Is there anything more annoying than people who put random quotes in their e-mails (typically as e-mail ‘sigs’) that they think are really fucking clever, and they imagine all their recipients will nod knowingly as they read them, blurting audibly, “that’s so true” – and we’re so impressed by your having included it at the end of your “LOL, this is really funny, make sure you have your sound turned on” e-mail that you forwarded to me and 200 of your closest friends without even bothering to put us in the BCC field)? Yes, of course there is. But I’ll bitch about ’em anyway.

One that was passed along recently as, presumably, “inspirational” was a quote attributed to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (so right off the bat you know it’s gonna be bullshit):

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.

Yeah. Good luck gettin’ off the island with that boat, Professor. Out here in the real world, you want a boat, you better frickin’ get some people that know how to design one, and then some goddamn worker bees that can actually get the material and put the goddamn thing together.

If you’re not familiar with Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (and, really, why would you be?), you might figure that he’s a sailor or ship builder or something. No, he’s a dead French author and aviator, known for writing about, well, flying. And he flew reconnaissance flights for the French Air Force in WWII (the big one), during one of which, his plane disappeared in the Mediterranean. They even put him on a 50 franc note (which would be worth about ten bucks, if they still had francs).

As far as what he knew about ships, I don’t really know. But I think it’s telling that he came to live in (and love) the desert. Probably after he couldn’t find a fucking boat.

Anyhow, Antoine failed to support Charles de Gaulle’s free french forces at first, which led Chuck to intimate that Antoine was in cahoots with the Nazis, which led to Antoine getting really depressed and hitting the bottle a lot, and there’s speculation that he committed suicide by ditching his plane into the Mediterranean Sea.

Whether it was suicide, an accident, or he got shot down, it’s probably safe to assume that, as he hit the water, he was filled with a sense of the endless immensity of the sea.

Too bad he didn’t have a fucking boat.