(on soccer) Americans don't need a metaphor for war. We have war. - John Hodgman

What better emblem for our nation, after all, than a level playing field, shaped like an octagon, where people of diverse cultural ass-kicking traditions can meet as equals and immediately start kicking ass.

Truth may be stranger than fiction, goes the old saw, but it is never as strange as lies. (Or, for that matter, as true.)

So long as you refuse to ever acknowledge failure, success becomes eternal, a downward curve, always approaching failure, but never quite reaching it.