If you choose to represent the various parts in life by holes upon
a table, of different shapes,--some circular, some triangular, some
square, some oblong,--and the persons acting these parts by bits of
wood of similar shapes, we shall generally find that the triangular
person has got into the square hole, the oblong into the triangular,
and a square person has squeezed himself into the round hole. The
officer and the office, the doer and the thing done, seldom fit so
exactly that we can say they were almost made for each other.
-- Sydney Smith (1769-1845)
-- Sketches of Moral Philosophy
The beach was a beach we shall not name, because his private house
was there but it was a small sandy stretch somewhere along the hundreds
of miles of coastline that runs west from Los Angeles, which is
described in the new edition of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"
in one entry as "junky, wunky, lunky, stunky, and what's that other
word, and all kinds of bad stuff, woo," and in another, written only
hours later as "being like several thousand square miles of American
Express junk mail, but without the same sense of moral depth....
