Mill Ends Park

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

The smallest park in the world is Mill Ends Park in Portland, Oregon. You’re looking at it: 452 square inches, barely two feet across. The nearby Forest Park is 60 million times as big.

Mill Ends started in 1948, when Oregon Journal journalist Dick Fagan noticed a forgotten hole outside his office on Front Street. He planted flowers and began to write a weekly column about goings-on there, including “the only leprechaun colony west of Ireland.”

When Fagan died in 1969, Portland took up the tradition, dedicating Mill Ends as an official city park in 1976. Today it has a swimming pool for butterflies (with diving board), a miniature Ferris wheel, and statues, and it hosts snail races, weddings, and regular rose plantings.

Just goes to show, you don’t need a large lot if the location’s good.

| Oddities

Guess

Once upon a time, there lived a rich farmer who had 30 children, 15 by his first wife who was dead, and 15 by his second wife. The latter woman was eager that her eldest son should inherit the property. Accordingly one day she said to him, “Dear Husband, you are getting old. We ought to settle who shall be your heir. Let us arrange our 30 children in circle, and counting from one of them, remove every tenth child until there remains but one, who shall succeed to your estate.”

The proposal seemed reasonable. As the process of selection went on, the farmer grew more and more astonished as he noticed that the first 14 to disappear were children by his first wife, and he observed that the next to go would be the last remaining member of that family. So he suggested that they should see what would happen if they began to count backwards from this lad. She, forced to make an immediate decision, and reflecting that the odds were now 15 to 1 in favour of her family, readily assented. Who became the heir?

16 children

— W.W. Rouse Ball, Mathematical Recreations & Essays, 1892

| Science & Math

“A Glutton”

Titus Angles of Darlington, has again shewn symptoms of a voracious appetite, by devouring five pounds and a half of old bacon, nauseous to the extreme. After finishing his repast he was taken in triumph round the town in a cart, and afterwards ducked in the Skerne.

— “Durham Paper,” cited in The Cabinet of Curiosities, 1824

| Oddities

Avoiding a Scandal

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Three beautiful women and their jealous husbands want to cross a river, but the boat will hold only two people at a time. How can they arrange the crossing if no woman is to remain with a man unless her husband is present?

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

Wile E. Coyote

Species designations for Wile E. Coyote:

  • Famishus vulgarus
  • Eatius slobbius
  • Hardheadipus oedipus
  • Carnivorous slobbius
  • Evereadii eatibus
  • Apetitius giganticus
  • Hungrii flea-bagius
  • Overconfidentii vulgaris
  • Caninus nervous rex
  • Grotesques appetitus
  • Nemesis ridiculii

Chuck Jones said, “Wile E. is my reality, Bugs Bunny is my goal.”

| Trivia

A Literary Knight’s Tour

The knight’s tour is a recreation familiar to chessplayers: Move a knight about an empty chessboard so as to visit each square exactly once.

On this board, each square contains a syllable. Collect them in the right order and you’ll compose a six-line quotation from Shakespeare. What is it?

(Hint: Start on e4, “to”.)

A Literary Knight's Tour

Click for Answer
| Literature · Puzzles · Quotations

Here … Kitty

In July 1891, lightning struck the house of a Mr. Arent S. Vandyck of New Salem, Vt. He submitted this account to a Boston newspaper:

Suddenly the younger Mr. Vandyck [his son] pointed to an old-fashioned sofa. Upon it lay what was apparently the silver image of a cat curled up in an exceedingly comfortable position. Each glittering hair was separate and distinct, and each silvery bristle of the whiskers described a graceful curve as in life. Father and son turned towards the sword which hung upon the wall just above the sofa and there saw that the sword had been stripped of all its silver. The hilt was gone, and the scabbard was but a strip of blackened steel. The family cat had been electroplated by lightning.

Draw your own conclusions.

| Oddities