So, Willy, let you and me be wipers / Of scores out with all men — especially pipers!

If our spirit is high in Ch'ang-an (Sian), then Chiang will send the Young Marshal back to us.

Eight years ago or so, the alternative paper I was working for sent me out to review a couple of folk-noise-psych-indie-beardie-weirdie bands. I had a dreadful night. The bands were bad enough — “fumbling,” I scratched in my notebook, “infantile” — but what really did me in was the audience. Instead of baying for the blood of these lightweights, as in the Darwinian days of old, the gathered young people — behatted, bebearded, besmiling — obliged them with patters of validating applause.

The big righthander got out of that jam, coaxing Vernon Wells into a soft lineout to third and Adam Lind into a flyball out.