What Passes for Science

WHAT PASSES FOR SCIENCE
the quotable Jonathan Caws-Elwitt

Ma Nature hates to vacuum.

The beak of a bird is both nose and mouth. This obviates the problem of where to put the noses during kissing.

If it weren’t for the invention of moveable type, the ever-popular “novel on wheels” would still be just a dream.

I will say this for the garden slug—it is too primitive to be able to poke you in the ribs when it wants your attention.

The megatherium is fairly charismatic for one so long extinct.

Consider the shin, a generally overlooked feature of the anatomy. All right, that’s enough.

Moss grows on the even-numbered side of the street and drives on the left.

The moray is the Cadillac of eels.

A dune is a pile of sand that has let the wind mess around with it, like some overzealous hair stylist.

Paleontologists have recently discovered that the Mesozoic Era was nothing but a plot device for textbook authors.

I think the Nile and the Amazon are really the same river. You’ll notice one never sees them together.

Grains such as oats and corn are grouped together by scientists because they occur in cylindrical containers.

The straight face and the flushed face are subsets of the poker face.

The white cliffs of Dover, notable as a large natural chalk deposit, were originally connected by a land bridge to the Great Blackboards of northern France.

Bermuda onions are so named because their baggy, larger-than-life shape was once thought to be reminiscent of a human being wearing Bermuda shorts.

If you can’t remember whether you’ve had your coffee yet, then you haven’t had your coffee yet.

In the Southern Hemisphere, autumn comes in March . . . and when the leaves turn, it’s counterclockwise.

People always want to have things both ways. Which, if you do the math, means that the total number of ways that people want things is exactly twice the number of actual existing ways in the entire universe.