For C.J.
In the mix and match of your wild claims and outlandish ideas this evening, I have been able to verify that only two of these, by some strange happenstance, turned out to be correct (zeen & armpit-AI). While usually a person would earn respect for stubbornly refusing to abandon common sense and receive a substantial financial reward as well (e.g., if a wager had been placed), I know you will understand and appreciate that, since four score and eighteen – two short of absolute preposterosity or as Jakob von Gunten would say von unten, kugelrunde Null -- of your other ideas provcd to be duds or little more than free-floating wind eggs, your two correct assertions have officially been determined to be the product of improbable probability (not dissimilar to a blindfolded zen master shooting 100 arrows at a target the size of a dime 60 yards away) and that whatever credit you might have received has been transferred to me, along with a gratifying financial reward for conspicuous virtue, due to my gracious and humble admission that, in these two lonely and exceptionally forgettable instances, you were by a hook or ticking croc correct and I was . Indeed, I have erased or rather sacrificed my memory of the plethora of claims you made this evening so that nobody, including myself, will ever be able to claim in the court of public opinion that any of these came out of deep left field. Even now, a strange fog hangs over me, and I can no more make out a number or a cart before a horse than a squirrel could find a nut buried in the Sahara. Nor could I presently swear on a 7-volume stack of In Search of Lost Time to remember when or where any of this happened. No matter! They are forging at this very moment a shapely Scutum Honoris* for my sacrifice, to be awarded no more than once a generation to an otherwise pleasing persona non grata who in their era found a way to capitalize on TOTA IMBECILITAS. C.J., I owe it all to you.
*"Shield of Honor," handsomely engraved with the words: Si id dixi, est ipso facto verum.** On the obverse is an image of a stately shack that was my locus originis, Domus Veritatis.***
**"If I said it, it is by that very fact true."
***Domus Veritatis is understandably often mistranslated as 'House of Ill Repute'
Post Scriptum: I would modestly claim that never has so much been made of so little. There is actually a Latin name for this noble effort, multum a parvo or in this present instance, plurimum a minimo, or optionally, maximum a penihilo ("a very great deal from almost nothing").
Addendum: Perhaps all this nonsense may yet serve as a compelling argument for learning lingua Latina, the most Romantic of all languages.