Monday, March 18, 2024

Not here, not now

 As she preceded us down the long dining room, her arm linked in George Tupper's - she seemed to have taken a liking to George - I had ample opportunity for studying her, from her patent-leather shoes to the mass of golden hair beneath her picture-hat. She had a loud, clear voice, and she was telling George Tupper the rather intimate details of an internal complaint which had recently troubled an aunt of hers. If George had been the family physician, she could not have been franker; and I could see a dull glow spreading over his shapely ears.

(from "The Debut of Battling Billson, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Friday, March 15, 2024

The strangeness in the proportion

 "There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion." 

Several decades ago, when I first saw that quote from Sir Francis Bacon in a pictoral collection in Readers Digest, it quickly became one of my favorites. By way of explanation, a face can be so perfect that it becomes almost uninteresting, whereas those with some slight defect by contrast become fascinating, or even hypnotic, and thus an "excellent" beauty.

An example might be the picture that I use for the character of Elliane McDermott in my Sir Cuthbert stories. In the first of the stories, Cuthbert Solves a Case, a friend asks Percy to tell her what it is that he doesn't like about her face, and he lists several supposed defects. She teases him that for someone who doesn't like her face he evidently has spent a good bit of time studying it. And defects they may justly have been, but he ends up marrying her anyway.



Thursday, March 14, 2024

He needs inspiration

     "What guarantee have I," demanded Ukridge, "that if I go to enormous trouble and expense getting him another match, he won't turn aside and brush away a silent tear in the first round because he's heard that the blighter's wife has got an ingrowing toenail?"

    "You could match him only against bachelors."

    "Yes, and the first bachelor he met would draw him into a corner and tell him his aunt was down with whooping-cough, and the chump would heave a sigh and stick his chin out to be walloped. A fellow's got no business to have red hair if he isn't going to live up to it. And yet," said Ukridge, wistfully, "I've seen that man - it was in a dance-hall at Naples - I've seen him take on at least eleven Italians simultaneously. But then, one of them stuck a knife about three inches into his leg. He seems to need something like that to give him ambition."

    "I don't see how you are going to arrange to have him knifed just before each fight."

(from "The Debut of Battling Billson," by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Monday, March 11, 2024

Why worry about technicalities?

     "Gentlemen," said Ukridge, "It would seem that the company requires more capital. Hw about it, old horses? Let's get together in a frank, business-like cards-on-the-table spirit, and see what can be done. I can raise ten bob."

    "What!" cried the entire assembled company, amazed. "How?"

    "I'll pawn a banjo."

    "You haven't got a banjo."

    "No, but George Tupper has, and I know where he keeps it."

(from "Ukridge's Accident Syndicate," by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Sunday, March 10, 2024

Too confounded healthy

 All over the inhabited globe, so the well-informed sheet gave one to understand, every kind of accident was happening every day to practically everybody in existence except Teddy Weeks. Farmers in Minnesota were getting mixed up with reaping machines, peasants in India were being bisected by crocodiles; iron girders from skyscrapers were falling hourly on the heads of citizens in every town from Philadelphia to San Fransisco; and the only people who were not down with ptomaine poisoning were those who had walked over cliffs, driven motors into walls, tripped over manholes, or assumed on too slight evidence that the gun was not loaded. In a crippled world, it seemed, Teddy Weeks walked alone, whole and glowing with health. It was one of those grim, ironical, hopeless, grey, despairful situations which the Russian novelists love to write about.

(from "Ukridge's Accident Syndicate," by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Tuesday, March 05, 2024

Not the brightest bulb

 If the leading incidents of S. F. Ukridge's disreputable career are to be given to the public - and not, as some might suggest, decently hushed up - I suppose I am the man to write them. Ukridge and I have been intimate since the days of school. Together we sported on the green, and when he was expelled no one missed him more than I. An unfortunate business, this expulsion. Ukridge's generous spirit, ever ill-attuned to school rules, caused him eventually to break the solemnest of them all by sneaking out at night to try his skill at the coco-nut-shies of the local village fair; and his foresight in putting on scarlet whiskers and a false nose for the expedition was completely neutralized by the fact that he absent-mindedly wore his school cap throughout the entire proceedings. He left the next morning, regretted by all.

(from "Ukridge's Dog College," by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Saturday, February 24, 2024

Admiral of the Navy

 You may not ever have heard of it, but there was once a rank of Admiral of the Navy, which was given to Admiral George Dewey after his victory at the Battle of Manila Bay in 1898. However, there was never a insignia created that had more stars than the standard one for Admiral. By 1955, the Navy had established that the rank was honorary, and when the rank of Fleet Admiral was created (with five stars), it was specified in a memo that "the rank of Fleet Admiral of the United States Navy shall be considered the senior most rank of the United States Navy."