Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut [110]
Add the year of Hitler’s birth. There! Everything is nice and positive again. If you have done everything right so far, you should have the year in which Napoleon was banished to Elba and the metronome was invented, neither event, however, discussed in this book.
Add the gestation period of an opossum expressed in days. That isn’t in the book, either, so I make you a gift of it. The number is 12. That will bring you to the year in which Thomas Jefferson, the former slave owner, died and James Fenimore Cooper published The Last of the Mohicans, which wasn’t set in this valley but might as well have been.
Divide by the square root of 4.
Subtract 100 times 9.
Add the greatest number of children known to have come from the womb of just 1 woman, and there you are, by gosh.
JUST BECAUSE SOME of us can read and write and do a little math, that doesn’t mean we deserve to conquer the Universe.
THE END