dennis scharnberg

Culture: an apparatus for imposing assertions as true.

Nathaniel Bumppo, The Final Word.

Today, science is modeling. If there is something that scientists cannot model—that resists modeling—their solution is to model it anyway.

Roger Hedgecook, Stolen and Sold for Parts.

Materialism: a scheme in which everything in the world is derived either from a system of some kind or from randomness.

Clive Morrow, A Crustacean’s Dictionary.

We should direct our skepticism toward those statements that appeal to us.

Godfrey Tooke, Collected Aphorisms.

We should want global warming.

Godfrey Tooke, Collected Aphorisms.

bucketfool

Andrew Tertullian, Pandora’s Ponderous Puns.

lass is more

Andrew Tertullian, Pandora’s Ponderous Puns.

“Do I? I say, do I? Do I care too much?”

Park V. Kessler, Nearly Music.

“Science, you say? Pah! I know what my old eyes have seen.”

Carson Drew, The Case of the Purloined Tiger.

In the bedroom closet, he finds that his well-worn oxfords now consist of two left shoes. He cannot fathom this perplexity. He cannot account for it. He seeks solace in the TV, by watching a 1940s film noir featuring Audrey Totter as an unhappy wife who, upon discovering that her favorite pair of heels has mysteriously become two right shoes, goes on a rampage (in flats), shoots her husband (six times), robs a small supermarket, and heads for the border in a stolen DeSoto.

Jason Starling, ed., Adventures in Narrative Parsimony.