Chips Off the Old Benchley

by Robert Benchley

I must have fainted at this point, for I found myself in bed with an ugly gash on the back of my head. Perhaps I had even attempted suicide.

(I have just discovered that I have a £ sign on my typewriter!

Not only am I averse to interfering in a gang war, but I would rather not meet any gangsters socially. "Live and let live" is my motto—especially "live."

I want to make a few little suggestions as to how they can carry on their business more efficiently—and then I want to run like hell.

Wearing apparel, jewelry, silks, laces, cottons (woven or in the bale), living equipment, books, gifts, raw hides, marble slabs, toothpaste, sugarcane, music (sheet or hummed), garters (except black with a narrow white band), sunburn acquired abroad, moustaches grown abroad (unless for personal use), cellulose, iron pyrites, medicine (unless poison), threshing-machines, saliva, over four lungfulls of salt air, and any other items that you might possibly want to bring in.

American civilization appears at its worst. One wonders, on glancing about at the specimens of manhood reclining on divans or breathing moistly under sheets, if perhaps it wouldn't be better for Nature to send down a cataclysmic earthquake and begin all over again with a new race.

You have probably asked yourself, as soon as you could talk, "Why is it that I seem to be unable to lift a piece of asparagus to my mouth without poking it in my eye, or button my clothes without catching my finger in the buttonhole and tearing the ligament to shreds?"