Tuesday, October 8, 2013

A Comparison

John England, Travels through Scotland (London: W. Morgan, n.d.), p. 17, quoted in Martin Rackwitz, Travels to Terra Incognita: The Scottish Highlands and Hebrides in Early Modern Travellers' Accounts c. 1600 to 1800 (Münster: Waxmann Verlag, 2007), p. 125, n. 39:
A Scotchman is compared to a Fart, because, as a Fart never returns to the Place it escapes from, so a Scotchman, when he once gets out of his own Country, never desires to go back again.

Sunday, October 6, 2013

Effects of Diet

Fernando del Paso, Palinuro of Mexico, tr. Elisabeth Plaister (Normal: Dalkey Archive Press, 1996), p. 477:
We learned to choose our foods to determine the calibre of our artillery. Because, just as we discovered that lentils produce fragmented farts like confetti and cauliflower produces green and lethal machine-gun fire and broad beans white mold so, also, we learned that when we ate rotten cheeses we produced fatuous and rancid farts of heraldic blue; when we drank beer, we launched foaming farts with ultra-violet tendencies and when we lunched on pheasant (the rottener the better) we produced super-active farts which, like the great de Chéseaux comet, had several multicoloured tails which followed them faithfully through Norton's Star Atlas.