In 1800, robber and housebreaker Pierre Coignard was sentenced to 14 years’ hard labor in the prison at Toulon. After five years he escaped, journeyed to Catalonia, assumed the identity of a local nobleman, won glory fighting in the Spanish ranks, entered the French army, rose to become a decorated colonel …
… and was recognized in Paris by one of his former cellmates.
He was tried, convicted, and returned to the same prison he had escaped 18 years earlier.
Take any twenty-one cards, and ask a person to choose one from them. [Deal] them in three heaps, and ask the person who selected the card in which heap it is placed. Gather them up, and put the heap containing the chosen card between the other two. Do this twice more, and the chosen card will be found the eleventh from the top.
— Alfred Elliott, The Playground and the Parlour, 1868
Exceptions to “I before E …”:
albeit, beige, counterfeit, deity, either, feisty, height, kaleidoscope, leisure, neighbor, obeisance, protein, reveille, seize, veil, weird, zeitgeist
“… except after C”:
ancient, concierge, efficient, financier, glacier, juicier, democracies, species
Will Rogers said, “Nothing you can’t spell will ever work.”
Strapped for cash in the mid-1950s, Kurt Vonnegut took a job at Sports Illustrated, though he “didn’t care or know squat about sports.”
They asked him to write a piece about a racehorse that had jumped the fence at the local track.
He fed a page into his typewriter, stared at it for several hours, typed “The horse jumped over the fucking fence” and left.
Here’s a familiar illusion known as the Ames room. The woman on the right is not really small, she’s just far away. The room is a trapezoid but is designed to appear square when viewed from this angle.
Curiously, a woman who loves and trusts her husband tends to see no change in him even as he walks from corner to corner; apparently she resists a distorted view of him.
The same is not true of men.
A good American misprint was the following, which is warranted as true and genuine. It occurred in the proof-sheets of a scientific treatise. The sentence, as written by the author, ran as follows: ‘Filtration is sometimes assisted by the use of albumen.’ This came out as: ‘Flirtation is sometimes arrested by the use of aldermen.’
— Patrick Maxwell, Pribbles and Prabbles, 1906
“I have often wondered how it is that every man loves himself more than all the rest of men, but yet sets less value on his own opinion of himself than on the opinion of others.” — Marcus Aurelius
Suffolk’s “House in the Clouds” disguised a water tower in 1923, but since 1979 it’s been fully converted into living space, with five bedrooms and three bathrooms.
You can try it for yourself for £700 a night: “Total of 67 easy stairs with 4 landings and 5 half landings–resting seats for the less able on each landing.”
bablatrice
n. a female babbler
