Christmas Every Day

He who gets married will be happy for a day, he who butchers a pig will be happy for a year.

The abbot and thirty monks couldn’t force a donkey to drink.

Three things are needed to get rich: a little, a lot, a nothing: little money, much ability, no conscience.

If water were any good, it wouldn’t be used to water cucumbers.

If you want to live to an old age, you need to start early.

For good health never wash your head, wash your hands often and your feet rarely.

Don’t choose a woman or cloth by candlelight.

– Sicilian proverbs

• You’re correct, but the goat is mine.
• He who sleeps cannot catch fish.
• He who leaves and then returns, had a good trip.
• A closed mouth catches neither flies nor food.
• If you own two houses, it is raining in one of them.
• Company drags a man to the scaffold.
• He who lives fast goes straight to his death.
•  Hunger drives the wolf from its den.
• Theory dominates practice.
• If a caged bird isn’t singing for love, it’s singing in a rage.
• An open path never seems long.
• A fine rain still soaks you to the bone, but no one takes it seriously.
• What can a cat do if its master is crazy.
• Words have no bones, but can break bones.
•  A thin cat and a fat woman are the shame of a household.

— Corsican proverbs

• In late Victorian times, proper ladies refused to use the word “leg,” so as to avoid mentioning the delicate subject of stilts.

• Pertinax was the first Roman emperor to hop on one foot for more than three hours straight.

• Most Nativity scenes displayed at Christmas are risibly inaccurate, because they leave out the obstetrician.

• All other Russian names that begin with the letter Ч are transliterated with a Ch in English, but Tchaikovsky’s name is transliterated with a Tch. The anomaly is due to the acrimony of Tchaikovsky’s enemies in the English-speaking music press, who wished to make sure that Tchaikovsky’s name would always appear last in alphabetical lists of Russian composers.

— Dr. Boli’s Encyclopedia of Misinformation

INFORMATION, we like to tell ourselves, is our most valuable commodity. Yet a cursory glance at the world today will show us that our deeds give the lie to our words. For our purposes we may define “information” as true knowledge of the state of things, and it is clear that we actively despise such knowledge. Has any nation ever gone to war, any hotly contested election been won, any grave question of public policy ever been decided on the basis of information? Certainly not.

No, when we face our most important decisions, the choices that will change our lives forever, MISINFORMATION is what we demand. We reward the purveyors of misinformation with high office and public honor; we punish the bringers of information with scorn and derision, and frequently prison or torture.

— Dr. Boli

• A gentle word opens an iron gate.
• God promises a safe landing but not a calm passage.
• If you call a single wolf, you invite the pack.
• If you can kiss the mistress, never kiss the maid.
• If you let everyone walk over you, you become a carpet.
• If you wish to drown, do not torture yourself with shallow water.
• When the sea turned into honey, the poor man lost his spoon.
• Even the madman runs away from the drunk.

— Bulgarian proverbs

• If you meet a Bulgarian in the street, beat him. He will know why.

— Russian proverb

Post-structuralism is a system of literary and social analysis that flared up and vanished in France in the 1960s but that became anachronistically entrenched in British and American academe from the 1970s on. Based on the outmoded linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and promoted by the idolized Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Michel Foucault, it absurdly asserts that we experience or process reality only through language and that, because language is inherently unstable, nothing can be known. By undermining meaning, history and personal will, post-structuralism has done incalculable damage to education and contemporary thought. It is a laborious, circuitously self-referential gimmick that always ends up with the same monotonous result. . . Post-structuralism has destroyed two generations of graduate students, who were forced to mouth its ugly jargon and empty platitudes for their foolish faculty elders. And the end result is that humanities departments everywhere, having abandoned their proper mission of defending and celebrating art, have become humiliatingly marginalized in both reputation and impact.

— Camille Paglia

See, the problem is that God gives men a brain and a penis, and only enough blood to run one at a time.

–Robin Williams.

God makes a portion of each generation intelligent well above the average, and despite the best efforts of our state school systems, His handiwork is hard to suppress. The task of the modern progressive university is therefore to corrupt and unbalance the intelligent; to pit their minds against their common sense.

— David Warren