Jobs for openers

Usage examples of bottlecaps.

That any mathematical operation you could do on paper, no matter how complicated, could be reduced—in theory, anyway—to messing about with actual physical counters, such as bottlecaps, in the real world.

It’s like this: when mathematicians began fooling around with things like the square root of negative one, and quaternions, then they were no longer dealing with things that you could translate into sticks and bottlecaps.

Liz had given him a bowl or two of Guinness and I, after the chicken bones had no visible effect, had plied him with everything from whole jalapeños to the bottlecaps from Liz's home brew.

When we did get all four legs into the right holes he thought it was time, and we had to chase him and hold him down to get his air bottle strapped to his back, and at the last moment he took a dislike to his helmet and tried to eat it—this was a dog who made short work of steel bottlecaps, remember—and we had to put on a spare seal and test it before we finally screwed him in tight, shoved him in the lock, and cycled it.

He had a pot, like most of these rogue leaders do, and affected a getup that was part street, part costume, including armless goggles no larger than bottlecaps he had had stitched to his eye sockets, black leather wristbands, shin guards and knee pads fashioned to resemble poised cobras, and a kind of pointed, twin-horned Vikinglike helmet and cowl combination.

While the robot bartender, all chrome and brass with bottlecaps for eyes, drew three big brews, the cost was subtracted from Stirner's lifetime account.