Michelangelo's skill, especially in sculpture, was greatly admired in his own time. It is said that when still a young apprentice, he had made a pastiche of a Roman statue (Il Putto Dormiente, the sleeping child) of such beauty and perfection, that it was later sold in Rome as an ancient Roman original.

The massive corruption which Keith Richburg encountered while working as a correspondent for The Washington Post in Nairobi, Kekya was encapsulated by the following ubiquitous joke:

An African and an Asian meet at an Ivy League school as undergrads and become friends. Both return to their countries and eventually become finance ministers.

One day, the African man goes to visit the Asian man at his home. He is amazed to see his friend's mansion, three Mercedes, swimming pool and small staff. "How did you do this?" the African asks. "See that highway over there?" the Asian replies, pointing to a raised, gleaming new toll road in the distance. He smiles. "10 percent." The African takes the lesson to heart and returns home...

A few years later, the Asian man comes to visit his African friend - and is dumbfounded by his palatial mansion, five swimming pools, fleet of Mercedes, yacht and army of servants. "How did you do this?" the Asian asks. "See that highway over there?" the African replies. His Asian friend looks in the distance and sees only fields, and cows grazing. "I don't see any road there."

The African smiles proudly: "100 percent."

Robert Todd Lincoln was home from Harvard on a visit at the time that his father was assassinated. After the shooting he sat by his father's bedside until he died. He had no political ambitions, preferring the life of a lawyer. But President James Garfield called him away from his practice to occupy the post of secretary of war in 1881. He reluctantly accepted. Later that same year Robert Lincoln arrived at the Washington railroad station just in time to see Garfield shot. Twenty years later, as president of the Pullman Company, Robert Lincoln was invited to bring his family to meet President William McKinley. As they arrived they heard the news: the president had just been shot. Robert Lincoln observed, "There is a certain fatality about presidential functions when I am present."

Noted violinist Jascha Heifetz, who often played with pianist Arthur Rubinstein and cellist Gregor Piatigorsky, often complained that Rubinstein always got top billing. "If the Almighty himself played the violin," he once remarked, "the credits would still read 'Rubinstein, God, and Piatigorsky - in that order."

Avian Water?

One day Maurice Barrymore took his children to the zoo. Young John - fascinated by the large pelicans and cormorants in a filthy aviary - begged his father to tell him about the exhibit's exotic creatures. "What," he asked at one point, "kind of birds are they?" "Presumably," the elder Barrymore replied, peering into a cage full of bird droppings, "they are birds of passage..."