Testing… testing…
For over 70 years, Consumer Reports has been subjecting its staff and volunteers to the vagaries of product quality so that we don’t have to…
Click here for a gallery of photos that document their vigilance… and a slew of downright strange products.
As we reconsider our options, we might smile slyly at the memory that it was on this date in 1842 that Ambrose Bierce was born. The author of The Devil’s Dictionary (and much else) rode to Mexico in 1913 to join Pancho Villa’s army; his disappearance there (the subject of Carlos Fuentes’ The Old Gringo) remains a mystery.
From The Devil’s Dictionary:
ACCORD: Harmony.
ACCORDION: An instrument in harmony with the sentiments of an assassin.
Ambrose Bierce; ibidADMIRATION: Our polite recognition of another’s resemblance to ourselves.
BORE: A person who talks when you wish him to listen.
CYNIC: A blackguard whose faulty vision causes him to see things as they are, not as they ought to be.
LAWYER: One skilled in circumvention of the law.
LAWSUIT: A machine which you go into as a pig and come out as a sausage.
LOVE: A temporary insanity curable by marriage or by removal of the patient from the influences under which he incurred the disorder.
MARRIAGE: The state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress and two slaves, making in all, two.
NON-COMBATANT: A dead Quaker.
PAINTING: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic.
Last words of Ambrose Bierce’s final written communication, a letter to his niece, Lora, in December, 1913:
Goodbye, if you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags please know that I think that a pretty good way to depart this life. It beats old age, disease, or falling down the cellar stairs. To be a Gringo in Mexico – ah, that is euthanasia!