A.Word.A.Day -- AWADmail Issue 830

Q: What’s George Bernard Shaw’s least favorite TV network?
A: Fox News (“Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.”)
-Carlina F. Della Pietra, Washington, Connecticut (cfdellapietra gmail.com)

Q: What’s Nietzsche’s favorite way of getting around?
A: By Uber. (He’s an Uber-man)
-Barbara Brown, Anchorage, Alaska (holdthisthought gmail.com)

Q: What was George Orwell’s worst subject in school?
A: Math. (“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”)
-Gary Coggins, Dallas, Texas (garyc isi85.com)

Q. What was Dorothy Parker’s favorite pastime?
A. Horticulture (“You can lead a whore to culture but you can’t make her think.”)
-Suzan Hamer, Nunspeet, Netherlands (suzanhamer hotmail.com)

Q: What was Harper Lee’s favorite cocktail?
A: A Tequila Mockingbird. (To Kill a Mockingbird)
-Brenda J. Gannam, Brooklyn, New York (gannamconsulting earthlink.net)

Q: What was Herman Melville’s favorite pastime?
A: Picking up women. (“Call me (Ishmael).”)
-Abhishek Veeraraghavan, Mysore, India (vamosabv gmail.com)

Q: What’s F. Scott Fitzgerald’s favorite sport?
A: Sculling. (“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”)
-Doug Hough, Baltimore, Maryland (douglas.hough jhu.edu) and
-Tim Schuster, Albuquerque, New Mexico (wisetim12000 yahoo.com)

Q. What was Shakespeare’s favourite household chore?
A. Laundry. (“Out, damned spot! Out, I say.”)
-Ted Schipper, Toronto, Canada (drtedsbraces gmail.com)

Q: What’s J.R.R. Tolkien’s favorite pastime?
A: Geochaching. (“Not all those who wander are lost”)
-Pam Oren, Catawissa, Pennsylvania (moonlightbooks gmail.com)

Q: What was Nietzsche’s favorite spirit?
A: Human. (“Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits”)
-Eda Ata, Ankara, Turkey (ataeda gmail.com)

Q: What is Charles Dickens’s favorite spice?
A: The best of thymes. (“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”)
-Alex Hoekstra, Boston, Massachusetts (alex.gmu gmail.com)

Q: What’s Charles Dickens’s favorite profession?
A: Economist. (“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”)
-Brian Zack, Princeton, New Jersey (bgzack gmail.com)

Q: How did Voltaire like his apples?
A: Candied. (Candide)
-Alex Hoekstra, Boston, Massachusetts (alex.gmu gmail.com)

Q: What’s Abraham Lincoln’s favourite guilty snack?
A: Four Skors. (“Four score and seven”)
-Brenden Kunimoto, Edmonton, Canada (brenden.kunimoto gmail.com)

Q: What was J.B.S. Haldane’s favorite band?
A: The Beatles. (“An inordinate fondness for beetles”)
-John Tate, Austin, Texas (johnatate sbcglobal.net)

Q: What was the first Roman Emperor’s favorite Rolling Stones song?
A: “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” (“I’d always thought the world was a wish-granting factory.” -Augustus)
-Ken Kirste, Sunnyvale, California (kkkirste sbcglobal.net)

Q. What is Voltaire’s favourite food?
A. Garden produce. (“Il faut cultiver son jardin” (you must cultivate your garden))
-Ian Hugo, Mollans, France (hugo.ian wanadoo.fr)

Q: What is Tom Wolfe’s favorite Thanksgiving food?
A: The right stuffing. (The Right Stuff)
-Betty Brown, Norman, Oklahoma (okbrowns flash.net)

Q: What is Hilary Mantel’s favourite hobby?
A: Gurning! (“Arrange your face” from Wolf Hall)
-Andy Carter, Trondheim, Netherlands (hornthesecond gmail.com)

Q: Which food does Anne Frank feel happiest about eating?
A: Leftovers. (“Think of all the beauty still left around you and feel happy.”)
-Nisha Kapoor, Luxembourg (nisha.kaps gmail.com)

Q: What’s Shakespeare’s favorite movie?
A: Avatar. (“O, wonder! / How many goodly creatures are there here! / How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, / That has such people in’t!”)
-Nancy Bonanno, Alexandria, Virginia (bonanno.nancy gmail.com)

Q: Who was Douglas Adams’s favorite baseball player?
A: Jackie Robinson (his uniform emblazoned with “the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything;” 42)
-Alexander O’Brien, West Lafayette, Indiana (alex.obrien271 gmail.com)

Q: What’s Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s favorite pastime?
A: Watching Stormy Daniels videos in the evening, with the lights turned off. (“It was a dark and stormy night.”)
-Dennis Newman, Chicago, Illinois (dnnewman gmail.com)

Q: What’s H.P. Lovecraft’s least favorite ice-cream flavour?
A: Vanilla (“No new horror can be more terrible than the daily torture of the commonplace.”)
-Catherine Arbour, Gloucester, Canada (catherinearbour3d gmail.com)

Q: What was H.G. Wells’s advice for one-night stands?
A: “It sounds plausible enough tonight, but wait until tomorrow. Wait for the common sense of the morning.”
-Joe Ware, San Antonio, Texas (patriot505 aol.com)

We are happy to have you here, Tish, but are you serious?

It’s common knowledge that Thomas Hobbes invented Nestea when he was in the middle of writing Leviathan. One afternoon he was online, researching human nature, and his Internet connection broke (these ISPs haven’t improved much in 400 years, have they?). He was solitary and poor and didn’t know what to do. So he went to his “kitchen” and started puttering about. What came out was Nestea and the rest, as they say, is history.

Important clarification: We don’t really know how he spelled the name of his now-famous drink as Nestle’s people snipped off pages of the Leviathan manuscript (if only there were a legitimate state to enforce the social contract back then!). It’s said that those pages with the original recipe are stored in a vault deep underground at the Nestle headquarters in Vevey, Switzerland and it requires two people with two separate keys to open it.

-Anu Garg