Today's head-scratching quotations (and, yes, I made the adjective mistake on purpose, so don't start crowing):

1. From Max Hastings, "War by Fops and Fools," in the New York Review of Books (9 June 2011): "I must renew my oft-made plea that clever academics concede a higher priority to accessibility and not consider it essential to their intellectual reputations that their prose plow a flight path through cumulonimbus clouds."

2. From Solon J. Buck and Elizabeth Hawthorn Buck, The Planting of Civilization in Western Pennsylvania (U. of Pittsburgh Press, 1939): "The Scotch-Irish were not the patient, painstaking people that the Germans were. They did not keep up their farms so well, partly because they were naturally slipshod."

Now, because it looks likely to be sunny, I have to go clean the barn. Otherwise, you will think that I am naturally slipshod.