How the p-list has warped me.

[Brian D. McCary]

This weekend, I got to see the local production of Tom Stoppard's "Arcadia".
In the middle of the second act, we find a nineteenth century literary
engaged in a bitterly offensive defense of his theory about the events
surrounding Lord Byron's first flight from England.  After his systematic
evisceration of everyone on stage and a few people off stage, most of
the cast was standing around with a stunned look on thier faces, while the
lead turned to the girl next to her (who, up to that point, had had
a definite crush on the Byron expert) and comforted her: "There, there
dear, don't worry.  It's called rhetoric; they learn it at the 
university.  It's not about what's right, that's what they have philosophy
for."  (Close, but paraphrased, rendered much more artfully by that
other master author Tom)  

No one around me found this as funny as I did.  Thanks, foax, for adding
so much humour to my life.

Brian McCary