surely you would also see through their skin and right into their bodies. You would see blood vessels, pulsing organs, food being digested and pushed through coils of bowel, and much else of a gross and undesirable nature. Even if you could somehow confine your X-rays to rosy epidermis, any body you gazed at wouldn’t be in an appealing natural state, but would be compressed and distorted by unseen foundation garments. The breasts, for one thing, would be oddly constrained and hefted, basketed within an unseen bra, rather than relaxed and nicely jiggly. It wouldn’t be satisfactory at all—or at least not nearly satisfactory enough. Which is why it was necessary to perfect ThunderVision™, a laserlike gaze that allowed me to strip away undergarments without damaging skin or outer clothing. That ThunderVision, stepped up a grade and focused more intensely, could also be used as a powerful weapon to vaporize irritating people was a pleasing but entirely incidental benefit.
Bill BrysonTag: humor imagination kids
I ordered a coffee and a little something to eat and savored the warmth and dryness. Somewhere in the background Nat King Cole sang a perky tune. I watched the rain beat down on the road outside and told myself that one day this would be twenty years ago.
Bill BrysonTag: travel
Still, I never really mind bad service in a restaurant. It makes me feel better about not leaving a tip.
Bill BrysonMostra la citazione in tedesco
Mostra la citazione in francese
Mostra la citazione in italiano
Woods are not like other spaces. To begin with, they are cubic. Their trees surround you, loom over you, press in from all sides. Woods choke off views
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