Edgar Allan Poe said his favorite word in the English language was cellar door. // strike that (maybe) -- it appears J.R.R. Tolkien's favorite word in the... was (also) cellar door. Maybe both authors loved the word, but this seems rather strange. oh well... / okay now i'm starting to think there is some sort of cellar-door-favorite-word conspiracy goin' on, see this link here. {special thanks to Sune Mølgaard for the info} T. was giving his orders with decision: it was as though this plan had been with him all his life, pondered through the seasons, now in his fifteenth year crystallized with the pain of puberty.... [read Graham Greene's The Destructors] the shot above (the flooding of the school) was inspired by the work below by artist Scott Mutter A lyric I wrote isn't meant to define this image but to speak to it and at the same time to introduce a truism of human nature: I'm a pilgrim on the edge, on the edge of my perception We are travelers at the edge, we are always at the edge of our perceptions. --Scott Mutter, Surrational Images But we also need the possibility of cataclysm, so that, when situations seem hopeless, and beyond the power of any natural force to amend, we may still anticipate salvation from a messiah, a conquering hero, a deus ex machina, or some other agent with power to fracture the unsupportable and institute the unobtainable. --Stephen Jay Gould, Questioning the Millennium: A Rationalist's Guide to a Precisely Arbitrary Countdown deux ex machina - "god from the machine" / definitions from this site 1. In Greek and Roman drama, a god lowered by stage machinery to resolve a plot or extricate the protagonist from a difficult situation. 2. An unexpected, artificial, or improbable character, device, or event introduced suddenly in a work of fiction or drama to resolve a situation or untangle a plot. 3. A person or event that provides a sudden and unexpected solution to a difficulty.