"You can practically see it from here," he tells a minion, usefully.
"It's not the edge of the world, but you can see it from here," her late father-in-law used to say.
"It is under the skin, you can't see it from here: rear suspension, front suspension, aerodynamics have all been pushed hard.
"Creede is not quite the end of the world, but you can see it from here," said Richard Brown, 63, who was born and raised here and worked 26 years in the silver mine until it closed in the mid-1980s.
By the time the bells, whooshes and clicks died down, I couldn't say the future had arrived, but I'm pretty sure we can see it from here.
For now, they are living on this bizarre lifeline that they can still have a season because, as Nicholas Cotsonika writes on Yahoo.com, they aren't actually at that brink yet, although they can see it from here.
"We have been waiting for restoration, but we are not sure if we will actually see it from here or from the grave," said Mona al-Hashemyoungyoung lawyer and one of approximately 33,000 residents.
"If so, I offer some sisterly advice to the shadow leader - that she should not let him get away with it!" If there is a sisterly tear of gratitude rolling down May's cheek, we cannot see it from here.
The war's reverberations are most deeply felt in small towns like Cando, which is "not at the end of the world, but you can almost see it from here," as Mayor James Gibbens describes it.
Due east is Calton Hill, which, with its monuments, observatory and neoclassical High School, inspired the name the Athens of the North: at least, that's where it is if you could see it from here.
