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 » Pandigital Products

Thursday 18 April 22:14:15 UTC 2024

From reader Hans Havermann: Each of these equations uses each of the digits 0-9 exactly once: 8596 = 2×14×307
8790 = 2×3×1465
9360 = 2×4×15×78
9380 = 2×5×14×67
9870 = 2×3×1645
10752 = 3×4×896
12780 = 4×5×639
14760 = 5×9×328
14820 = 5×39×76
15628 = 4×3907
15678 = 39×402
16038 = 27×594 (= 54×297)
16704 = 9×32×58
17082 = 3×5694 … [Link]

Weird Universe » Wild Stereo Drums

Thursday 18 April 13:36:44 UTC 2024

[Link]

Weird Universe » Meet Miss Electronic

Thursday 18 April 9:05:56 UTC 2024

Once upon a time answering machines were considered strange and dumbfounding.

Wilmington News Journal – Mar 31, 1956 [Link]

Futility Closet » Do It Yourself

Thursday 18 April 7:24:35 UTC 2024

That wise philosopher, William J. Boardman, tells me that those first threatening aggressive noises [man’s first swearing] were full of G’s and K’s and P’s and H’s and harsh sibilants. Such noises had the effect of a blow; they needed no dictionary to prove they were primed with all the bad magic of an evil wish. … If I am … [Link]

John Gordon Ross

A Man for All Reasons