This morning I discovered a flyer in my mailbox advertising “Wordsworth and Keats Fine Interior Housepainting: special attention paid to metre and rhyme.” Part of me wanted to believe this was a real service, perhaps featuring painters who speak in couplets and scrawl secret verses on your walls before they slap up a coat of Benjamin Moore. Alas, the website the flyer lists turns out to be completely unrelated to poetry or paint. I guess the whole point was just to get people’s attention, in which case, it worked.

Anyway, the slogan on the flyer was “They’re tanned! They’re rested!” Gimmick or not, surely we can do better than that? “From Daffodil Yellow to Grecian Urn Gray!” “If beauty were truth and walls could talk, ours would be totally honest!” “The external world is fitted to the mind — but let us help you with the interiors!” Any more ideas? And hey, who can tell me, without Googling, whose quote I used for the title of this post?