The Slaughtered Lamb

[Chuck Yeager]

Has that line ever worked on anyone?

Something mighty similar worked faster than the speed of sound on my filly Glennis.

[Randolph Churchill]

My silver tongue ginned up Jenny.

[Bess Truman]

Harry was a plain speaker, which mother and I appreciated.

[Dorothy Bliss]

I agree with Jordan Peterson. Men are like lobsters. As a pioneer in the field of hormonal control in crustaceans, I should know. My point being, kindly remove your claw from my tail, Lord Randolph, or you shall lose it in such a way that it does not grow back.

[Sonny Bono]

Sidles up to Dorothy, motioning to the bartender and pointing to her drink: "I got this babe."

[Helen Gurley Brown]

As long as you're buying, make mine a cosmo, natch.

[Carson McCullers]

I think it might be about time I switched to Shirley Temples.

[Overheard]

One of my formative American experiences of guns involved pumpkins, assorted other unfortunate squash, crayfish, and the backwoods of West Virginia. For some reason I got myself invited to a crawfish boil. I'm not sure why as I like crustaceans about as much as they like me. But hey, there was the promise of beer and when in Virginia with a girl called Mary Lou and she's y'all-ing for the Dixie olympics, you go with the flow because you know where you'd like it to go. Plus she promised to show me where the Waltons lived, which turned out not to be a euphemism.

Anyway, we crossed the state line. Maps were consulted. Further and further we went, trees edging closer to the road. Daylight got more squeezed. It turned out that none of us actually knew the hosts, they were friends of someone's brother's cousin (never to try to unpick these family relationships would be my advice) who had mentioned en passant that the event was happening. So, we were basically gatecrashing a redneck party.

Now you know it's a party when you get to the end of the driveway, or rather rutted track, and there's some balloons or a banner, maybe a sign saying 'crawfish boil this way.' Not in WV, there's a big fella leaning on a pump action. Y'all here for the 'fish? I'm not arguing. Why yes, good sir we are. You ain't from round here? Sarcasm, go stand on the corner and shut the fuck up, the man has a gun.

So, anyway, another ten miles of track lands us on Planet Pick-Up truck. You know how it is when you arrive at a party underdressed. I felt undergunned. A small army would have felt undergunned. Mary Lou? Paul? Not one of us had thought to bring a weapon. These people made it look like the crawfish might be fomenting armed rebellion. They weren't going to go quietly into that oil drum of boiling cajun-spiced water.

So, in short order, beer was consumed. Two hundred and fifty pounds of crawfish met an unseemly demise, of which I ate about one. As my brain started to go sudsy rockabout, the shooting starts. Now all good Americans want to see English people shoot guns. Trust me, like the accent, it holds an ineffable attraction. So I find myself holding a small cannon in one hand and a beer in the other. Mary Lou appears with a borrowed assault rifle, looks my limply clutched handgun up and down, and shakes her head before putting a 7.62 mm round through a pumpkin far enough away to be in the next county. Suddenly, about 200 pair of eyes fall on me. Shoot the pumpkin, English. I don't think this shit ever happened on the Waltons. I don't think Mary Lou is going to offer any favours to a boy who won't kill a pumpkin so I down the beer, slug some bourbon and take aim and – every varmint in the state duck – start massacring trees. Then everyone is shooting. It's like a small war. Someone zooms by me on a quad bike with a machine gun in one hand, splattering veg left right and centre. It's like an organic veg version of Mad Max.

I've no idea how many people died that night. My ears rang for about four days. Mary Lou never looked at me quite the same. I think you shot a squirrel, she said. Collateral damage.

[Pierre Boulle]

A monkey goes into a bar and orders a martini. This totally amazes the bartender, but he thinks, "What the heck, I guess I might as well make the drink." So he mixes the martini. He then walks back over to the give it to the monkey, who is holding out a twenty-dollar bill. Now the bartender is at a loss for words. He can't believe that a monkey walked into his bar, ordered a martini, and then actually had a twenty-dollar bill to pay for it.

In amazement, he takes the twenty and walks to the cash register to make the change. While he's standing in front of the register he stops for a second and thinks to himself, "Let me try something here and see if the monkey notices anything."

So he walks back over and hands him a dollar change. The monkey just sits there sipping the martini. After a few minutes the bartender just can't take it anymore.

"You know," he says, "we don't get too many monkeys in here."

And the monkey says, "At nineteen dollars a drink I'm not surprised."

[Ansel Adams]

This all sounds very unlikely. Did he get a picture of the monkey?