Curmudgeonly Quotes and Related Matters

A :Dave Petzal, Field & Stream's resident curmudgeon (and the main if not only reason to read that mag any more) was asked why he had such a bad attitude. He responded:

"Because I have had the opportunity to observe human beings for seven decades, and if you do it for that long and don't have a foul disposition, either you're simple or you haven't been paying attention."


Exhibit B, from The Selected Letters of William Styron, quoting his friend Irwin Wallace: "...no magazine is happy unless they remove the gonads from a writer's work."


C is merely melancholy, on the recent suicide of a hacker, from the pseudonymous "Mencius Moldbug": "No one ever had a chance to tell him that his only honorable option was to live in the past."


D is a headline in one of our main contemporary sporting mags, on hunting rare animals in a fenced preserve and using the money for conservation; I have some esthetic reservations and traditional ones, but my most severe might be... grammatical.* Can NO one see obvious mistakes anymore? The title reads: EXOTIC AND EXTICT.


E, the last for now, courtesy of John Wilson but quoting Ohio naturalist Tom Schied, says more about the originator's wit than the quality of the recipients. Or, well, maybe not-- it is one of those things you wish you had said. Describing to John Wilson (below) the non- joy of casting pearls of wisdom in front of the invincibly ignorant, he spoke of a pair to whom he had shown what Andrey Kovalenko calls a "World Class Bird", only to find them bored and impatient to turn on the radio and move on: John, it was like... it was like showing your stamp collection to an iguana."

*Fairly recently a young editor asked me the source of the phrase "The way of an eagle in the air". I gave the answer as King James Version, such and such book, chapter, verse etc. The person-- I do not know whether male or female but I am sure young, responded as though I were an idiot with "NO-- what BOOK? WHO WROTE IT?"

UPDATE: Libby just read this. As regular readers know, she works for the Post Office, a source of tales of humor and horror second only to the Zoo. She instantly cited a customer, a teacher no less, who when she got to the head of the line asked "How much is a two- cent stamp?"