>>>Resembles my mechanic's words from ages ago: "it's not your battery that died, it's the coil".
>
>Blame Bill... he used that wonderful word "halcyon" that prompted further poetic license, in this case from Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy. ;-)

At the time when I was learning english, the selected bit of Hamlet that I memorized was "all the world's a stage". The 2b .or. !2b was something I knew in translation, also by heart. Which is weird, learning lines by heart was the thing I generally hated and rarely managed to do. But the few that I did have stayed. Mysterious are the ways of memory.