Out for a duck

This should not look like a sexy duck to you.

I've been trying to learn a new thing every day, and today I was worried that, stuck at my desk with nobody but a database to talk to, I'd learn nothing. Luckily, I had a 9pm haircut scheduled, and the garrulous barber cutting my hair told me that Salvador Dali had sex with ducks.

Out for a duck

In times of gloom like yesterday, I reach for my copy of Brewster's Rogues, Villains and Eccentrics, a magnificent dictionary of bounders and lunatics, and seek succour amongst tales of men such as George Robert Fitzgerald, a man who trying to do "everything possible to make his father's life a misery ... [on one occasion] manacled him all day to a pet bear".  The dictionary is aided by the most heroic act of cross-referencing I've ever seen; you can happily carom through its pages all day, choosing between (on a single page chosen at random) butlers, indecently assaulted, butlers, levitating and butlers, murderous.  Its one flaw (or perhaps a virtue) is that all this cross-referencing makes for a big book; my hardback weighs three pounds, 2 ounces and thus it may not be very comfortable as bedtime reading.