Whittle It a Little, It’ll Fit

Odds and sods I look at regularly, just because they amuse me. I hope they do the same for you. Incidentally, I found this page’s title on Greg Ross’s Futility Closet (it’s somewhere on this page) in a mini-article which also includes the delightful sentence in Icelandic: Barbara Ara bar Ara araba bara rabbabara. Ross points out that this, “besides being fun to say, is spelled with only three letters. It means “Barbara, daughter of Ari, brought only rhubarb to Ari the Arab.”

Futility Closet » Tact

Tuesday 27 February 19:11:01 UTC 2024

When I was young I had an elderly friend who used often to ask me to stay with him in the country. He was a religious man and he read prayers to the assembled household every morning. But he had crossed out in pencil all the passages in the Book of Common Prayer that praised God. He said that there … [Link]

Weird Universe » Bad Wig Bandits

Tuesday 27 February 10:39:00 UTC 2024

Bad hairpieces are a definite theme for bank robbers. The first such I find is from the 1950s. The latest is from 2020. When will the next Bad Wig Bandit strike?

The newspaper piece below was too long to reproduce in its entirety, but you can read about Frank Sprenz here.

[Link]

Weird Universe » Rosemary Brown’s Music

Tuesday 27 February 9:56:04 UTC 2024

At first glance the 1970 album Rosemary Brown's Music might have seemed just like a collection of classical music. The track list included composers such as Liszt, Chopin, and Beethoven, but looking closer one would see that the various tracks were merely "inspired by" these composers.

And there was the odd twist. Rosemary Brown claimed that the ghostly spirits of … [Link]

Futility Closet » Local News

Tuesday 27 February 7:09:07 UTC 2024

The cemetery at Aurora, Texas, bears a notable marker from the state’s historical commission: “This site is also well known because of the legend that a spaceship crashed nearby in 1897 and the pilot, killed in the crash, was buried here.” An April 1897 article by S.E. Haydon in the Dallas Morning News explains that “the airship which has been … [Link]

John Gordon Ross

A Man for All Reasons