The culprit sent himself a regular letter and the culprit had hidden the stamp worth millions under the regular stamp, which is how it passed visual inspection.
They are from the former British colony of Mauritius. Not British per se… 
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Don´t look at me like that, the only colony germany ever had was a sausage factory in Tanganyika.
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The Oktoberfest is everywhere!
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Some fun facts about Mauritius
- Home to some of the world’s rarest plants and animals
- Ranked 2nd in an air quality index by WHO
- Has only two seasons - summer and winter
- Only known home of the dodo (now extinct)
- Strong Indian food influence
- The major music genre is Sega (no relation)
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And we can’t even blame the British.
That reminds me, I quit on either V or Gravity’s Rainbow during an enormous interlude about dodo hunting. (I did finish V; I have yet to pick Gravity’s Rainbow back up.)
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And what is it at the moment, then?
I´d relax to Green Hill Zone on the beach any day!
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Winter, just.
Me too 
then do some water aerobics to the scrap brain zone.
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@PiecesOfKate I looked it up. It’s in Gravity’s Rainbow. Here’s a partial extract.
However much of Gravity’s Rainbow I ended up reading before I “temporarily” took a break from it, felt like a rehash of V.
I haven’t read either of those. Why did you quit during that bit? Was it just a bit of a weird tangent?
Nah, I was getting somewhat tired of the book anyway and that was the drop that overflowed the bucket (the straw that broke the camel’s back). It’s probably mostly that I started reading it more or less directly after V. Pynchon is brilliant in strides, but he can be… gosh, what’s the word… let’s say exasperating. He doesn’t have the flair of a Tom Robbins, a Willem Frederik Hermans or a Laurent Binet.
I read V from 2015-10-05 to 2015-10-18. I apparently didn’t record when I started Gravity’s Rainbow, which is odd. I read a number of Spirous and The eyes of the dragon before reading the first fifth or so of Gravity’s Rainbow. I think I started The stand : a novel after I gave up on Gravity’s Rainbow.
It also reminded me a bit of La Vie: mode d’emploi. I have yet to finish that one, which is odd perhaps because I actually reached the part of that book where it all comes together, but it had to go back to the library and I didn’t really feel like taking it out again.
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There is a chapter in Don Quixote that has a title that goes something like:
“an anecdote that has absolutly nothing to do with our main story but will be told in this place now regardless” or something to that effect (and it is in fact true!) I found that really funny.
Heh, nice.
It’s not entirely like that. Iirc the story is told by the descendant of the dodo hunter, and the story itself felt as some kind of heavy-handed trying too hard to be dark and sinister war/Holocaust allegory type thing.
The problem is more that it was just… boring.
That sounds familiar… I think I’ve heard that as a reference in something else.
In Max Havelaar, Multatuli masterfully parodies certain 19th century narrative practices, but unfortunately some 160+ years later much of it feels as annoying as a real obnoxious moralistic 19th century narrator.
A suprisingly exhaustive list of 19th century writers I dislike:
- George Elliot
- Thomas Hardy
An extremely inexhaustiveness list of 19th century writers I like:
- Henry freaking James. The man. My homeboy.
- Heinrich Heine
- Conrad Busken Huet (no diss for Multatuli, just giving some love to someone who’s slightly more on the down-low)
- Mary Shelley
- Jane Austen
It really surprises me that I don´t seem to have so far.
If only I could find the exact wording. Looking in that 1100+ pages book is difficult enough (and there is no index).
One of our greatest!
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I was literally just flipping through my copy but couldn´t find it (though many chapter titles are just hilarious) I hope I´m not experiencing a “Mandela” Effect. Maybe it wasn´t a chapter title but a comment or something.
Like the one I just found where the “translator” explains that Sancho talks far to smart for his character in the following chapter but that he will still tell that part of the story for the sake of completeness.