In pre WW-II Britain and across the Commonwealth, ads for “Bennett College, in Sheffield” were a mainstay of the back pages of magazines, and sounded a clarion call among the ads for trusses, cures for bad breath, baldness and hæmorrhoids.

Men, aged 16-45! You need help!

The headline was styled after recruitment posters of the time, and flattered the reader into thinking that they might have hidden talents. Let Bennett College be your stepping-stone to success! Bennett College was a trade correspondence school, similar to ICS, or any of a number of firms like it. It gave you a certificate in anything from Marine Architecture to Modern Farm Management, to Short Story Writing, that you could give to a potential new boss and show that, even if you hadn’t learned from your folks, you at least had

I had a copy of "Mason & Dixon", by Thomas Pynchon, for over 10 years. I got it for free or very cheap from a library surplus sale, and I carried the hardback book around with me, from place to place, for years. I had it in a box of "must reads" in storage. And after a decade, I finally decided to dive in. The only other book by Pynchon I had read, 20 years previously, was "The Crying of Lot 49". Well, the only book I read successfully, I had tried Gravity's Rainbow but never finished it.

A non-literal Discordian perspective on the logic of cause and effect, emphasizing absurdity and paradox over indisputable fact.

"I mean, it’s Newton, right? What could go wrong? Plenty."
-- fool4luv

This law states: If something does not happen then the exact opposite will happen, only in exactly the opposite manner from that in which it did not happen. Or