Full text of a letter from Edward Lear to Evelyn Baring, Lord Cromer, 1862:
Thrippy Pilliwinx, —
Inkly tinky pobblebockle able-squabs? Flosky! Beebul trimble flosky! Okulscratch abibblebongibo, viddle squibble tog-atog, ferry moyassity amsky flamsky damsky crocklefether squiggs.
Flinky wisty pomm,
Slushypipp
“I was much distressed by next door people who had twin babies and played the violin,” Lear once wrote, “but one of the twins died, and the other has eaten the fiddle–so all is peace.”
In 1981, wildlife photographer Carl McCunn paid a bush pilot to drop him near the Coleen River in northern Alaska. He thought he’d arranged for the pilot to pick him up again.
He hadn’t.
State troopers found his body the following year. He had tried to winterize his tent, then shot himself in the head. A 100-page diary read, “I think I should have used more foresight about arranging my departure.”
A beggar asks a wealthy man for a penny. He says he wants to be a wealthy man himself someday.
“Well, consider,” says the wealthy man. “A single penny will not make you wealthy. And a second penny will not make you wealthy either.
“Indeed, there is no point at which an additional penny will make you a wealthy man. So I’m sorry, my friend, but your dream is impossible.”
A favorite kind of school-boy humor is that which takes the form of evolving sentences like the following: Forte dux fel flat in gutture, which is good Latin for ‘By chance the leader inhales poison in his throat,’ but which read off rapidly sounds like the English ‘Forty ducks fell flat in the gutter.’ A French example is Pas de lieu Rhône que nous, which it is hardly necessary to explain makes no sense in French at all, though every word be true Gallic, but by a similar process of reading reveals the proverbial advice, ‘Paddle your own canoe.’
— William Shepard Walsh, Handy-Book of Literary Curiosities, 1909
What’s 2.5 miles wide, perfectly circular, and warm enough to melt ice?
I don’t know either, but there are at least two of them in Russia’s Lake Baikal.
They were spotted in April from the international space station.
09/26/2013 Resolved. (Thanks, Drew.)
kalokagathia
n. a combination of the good and the beautiful in a person
bellibone
n. a remarkably beautiful and good woman
Byron wasn’t shy with his political opinions — he proposed this epitaph for Lord Castlereagh, who died in 1822:
Posterity will ne’er survey
A nobler grave than this:
Here lie the bones of Castlereagh:
Stop, traveller, and piss.
In 1945, Dutch designer Arnold Henske realized that his body was “invulnerable” and took to swallowing glass and razor blades as a fakir in Amsterdam.
That’s a real rapier transfixing his thorax at left.
His dream was to use his ability to spread a message of love and peace, but Dutch officials would license him only to perform his act, not to preach against materialism, as he’d hoped.
A voice told him to swallow a steel needle in 1948, and he died of an aortic rupture — a broken heart.
At a desert oasis, A and B decide independently to murder C. A poisons C’s canteen, and later B punches a hole in it. C dies of thirst. Who killed him?
A argues that C never drank the poison. B claims that he only deprived C of poisoned water. They’re both right, but still C is dead. Who’s guilty?
Distances to which objects were carried by the tornado at Mount Carmel, Ill., June 4, 1877:
A letter from Mount Carmel was found at Vincennes, Ind., twenty-five miles northeastward. A piece of tin roofing was picked up near Hazleton, Ind., seventeen miles northeastward. The spire, vane, and gilded ball of the Methodist church were found near Decker’s Station, Ind., fifteen miles northeastward. A letter from Mount Carmel was carried by the wind to Widner Township, Ind., forty-five miles north-northeastward. A discharge from the military service of the United States belonging to a Mount Carmel man was found near Edwardsport, Ind., nearly fifty miles northeastward, and a letter from Mount Carmel was found near the same place. … I was also told that a paper sack of flour from a demolished store was found nearly five miles distant in Indiana, with no further damage than a small hole in it.
From the Annual Report of the Secretary of War, 1877.