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unearths some literary gems.
From Banner Deadlines, by Joseph Commings:
***He had a voice like a French flute.[I liked the sound of this, but I didn't know what a French flute was. Looking it up, I read that a French (open-hole) flute doesn't sound inherently different from a non-French flute--except in a de facto way, insofar as French flutes tend to be higher-quality flutes.]***Professor Maybrick, the phony spiritualist...was finally caught with his ectoplasm down.[later]"Someone took off his clothes in here," said Konstanz."For what reason? To walk around in these drafts in his ectoplasm?"***She was knitting an afghan and she was so quiet you could hear a stitch drop.***"Duck pin bowling is beyond me."***"The architect has designs on me."***"Yesterday she lured me into her apartment...Too late I realized I'd stepped into a nest of cobras.""She had you meet her relatives?" said Banner, highly amused."No, I mean real cobras."***"I've always wanted to meet you, Senor.""Where'd you hear of me before?" asked Banner suspiciously."This is the first time."***"What the mischief became of Hazzard?"[Ha! "What the mischief" was new to me. But not an original, as "What the mischief are you doing?" has various Google results.]***It reported the murder on X Street with as much passion as there is in a recipe for an upside-down cake.[Upside-down cakes are funny, of course. Which is funnier: Upside-down cake or Baked Alaska?]***"I'm not hanging around to pose for animal crackers."***Bonuses:"uneaten canoes of orange" (i.e., unpeeled orange wedges)"a walking gingersnap""wraprascal" (I'd never heard of this name for a kind of overcoat)Mr. Kermit Gosling[Special bonus: One of the stories in this collection is called "Stairway to Nowhere." Nice to see that the author arrived early (decades ago) to play along with the "doors to nowhere" theme.]
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