All right. Tell me what I'm looking at." From the improvised Rolling Stones T-shirt bag tied to my sash, Bob the Skull said, in his most caustic voice, "A giant pair of cartoon lips." I muttered a curse and fumbled with the shirt until one of the skull's glowing orange eye sockets was visible. A big goofy magic nerd!" Bob said.

Honest. It's almost always best to go with honest. It means you never have to worry about getting your story straight.

Life is easier when you can write off others as monsters, demon, as horrible threats that must be hated and feared the thing is you can't do that without becoming them, just a little.

Don't call me a dinosaur. It isn't fair to the dinosaurs. What did a dinosaur ever do to you?

Laughter is good for you. Nine out of ten stand-up comedians recommend laughter in the face of intense stupidity.

Dammit, Dresden, if you want to know about me, wait for the autobiography like everyone else.

I grunted. It's something I picked up over a fifteen-year career in law enforcement. Men have managed to create a complex and utterly impenetrable secret language consisting of monosyllabic sounds and partial words—and they are apparently too thick to realize it exists. Maybe they really are from Mars. I'd been able to learn a few Martian phrases over time, and one of the useful ones was the grunt that meant "I acknowledge that I've heard what you said; please continue.