9 × 9 + 7 = 88
98 × 9 + 6 = 888
987 × 9 + 5 = 8888
9876 × 9 + 4 = 88888
98765 × 9 + 3 = 888888
987654 × 9 + 2 = 8888888
9876543 × 9 + 1 = 88888888
98765432 × 9 + 0 = 888888888
03/30/2017 UPDATE: Reader Alon Shaham points out that:
987654321 × 9 – 1 = 8888888888
9876543210 × 9 – 2 = 88888888888
In the Cathedral of Girgenti, in Sicily, the slightest whisper is borne with perfect distinctness from the great western door to the cornice behind the high altar, — a distance of two hundred and fifty feet. By a most unlucky coincidence, the precise focus of divergence at the former station was chosen for the place of the confessional. Secrets never intended for the public ear thus became known, to the dismay of the confessors, and the scandal of the people, by the resort of the curious to the opposite point, (which seems to have been discovered accidentally,) till at length, one listener having had his curiosity somewhat over-gratified by hearing his wife’s avowal of her own infidelity, this tell-tale peculiarity became generally known, and the confessional was removed.
— Charles Carroll Bombaugh, Gleanings for the Curious from the Harvest-Fields of Literature, 1890
At the Panama Canal, the Pacific is east of the Atlantic.
In 1925 New York poet Eli Siegel composed the shortest poem in the English language. He called it “One Question”:
I.
Why?
The former record holder was an anonymous verse titled “On the Condition of the United States After Several Years of Prohibition”:
Wet
Yet.
You say that you have a dog.
Yes, and a villain of a one, said Ctesippus.
And he has puppies?
Yes, and they are very like himself.
And the dog is the father of them?
Yes, he said, I certainly saw him and the mother of the puppies come together.
And is he not yours?
To be sure he is.
Then he is a father, and he is yours; ergo he is your father, and the puppies are your brothers.
Let me ask you one little question more, said Dionysodorus, quickly interposing, in order that Ctesippus might not get in his word: You beat this dog?
Ctesippus said, laughing: Indeed I do; and I only wish that I could beat you instead of him.
Then you beat your father, he said.
— Plato, Euthydemus
In central Bahrain stands a large mesquite known as the Tree of Life. It’s the only tree that survives in this part of the desert, and it’s been here for 400 years. No one knows where it’s finding water and nutrients.
See also Spectacularly Bad Driving.
imparlibidinous
adj. pertaining to an unequal state of desire between two people
A Lusitanian physician had a patient who insisted upon it he was perpetually frozen, and would sit before a great fire even in the dog-days. The Portuguese Esculapius procured him a dress of rough sheep skins, saturated with aqua vita, and set him on fire. The patient then declared he was quite warm, rather too much so, and was cured.
— Cabinet of Curiosities, Natural, Artificial, and Historical, 1822
More nouns of assemblage:
My sources insist that a group of gnus is called an implausibility. Should I believe them?
“Two apparent prints or impressions of the human foot in a tabular mass of limestone,” discussed in Schoolcraft’s Travels in the Central Portions of the Mississippi Valley, 1825:
The rock containing these interesting impressions is a compact limestone of a grayish blue color. It was originally quarried on the left bank of the Mississippi at St. Louis, and is a part of the extensive range of calcareous rocks upon which that town is built. Foundations of private dwellings, and the military works erected by the French and Spaniards, from this material, sixty years ago, are still as solid and unbroken as when first laid.
“The probability … of their having been imparted by some individual of a race of men who were unacquainted with the art of tanning skins, and at a period much anterior to that to which any tradition of the present race of Indians reaches, derives additional weight from this peculiar shape of the feet.”
