- Mel Gibson has 38 lines in The Road Warrior.
- The ATMs in Vatican City bear instructions in Latin.
- The Finnish length unit peninkulma, 6.2 miles, originally meant “the distance a dog can be heard from.”
- The Corduroy Appreciation Club meets on 11/11, “the day that most resembles corduroy.”
- “It is unbecoming for young men to utter maxims.” — Aristotle
Quotations
Complaint
“Have you noticed … there is never any third act in a nightmare? They bring you to a climax of terror and then leave you there. They are the work of poor dramatists.” — Max Beerbohm
Unquote
“To be sure, the dog is loyal. But why, on that account, should we take him as an example? He is loyal to men, not to other dogs.” — Karl Kraus
Unquote
“The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.” — Emerson
Good Works
“Pins have been the means of saving many lives, through people not swallowing them.” — Theo Johnson, Personal Recollections of the Zoo, 1891
Unquote
“Fish die belly upward, and rise to the surface. It’s their way of falling.” — André Gide, Journals
(Thanks, Macari.)
Unquote
“My favorite poem is the one that starts ‘Thirty days hath September’ because it actually tells you something.” — Groucho
Misc
- The newsletter of the Procrastinators’ Club of America is called Last Month’s Newsletter.
- Samuel Johnson’s 1755 Dictionary defines dross as “the recrement or despumation of metals.”
- A sphere of radius n kilometers has almost exactly the same volume as a cube of side n miles. (Randall Munroe)
- Cookie Monster’s real name is Sid.
- “Henry James chews more than he bites off.” — Clover Adams
“There exist only two kinds of modern mathematics books: ones which you cannot read beyond the first page and ones which you cannot read beyond the first sentence.” — Physics Nobelist Yang Chen-Ning
Unquote
“I hate Twitter. It’s like a state surveillance agency run by gullible volunteers.” — Stewart Lee
Twilight
We do not know what thoughts stirred in the mind of the last of the mastodons, but we can take it that they were nothing very remarkable. It is hardly likely that the last man will have the mind of a Goethe. He will die, and that will be the last stage of human progress.
— Anatole France, Under the Rose, 1925