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 » Remembrance

Tuesday 26 March 19:06:16 UTC 2024

The Fireside Book of Humorous Poetry contains this resonant scrap of anonymous verse: John Wesley Gaines!
John Wesley Gaines!
Thou monumental mass of brains!
Come in, John Wesley
For it rains. In The American Treasury, Clifton Fadiman writes, “Mr. Gaines is believed to have been a Congressman.” And lo, a John Wesley Gaines did indeed serve in the House, representing … [Link]

Weird Universe » Hear how to handle your boat

Tuesday 26 March 11:17:00 UTC 2024

Released in 1961 as part of the "Carlton Hear How Series."

The series started off with fairly mundane topics such as how to handle your boat, how to be a better bowler, how to take better photographs, etc. But as sales lagged (surely because of the dull topics) Carlton introduced more controversial topics such as "Hear how to achieve sexual … [Link]

Weird Universe » Ashkasha

Tuesday 26 March 9:39:00 UTC 2024

Ashkasha from Lara Maltz on Vimeo. [Link]

Futility Closet » Counting Up

Tuesday 26 March 7:23:05 UTC 2024

A problem from Daniel J. Velleman and Stan Wagon’s excellent 2020 book Bicycle or Unicycle?: A Collection of Intriguing Mathematical Puzzles: A square grid measures 999×999. Each square is either black or white. Each black square that’s not on the border of the grid has exactly five white squares among its eight immediate neighbors (those that adjoin it horizontally, vertically, … [Link]

John Gordon Ross

A Man for All Reasons