Originally published at: Cook's books "Ducks: And How To Make Them Pay" not about revenge | Boing Boing
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Fun Fact: 91% of all mentions of “duck” since 2010 have been caused by autocorrect.
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Not about holding them accountable!? How about enslaving you and breeding your family as food stock! Yeah that lucky ducky got away with it again!
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I bear no ill will against ducks.
Geese, on the other hand…
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There used to be a lot of such guides (how to make a profit on a hobby/part time gig) back in the day. In old comic books you can see a famous ad for “Growing Mushrooms for fun and profit”. The ad was so famous that lots of things since have been jokingly entitled “[Subject] for fun and profit”
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“what will you say when the ducks come?”
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Uh oh, friendly pedantry ahead!
There’s a typo—or possibly a misunderstanding—in the quote of the first sentence. The word (correct in the book) is “remuneration”. From the Latin munus, meaning gift. It’s related to “munificent” (generous) and also to “municipal” (from munus in the sense of office, duty, or service given).
Merriam-Webster gives a note about the mix-up that people often do with the word:
Our evidence shows remuneration to be most at home in writing that concerns financial matters, especially when large amounts of money—or other forms of compensation—are involved. Whether it’s because money is often expressed in numerals, or simply because the “n” and “m” are adjacent to each other on our keyboards, “reMUNeration” often appears misspelled as “reNUMeration.” (Renumeration, a very rare word, means “the act of enumerating [counting or listing] again.”) It pays to know that the -mun- in remuneration is from Latin munus, meaning “gift,” a root it shares with munificent, an adjective which means “very liberal in giving.”
If you ask me, “reMUNeration” is the harder of the two to pronounce, and maybe that’s why so many people seem to naturally go for the other one.
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But the duck is always left with the bill
I’ll get my coat.
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publish the first edition of this book
That’s a lot of confidence.
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This book, by contrast, is pretty great:
And it’s always time for one of my favorite YouTubes:
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And pays through the nose.
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That is a great little video I used to watch with my kid.
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We are looking at the Preface of the fourth edition!! 
The last sentence of said Preface says
The book has now been revised, and brought up to date, with much additional information, which it is hoped will help duck keepers to become more successful in the future, even than many who have been successful in the past.
This guy was dedicated.
ETA: Did I miss the chance to say He clearly had his ducks in a row?
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When I was very young, one summer we had a “pet” duck—not that it was ever truly tamed. My dad won it for us at a local carnival—it was the late 1950s, back in the days when they gave live ducklings or goldfish as prizes. My dad was pitching nickels onto shallow saucers that were floating around in a pool of circulating water. Not as easy to land and stay as you (as a child) might think or hope. Nickel after nickel hit a saucer and bounced or skittered off into the water. We watched as he got down to his last nickel to pitch, and lo and behold it stayed in the saucer and we came home with a little fuzzy baby duck.
My dad made a pen in the back yard with some chicken wire. He put in a wide metal bushel for a little pond, and built a wooden ramp up to it. We kids tried to play with the duck and tame it, but were only partially successful. Meanwhile it grew big!
At the end of the summer it was taken—we were told—to live at a petting zoo, because it was accustomed to people. I don’t think my older siblings really believe, or ever believed, that. I as the youngest of course believed it. But I remember the name of the zoo, and I’ve looked it up fairly recently on the internet. It did exist, at that time, and I think it’s possible that the duck may have actually lived out its days there. One can hope.
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This may well be a quote from San Francisco residence when the Irish Australian gang, the Sydney Ducks burnt half the city down in a looting spree in the gold mining era.
