As a teacher of fourth-graders in a public school, where corporal punishement was not allowed, she had years of violence stored up and was, truth be told, sort of enjoying letting it out on Kona, who she felt could have been the poster child for the failure of public education.

Ack! Parables. I hate parables.

Nothing evokes the prurient like puritanism.

Confucius is like the Torah, rules to follow. And Lao-Tzu is even more conservative, saying that if you do nothing you won't break any rules. You have to let tradition fall sometime, you have to take action, you have to eat bacon.

Canada is a myth people made up to entertain children, like the Tooth Fairy. There’s no such place.

No one knows why, but second only to eating the brains of the living, the dead love affordable prefab furniture.

In fact, he sorely hoped that it would happen, because otherwise, the world made no sense, there was no justice, and life was just a tangled ball of chaos.