“When I stop drinking tea and eating bread and butter I say, ‘I’ve had enough.’ But when I stop reading poems or novels I say, ‘No more of that, no more of that.'” — Chekhov
Quotations
Unquote
“Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes — our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking around.” — G.K. Chesterton
Misc
- After a rain, the Bolivian salt flat Salar de Uyuni becomes the world’s largest mirror.
- The letter J appears nowhere in the periodic table of the elements.
- 9(9 – 6) yields same result upside down: (9 – 6)6 = 729. (Erich Friedman)
- Rearrange the letters in SUPRARATIONAL and you get PRO-AUSTRALIAN.
- “A good book praises itself.” — German proverb
Misc
- Samuel Johnson said that sending a timid boy to a public school is “forcing an owl upon day.”
- Inscribed over the door of the library at Murcia, Spain: “Here the dead open the eyes of the living.”
- TRICE in Pig Latin is ICE TRAY.
- 35 × 1482 × 9760 = 3514829760 (Jean-Marc Falcoz)
- “Mauve is pink trying to be purple.” — Whistler
Pekwachnamaykoskwaskwaypinwanik Lake is a lake in Manitoba. Its name is Cree for “where the wild trout are caught by fishing with hooks.”
Muckanaghederdauhaulia, a townland in County Galway, means “pig-marsh between two sea inlets.”
Saaranpaskantamasaari, an island in northeastern Finland, means “an island shat by Saara.”
Mamungkukumpurangkuntjunya is a hill in South Australia. Its name means “where the devil urinates.”
(Thanks, Colin.)
Unquote
“Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before and wiser than the one that comes after it.” — George Orwell
Unquote
“Home is the only place where you can go out and in. There are places you can go into, and places you can go out of, but the one place, if you do but find it, where you may go out and in both, is home.” — George MacDonald
Observations
Pensées of Mauritian aphorist Malcolm de Chazal:
- Birdsong is always in pitch. Birds sound wrong only when frightened.
- The underbrush makes the light chubby.
- A trotting dog: his hind legs knit and his forelegs crochet.
- Night softens the mind’s irritations and inflames the body’s.
- The mouth and eyes are each anagrams of the other.
- An animal’s feet are as intelligent as a man’s hands.
- Women make us poets, children make us philosophers.
- A cat purrs himself to sleep, being the only creature who sings his own lullaby.
- Shadows round everything out. The lacework of light is based on a circular pattern.
- Good taste has no fixed rules, though fashion has. Taste amounts to being fashionable with a sense of style.
- The eyes of the overly fearful stammer.
- Servants eventually come to resemble their masters. “Professional” churchgoers end up looking like priests.
- Suffering doesn’t ennoble unless there is greatness to begin with.
And “Number is the alphabet of form, which is why children always want to touch whatever they count.”
Misc
- NUTHATCH and UNTHATCH are nearly the same word.
- Vladivostok is farther south than Venice.
- Thackeray called George IV’s prose style “lax, maudlin slipslop.”
- dollop reads the same upside down.
- “I shall stipulate that I will only go into Heaven on condition that I am never in a room with more than ten people.” — Edward Lear
Unquote
“We discover in ourselves what others hide from us, and we recognize in others what we hide from ourselves.” — Vauvenargues
Misc
- Angkor Wat and Machu Picchu are roughly antipodal.
- WONDER is UNDERWAY in Pig Latin.
- By convention, current flows from positive to negative in a circuit; electrons, which are negatively charged, move in the opposite direction.
- The immaculate conception describes the birth of Mary, not Jesus.
- “A man’s style in any art should be like his dress — it should attract as little attention as possible.” — Samuel Butler
10/22/2024 UPDATE: Interesting addendum from reader Mark Thompson: The capital cities Asunción, Canberra, and Kuwait City are nearly equidistant on great-circle routes:
Kuwait City to Canberra: 12,768 km
Canberra to Asunción: 12,712 km
Asunción to Kuwait City: 12,766 km
“Their mutual distances apart (along the earth’s surface) happen to be very close to one Earth-diameter [12,742 km]: so, sadly, they don’t all lie on a single great circle (since pi is not 3).” (Thanks, Mark.)