Small Gods

1

Or, if you are a believer in Omnianism, the Pole.

2

Which were of the one-size-fits-all, tighten-the-screws variety.

3

Or would have done. If he had been there. But he wasn’t. So he couldn’t.

4

It takes forty men with their feet on the ground to keep one man with his head in the air.

5

Words are the litmus paper of the mind. If you find yourself in the power of someone who will use the word ‘commence’ in cold blood, go somewhere else very quickly. But if they say ‘Enter’, don’t stop to pack.

6

Provided that he wasn’t poor, foreign nor disqualified by reason of being mad, frivolous or a woman.

7

i. e., before the inhabitants had let goats graze everywhere. Nothing makes a desert like a goat.

8

But not enough.

9

Like many early thinkers, the Ephebians believed that thoughts originated in the heart and that the brain was merely a device to cool the blood.^{*}

* In our world this idea was originally proposed by none other than Aristotle. Aristotle got almost everything to do with natural history dead wrong, although in his defense it must be said that it was not his fault that later cultures took his works to be Absolute Truth instead of trying to experiment and find things out for themselves.

10

Fasta Benj’s people had no word for war, since they had no one to fight and life was quite tough enough as it was. P’Tang-P’Tang’s words had arrived as: ‘remember when Pacha Moj hit his uncle with big rock? Like that, only more worse.’