At the height of Mark Twain’s popularity, a group of his friends in New York wanted to send him a birthday greeting.
But Twain was traveling abroad and none of them knew where to direct the letter.
After some hopeless havering they simply addressed it “Mark Twain, God Knows Where.”
Several weeks later a note arrived from Twain.
It said: “He did.”
Pick a three-digit number (example: 412).
Double it to create a six-digit number (412412).
Divide the result successively by 7, by 11, and by 13. There will be no remainders.
The result is the original number.
Epitaph of John Laird McCaffrey (1940-1995), who lies in Montreal’s Mount Royal Cemetery:
John:
Free your body and soul
Unfold your powerful wings
Climb up the highest mountains
Kick your feet up in the air
You may now live forever
Or return to this earth
Unless you feel good where you are!
It was composed jointly by his ex-wife and mistress.
Read the first letter of each line.
Twelve percent of people dream only in black and white.
A curious account of a subterranean garden formed at the bottom of the Percy Main Pit, Newcastle, by the furnace-keeper, was lately communicated to the Caledonian Horticultural Society. The plants are formed in the bottom of the mine by the light and radiant heat of an open stove, constantly maintained for the sake of ventilation. The same letter communicated an account of an extensive natural hot-bed near Dudley, in Staffordshire, which is heated by means of the slow combustion of coal at some depth below the surface. From this natural hot-bed, a gardener raises annually crops of different kinds of culinary vegetables, which are earlier, by some weeks, than those in the surrounding gardens.
— Curiosities for the Ingenious, 1825
Harold Cross once composed a chess position with 29 possible mates.
In this one, by Henry Dudeney, White can choose among 36 different mates on the move:
martext
n. a blundering preacher
In 1572 something began killing the children of Dôle in eastern France. A 10-year-old girl was strangled and partially devoured in October; another girl succumbed after a similar attack a few weeks later, and more victims followed. The province decided there was a werewolf abroad, and one evening some workers spotted a creature carrying a child’s body through the failing light.
It wasn’t a wolf. It was Gilles Garnier, a local hermit and, as it turned out, a cannibalistic serial murderer who hunted children to feed his new wife. Garnier said that a specter had given him a magic ointment that would let him assume a wolf’s shape in order to hunt more easily.
Who’s to say he was wrong? After confessing to four murders, Garnier was convicted of “crimes of lycanthropy and witchcraft” and burned at the stake.
Unfortunate grave inscriptions, collected by Susan Darling Safford in Quaint Epitaphs (1895):
The little hero that lies here
Was conquered by the diarrhoea.
(Portland, Maine)
JOHN PHILLIPS
Accidentally shot as a mark of affection by his brother.
(Maine)
Our little Jacob has been taken away to bloom in a superior flower pot above.
(Vermont)
Beneath this stone our baby lays,
He neither crys nor hollers.
He lived just one and twenty days,
And cost us forty dollars.
(Vermont)
Grim death took little Jerry,
The son of Joseph and Sereno Howells,
Seven days he wrestled with the dysentery
And then he perished in his little bowels.
(Vermont)
Here lies the body of Dr. Hayward,
A man who never voted.
Of such is the kingdom of Heaven.
(Wayland, Massachusetts)