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 » A Remarkable Injury

Tuesday 2 April 18:48:34 UTC 2024

This gruesome portrait illustrates an unconfirmed story: It’s said that in the 16th century a Hungarian nobleman named Gregor Baci survived for a year after being impaled through the head during a joust. Did this really happen? We don’t know, but in 2010 surgeon Martin Missmann and his colleagues showed that it could have. They had been presented with a … [Link]

Weird Universe » The Straw Hat Riots of 1922

Tuesday 2 April 15:45:40 UTC 2024

Allow me to quote at length from Wikipedia. But visit that page for even more details.

The Straw Hat Riot of 1922 was a riot that occurred in New York City at the end of summer as a result of unwritten rules in men's fashions at the time, and a tradition of taunting people who had failed to stop wearing … [Link]

Weird Universe » Mr. Coffee Nerves

Tuesday 2 April 8:56:54 UTC 2024

On a mission to wreck marriages and destroy romance by promoting the consumption of coffee.

Personally, I need my morning coffee before I'm at all sociable.

(click images to enlarge)
Spokesman Review – Jan 16, 1949

Boston Globe – Sep 11, 1949 [Link]

Futility Closet » Elocution

Tuesday 2 April 6:46:08 UTC 2024

An odd little detail: David Garrick said of Anglican evangelist George Whitefield that he “could make his audience weep or tremble merely by varying his pronunciation of the word ‘Mesopotamia.'” “Garrick did not say that he had ever seen this feat performed,” noted one biographer. “[H]e surely must have been befooling some too warm admirer of the preacher, to see … [Link]

John Gordon Ross

A Man for All Reasons