She thinks petting me is an honor. This is an unexpected position to take for a goddess of slaughter, but I applaud her defiance of convention.

You are telling me that your lawyer is a bloodsucking vampire?

If I waved that in front of a museum curator, he'd promptly lose control of his salivary glands.

Yer a good lad, Atticus, mowin’ me lawn and killin’ what Brits come around.

There are many perks to living for twenty-one centuries, and foremost among them is bearing witness to the rare birth of genius. It invariably goes like this: Someone shrugs off the weight of his cultural traditions, ignores the baleful stares of authority, and does something his countrymen think to be completely batshit insane. Of those, Galileo was my personal favorite. Van Gogh comes in second, but he really was batshit insane.

Anyone who's ever tried to tangle with a teddy bear cholla knows there's a whole lot more bear than teddy to it.

For me, the times I always regret are missed opportunities to say farewell to good people, to wish them long life and say to them in all sincerity, "You build and do not destroy; you sow goodwill and reap it; smiles bloom in the wake of your passing, and I will keep your kindness in trust and share it as occasion arises, so that your life will be a quenching draught of calm in a land of drought and stress." Too often I never get to say that when it should be said. Instead, I leave them with the equivalent of a "Later, dude!" only to discover there would be no later for us.