Richard J. Needham
Overview
 
Richard J. Needham was a Canadian
Canada
Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...

 humour
Humour
Humour or humor is the tendency of particular cognitive experiences to provoke laughter and provide amusement...

 columnist for The Globe and Mail
The Globe and Mail
The Globe and Mail is a nationally distributed Canadian newspaper, based in Toronto and printed in six cities across the country. With a weekly readership of approximately 1 million, it is Canada's largest-circulation national newspaper and second-largest daily newspaper after the Toronto Star...

.

Many of his columns were collected in a variety of books, including The Garden of Needham and Needham's Inferno, which won the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour
Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour
The Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour is an annual literary award presented to the best work of humorous literature in English by a Canadian writer. The award is a tribute to well-known Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock , and is accompanied by a cash prize of $15,000...

 in 1967.

Needham also coined Mop and Pail and Grope and Flail as unflattering nicknames for his employer, both of which are still in use today.
Quotations

People who are brutally honest get more satisfaction out of the brutality than out of the honesty.

Love is a fever which marriage puts to bed and cures.

People are like birds - from a distance, beautiful; from close up, those sharp beaks, those beady little eyes.

 
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