It’s no secret that Will Cuppy is one of my favorite historians. Along with Ambrose Bierce he has a certain way with words, as found in The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody. Here is how he sums up the pyramids:
The fact is that building a pyramid is fairly easy, aside from the lifting. You just pile up stones in receding layers, placing one layer carefully upon another, and pretty soon you have a pyramid. You can’t help it. In other words, it is not in the nature of a pyramid to fall down…
And then there’s the origins of America
Captain Smith reached Virginia on April 26, 1607, with a number of English gentlemen and some people who were willing to work. Then they all held a meeting to discuss ways and means of civilizing everybody. They made a great many speeches and accused each other of various crimes and misdemeanors and arrested some of themselves as an object lesson, and American history was started at last.
Perhaps my favorite quote of all by Cuppy is in regard to the Aztecs.
Montezuma had a weak and vacillating nature. He never knew what to do next.*
(*He had the courage of his convictions, but he had no convictions.)
I was reminded of this style of humor recently when I read the slightly less prosaic but still curmudgeonly lines of thinking in a blog post from James Iry, an abridged history of programming languages:
1964 – John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz create BASIC, an unstructured programming language for non-computer scientists.
1965 – Kemeny and Kurtz go to 1964.
[…]
1972 – Dennis Ritchie invents a powerful gun that shoots both forward and backward simultaneously. Not satisfied with the number of deaths and permanent maimings from that invention he invents C and Unix.
