I can’t count on my friends to do anything for me.

And then, she called me this morning. She’d been thither and yon and back again; that’s all there was to it.

I suppose one shouldn’t read too much into a name. Myth is real, and Constance is anything but constant. On the other hand, David means beloved; that’s me!

When the Egyptians built their railway network in the nineteenth century, construction crews dug up thousands upon thousands of mummies. The supply was so huge that engineers powered their locomotives by burning the mummified corpses.

Melanie asked me a question that’s been going around for at least a century and a half, “Is photography art?”

“In the context of the commercial art word, photography is not art,” I declared.

“What’s the difference?” she asked.

“One or two decimal places,” I explained. “That’s why I’m an artist who uses a camera instead of a photographer.”

“Sort of like music, then?” Melanie replied. “That’s why the Whacksmackers always ratchet up our sound a few decibel places.”

We concluded our meal slightly enlightened.

The driver, who was drunk and speeding, made a mistake all of us make from time to time: he mistook a mailbox for a highway ramp, and a house for the open road.

Smash! Crash! Oops.

I can already anticipate some of my learned friends protesting that they haven’t had such a lapse of judgment since they were thirteen, and that only an idiot or an imbecile would make such a blunder. But they’d be wrong, ha ha ha! Moron, that’s who would make such an error.

Bryan Scott Moron, to use his full name. Maybe there is a link between names and behavior after all?

As for the technical notes, someone with an IQ of from zero (?!) to twenty-five is an idiot, an imbecile’s IQ ranges from twenty-six to fifty, and a moron has an IQ of between fifty-one and seventy. As for Moron’s IQ, I wonder if there’s a separate scale for Texans?

I’ve never found it difficult to discuss works I haven’t read, since that includes almost everything ever published. Not only have I never read anything by Shakespeare, I don’t know the plot of a single play. I can, however, quote the bard, e.g., “Thinking makes it so.”

I can usually discuss contemporary work with convincing convincingness after reading a review or two and listening to an interview with the author. I never ask my friends if they’ve read the titles under discussion; that seems almost irrelevant these days.

Bayard, a professor at Paris University, doesn’t add much in the way of specific tips except to change the subject when cornered. For example, if asked to discuss Book X, opine that it reminds you of Book Y, and talk about that publication instead.

The author may have included more useful strategies in his most recent work, but, since I’ll never read it, I may never know.

Rutherford wasn’t impressed.

“So when do you think?” he asked.