a good guide to differentiating between a raven and a crow: crows are lovable ragamuffins intent on making mischief while ravens are unsettling dinosaurs
there’s a reason Poe wrote his poem about a raven and not a crow. The crow would not just perch (on a pallid bust of Pallas) above the chamber door and stare menacingly while uttering a few pithy remarks, the crow would barge in with ten of his friends and they would start pulling apart the furnishings looking for food and making off with any objects they found interesting, like fuck nevermore, this dude has BREAD in here.
Although barely out of adolescence…[Shelley] was, in 1813, an ardent radical and anti-monarchist. Physically, he was rather odd, tall and slim to the point of limpness, with a high-pitched effete voice; but what he lacked in physical bulk he more than made up for in charismatic intensity. Among the earliest witnesses to this intensity were his school fellows at Eton, where he was sent by his landowning father when he was twelve. Initially he was bullied for his refusal to ‘fag’ for older boys, but the bullies soon discovered that in spite of his feeble frame, Shelley was not a boy to succumb quietly to taunts. On the contrary, he could be terrifying when roused, and was quite capable of reciprocal acts of violence. He stabbed one tormentor’s hand with a fork, and others remembered him as an almost unearthly creature, with flashing eyes, wild hair, and deathly white cheeks.
An Englishman is being shown around a Scottish hospital.
At the end of his visit, he is shown into a ward with a number of patients who show no obvious signs of injury. He goes to examine the first man he sees, and the man proclaims:
Fair fa’ yer honest, sonsie face,
Great chieftain e’ the puddin’ race!
Aboon them a’ ye tak your place,
painch tripe or thairm:
Weel are ye wordy o’ a grace
as lang’s my arm.
The Englishman, somewhat taken aback, goes to the next patient, and immediately the patient launches into:
Some hae meat, and canna eat,
And some wad eat that want it,
But we hae meat and we can eat,
And sae the Lord be thankit.
This continues with the next patient:
Wee sleekit cow’rin tim’rous beastie,
O what a panic’s in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty,
wi’ bickering brattle.
I wad be laith to run and chase thee,
wi’ murdering prattle!“
“Well,” the Englishman mutters to his Scottish colleague, “I see you saved the psychiatric ward for the last.”
“Nay, nay,” the Scottish doctor corrected him, “this is the Serious Burns unit.”
A Pretty Taste for Paradox 