A skull is a cup until it is struck

One of the distinguishing features of Paget's Disease a.k.a. osteitis deformans. However, if your doctor proposes using this as a diagnostic test it is time to change doctors.

Note invitingly high forehead

Not many people know that one famous victim of incipient Paget's Disease was Friedrich Nietzsche, hence the crippling headaches that plagued him throughout his productive years.

Now in those days philosophy was a brutal thuggish pastime, basically an appendage of organised crime. No eyebrows were raised after Nietzsche's death and interment in 1900, when his bitter rival Professor Moriarty excavated his grave and stole his skull, for the ghoulish depravity of this crime was simply par for the course. Moriarty's intention, of course, was to make it into a drinking cup with which to toast the downfall of Nietzsche's views on Dionysian theatre.

It happened that through their contacts in the criminal fraternity, Keats and Chapman received an invitation to the underworld gathering where Moriarty brought out his cranial chalice for its inaugural pint. In the anticlimatic silence as the beer leaked straight through the porous bone and puddled on the table-top, Keats could not help but point out the result of scorning excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerating shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity: "neither his skull nor his theories will hold water."

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"Isn't this stolen from an exchange in a comments thread from last year?" Another Kiwi opined.

"It's relevant," I explained.

"You are both still loonies," said Evangeline van Holsteren, chief barmaid at the Old Entomologist. "Also your novelty personalised beer-mugs are in very bad taste. It's not as if they're any larger than a standard nonic glass."

Not toby

"Toby or not toby, that is the question," we murmured in unison.