You will engage in a profitable business activity.

The very ink with which all history is written is merely fluid prejudice.

-- Mark Twain

You have a deep appreciation of the arts and music.

Snow Day -- stay home.

Snow Day -- stay home.

The Bulwer-Lytton fiction contest is held ever year at San Jose State

Univ. by Professor Scott Rice. It is held in memory of Edward George

Earle Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873), a rather prolific and popular (in his

time) novelist. He is best known today for having written "The Last

Days of Pompeii."

Whenever Snoopy starts typing his novel from the top of his doghouse,

beginning "It was a dark and stormy night..." he is borrowing from Lord

Bulwer-Lytton. This was the line that opened his novel, "Paul Clifford,"

written in 1830. The full line reveals why it is so bad:

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents -- except

at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of

wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene

lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty

flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.

There is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.

-- Mark Twain

You would if you could but you can't so you won't.

You will wish you hadn't.

Q: What do you call the money you pay to the government when

you ride into the country on the back of an elephant?

A: A howdah duty.

Your motives for doing whatever good deed you may have in mind will be

misinterpreted by somebody.

Q: How do you keep a moron in suspense?

The lovely woman-child Kaa was mercilessly chained to the cruel post of

the warrior-chief Beast, with his barbarian tribe now stacking wood at

her nubile feet, when the strong clear voice of the poetic and heroic

Handsomas roared, 'Flick your Bic, crisp that chick, and you'll feel my

steel through your last meal!'

-- Winning sentence, 1984 Bulwer-Lytton bad fiction contest.

In the plot, people came to the land; the land loved them; they worked and

struggled and had lots of children. There was a Frenchman who talked funny

and a greenhorn from England who was a fancy-pants but when it came to the

crunch he was all courage. Those novels would make you retch.

-- Canadian novelist Robertson Davies, on the generic Canadian

novel.

Q: How many mathematicians does it take to screw in a light bulb?

A: One. He gives it to six Californians, thereby reducing the problem

to the earlier joke.

Your business will assume vast proportions.

People are beginning to notice you. Try dressing before you leave the house.

You are capable of planning your future.

Q: How many Marxists does it take to screw in a light bulb?

A: None: The light bulb contains the seeds of its own revolution.

In the stairway of life, you'd best take the elevator.