Rule 63

For every given male character, there is a female version of that character, and vice versa.

Truthful Portraiture

Sutherland: It’s art. It’s not personal.

Churchill: Well, you are a lost soul. A narcissist without direction or certainty.

Sutherland: Please, sir. Don’t overreact. Give it time. I showed those sketches to your wife throughout. She remarked on how accurate they were.

Churchill: That is the whole point. It is not a reasonably truthful image of me!

Sutherland: It is, sir.

Churchill: It is not! It is cruel!

Sutherland: Age is cruel! If you see decay, it’s because there’s decay. If you see frailty, it’s because there’s frailty. I can’t be blamed for what is. And I refuse to hide and disguise what I see. If you’re engaged in a fight with something, then it’s not with me. It’s with your own blindness.

– The Crown (2016) Season 1, Episode 9; “Assassins” [No. 9]

On Freedom from Pain

Chorus of Theban Elders: ‘Therefore, while our eyes wait to see the destined final day, we must call no one happy who is of mortal race, until he hath crossed life’s border, free from pain.’

– Sophocles, Oedipus Rex

---

Taken from Oedipus the King, lines 1529-1530; as published in The Tragedies of Sophocles (1917), translated by Richard Claverhouse Jebb.

20/x mmxvi

In 2002, Norwegian footballer Kenneth Kristensen signed for third-division team Floey and was paid his weight in shrimps.

The modern Spanish Navy is still called the Armada.

There are more Catholics in Scotland than in Northern Ireland.

A 2005 United States medical research project showed that 20% of interviewees admitted to taking Derbisol, a drug that does not exist.

The director and producer of the 1971 film Fiddler on the Roof was called Norman Jewison.

See other: Quite Interesting Facts

Tradition Tradition

Perchik: You have wit, even some intelligence!

Hodel: Thank you.

Perchik: Perhaps, but what good is your brain? Without curiosity, it is a rusty tool! Good day, Hodel!

Hodel: We have an old custom here! A boy talks respectfully to a girl. But that is too traditional for an advanced thinker like you!

Perchik: Our traditions! Nothing must change! Everything is perfect as it is!

Hodel: We like our ways.

Perchik: Our ways are changing in other places. In the city, boys and girls can be affectionate without a matchmaker’s permission? They hold hands together. They even dance together.

– Jewison. N. (Producer, Director). (1971). Fiddler on the Roof [Motion Picture]. United States: The Mirisch Production Company

Shakespeare on Astrology

Edmund ‘This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune,—often the surfeit of our own behaviour,—we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars; as if we were villains on necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical pre-dominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on: an admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star! My father compounded with my mother under the dragon’s tail, and my nativity was under ursa major; so that it follows I am rough and lecherous.—Tut!’

– Reed International Books Ltd. 1992. The Illustrated Stratford Shakespeare London, Great Britain: Chancellor Press (1996) p. 836

30/ix mmxvi

Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor of radio, was the great-grandson of the inventor of Jameson’s Irish whiskey.

The German Staubsauger and Dutch Stofzuiger, both literally translate as ‘dust-sucker’ to mean vacuum cleaner.

Victorian pantomimes starting at 7pm often did not finish until midnight.

In 2014, a pair of underpants donated by the mayor of Brussels was stolen from the Brussels Underpants Museum.

Between 1939 and 1945, World War II claimed an average of 1256 lives per hour; between 1934 and 1945, Holocaust claimed an average of 169 lives per hour.

See other: Quite Interesting Facts

On The Erased Idea

“The painting is finished when it has erased the idea.”

– Georges Braque