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 » Authority

Friday 22 March 19:16:21 UTC 2024

“King James said to the fly, Have I three kingdoms, and thou must needs fly into my eye?” — John Selden “The autocrat of Russia possesses more power than any other man in the earth, but he cannot stop a sneeze.” — Mark Twain [Link]

Weird Universe » The Venice Surfestival

Friday 22 March 13:55:31 UTC 2024

This celebration ran for a number of years. And of course, there had to be a queen each year.

[Link]

Weird Universe » Working on Sunday

Friday 22 March 10:44:45 UTC 2024

The UK's Shops Act made it illegal to operate a shop on Sunday… unless one was Jewish (since the Jewish observed the sabbath on Saturday). So business owner Mike Robertson figured that to open his stores on Sunday he simply had to make his staff convert to Judaism.

The Shops Act had other oddities. According to the London Telegraph, a … [Link]

Futility Closet » Mass Transit

Friday 22 March 7:57:47 UTC 2024

A problem from the October 1964 issue of Eureka, the journal of the Cambridge University Mathematical Society: The planet Kophikkup is in the shape of a torus or ring-doughnut. There is a direct mono-rail line from each of the four space-ports to each of the major cities. No lines join or cross. What is the greatest possible number of major … [Link]

John Gordon Ross

A Man for All Reasons