Napoleon

"While Waterloo was no doubt Napoleon’s most crushing defeat, it was not his most embarrassing.

In 1807, Napoleon was in high spirits having signed the Peace of Tilsit, a landmark treaty between France, Russia, and Prussia. To celebrate, he suggested that the Imperial Court should enjoy an afternoon’s rabbit shooting.

It was organised by his trusted chief of staff, Alexandre Berthier, who was so keen to impress Napoleon that he bought thousands of rabbits to ensure that the Imperial Court had plenty of game to keep them occupied.

The party arrived, the shoot commenced, and the game-keepers released the quarry. But disaster struck. Berthier had bought tame, not wild, rabbits, who mistakenly thought they were about to be fed rather than killed.

Rather than fleeing for their life, they spotted a tiny little man in a big hat and mistook him for their keeper bringing them food. The hungry rabbits stormed towards Napoleon at their top speed of 35 mph.

The shooting party – now in shambolic disarray – could do nothing to stop them. Napoleon was left with no other option but to run, beating the starving animals off with his bare hands. But the rabbits did not relent and drove the Emperor back to his carriage while his underlings thrashed vainly at them with horsewhips.

According to contemporary accounts of the fiasco, the Emperor of France sped off in his coach, comprehensively beaten and covered in shame."

(Source: The Book of General Ignorance, by John Lloyd & John Mitchinson)

F. Try Harder.

This is from a little bookie of test solutions that had to be (solutions, not the bookie), regrettably, awarded with an F. These F students may be low on accuracy, but they are high on creativity and humour (at times, admittedly, unintentionally).
F in Exams: The Very Best Totally Wrong Test Answers, by Richard Benson.

Some of my favourites:

Q: What was Sir Isaac Newton famous for?
A: He invented gravity.
(The answer comes even with a hand-drawn apple nicely fallen to the floor, for the first time ever.)

Q: Define enzyme.
A: Superhero of the cell.
Q: Now coenzyme.
A: Enzyme's sidekick.
(No drawings, regrettably.)

There are many other F tests on the web (like the two below).





A-tests may earn better, but them F-tests... they break a leg... They make it to the stage. I only wish I had kept some of mine...

Mrs Coulter's dæmon

In Northern Lights, Philip Pullman uncovers a parallel world where each person is born as a pairing of a human and a dæmon. Each will be given a unique name. A dæmon takes the shape of an animal of the opposite gender from that of its companion human. The human is not able to choose the shape of his or her dæmon. In childhood, a dæmon can shapeshift at will or at the companion human’s bidding. Then, in puberty, the dæmon loses the power to shapeshift and settles in the shape that best reflects the personality of the human.
The dæmon and the human are one being. A dæmon fades out when the human dies. The human and the dæmon suffer excruciating pain whenever they are not within each other’s grasp. A dæmon is such an intimate part of the being that any form of touching someone else’s dæmon is an absolute no-no. This law may exceptionally be breached in intimacies between lovers. Friendships and trust between humans are unthinkable without corresponding friendships and trust between their dæmons. Interpreting a human’s reaction cannot be correct without investigating into the simultaneous reaction of the dæmon, and the two will more often than not be divergent.
This then leads us to the mesmerizing character of Mrs Marisa Coulter.
An extraordinarily beautiful woman with fair skin, light eyes and sleek black hair, Marisa Coulter enchants everybody with her disarming personality. She is charismatic, brilliant, charming to no end.
All that being said, the dæmon of Mrs Coulter does not take the shape of a unicorn. Ozymandias - mirroring the charisma and the sharp curious mind of Mrs Coulter – is a monkey with beautiful and shining golden fur. One may flirt with the coy Mrs Coulter. One will, however, avoid Ozymandias’s malevolent black eyes and horny black fingers. When bored, Ozymandias tears wings off live bats to pass the time.
The symbiosis between the two - for they form a single being - is one of black, black magic.