Mother knows best.

Mona had great ambitions for her son. She wanted him to be an actuary or a dentist, but unfortunately Lionel was a prodigy of a different sort. From an early age he exhibited a gift for metaphysical thinking and an aptitude for moral philosophy.

"Can you butter metaphysics?" asked Mona with mother's tears in her mother's eyes.

At six he grappled with the great Scottish thinker David Hume's problem of induction, by eight he had read and mastered Kant, and by 16 he had penned a treatise attacking the intellectual promiscuity of Heidegger's Being and Time.

Unfortunately this treatise was lost to the world for Mona destroyed it, fearing that these "useless distractions" could prove disastrous to a solid career of fixing teeth or calculating life expectancies. "Fine," said Lionel, "you want me to have security," and so he joined the post office.

"Good," said Mona. "Ethics -- can you make soup from it?"

Ethics soup is delicious if you add some cabbage, salt beef, potatoes, onions, carrots, mushrooms, and so on.  ¶ 5:49 PM