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 » Black and White

Tuesday 16 April 17:48:44 UTC 2024

An old puzzle by Paul Hoffman from Science Digest. Dr. Crypton is playing chess with his boss. Crypton has the white pieces. What move can he play that will not checkmate Black? There’s no funny business; the problem is just what it seems, except that Crypton has promised never to put a knight on any square adjacent to the black … [Link]

Weird Universe » Into the Stream

Tuesday 16 April 13:20:30 UTC 2024

Betcha can't watch/listen to the whole thing!

The artist's Wikipedia page.

[Link]

Weird Universe » Saved pennies crash through ceiling

Tuesday 16 April 10:04:05 UTC 2024

Aug 1947: Clarence Ellsworth had been saving pennies by dropping them through a crack in his attic floor. Finally, when the number of pennies reached 1,672, the weight of the pennies broke through the ceiling and landed in his living room.

This raises the question: how much did 1,672 pennies weigh?

According to Wikipedia, pennies issued before 1982 each weighed … [Link]

Futility Closet » Rebuke

Tuesday 16 April 7:10:17 UTC 2024

When Joseph Addison lent a sum of money to his friend Temple Stanyan, Stanyan became meekly agreeable, unwilling to argue with Addison as he used to. At last Addison told him, “Sir, either contradict me or pay me my money.” Biographer Peter Smithers calls this “a salvo of which Johnson himself might have been proud.” [Link]

John Gordon Ross

A Man for All Reasons