The leaders of Russia have been alternately bald and hairy since 1881.
And monarchs’ profiles on British coins have faced alternately left and right since 1653.
(The exception is Edward VIII, who stares obstinately at the back of George V’s head.)
Trivia
Misc
- ZZ Top’s first album is called ZZ Top’s First Album.
- Supreme Court justice Byron White was the NFL’s top rusher in 1940.
- LOVE ME TENDER is an anagram of DENVER OMELET.
- Every palindromic number with an even number of digits is divisible by 11.
- “In great attempts it is glorious even to fail.” — Cassius
From English antiquary John Aubrey’s 1696 Miscellanies: “Anno 1670, not far from Cyrencester, was an Apparition; Being demanded, whether a good Spirit or a bad? Returned no answer, but departed with a curious Perfume and a most melodious Twang.”
Misc
- Consecutive U.S. presidents Grant, Hayes, and Garfield were all born in Ohio and served as Civil War generals.
- Travel due south from Buffalo and you’ll reach the Pacific Ocean.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. shook hands with both John Quincy Adams and John F. Kennedy.
- This false statement is not self-referential.
- “When you have no basis for an argument, abuse the plaintiff.” — Cicero
In the 2004 film Shark Tale, the shark Lenny coughs up several items onto a table. Among them is a Louisiana license plate, number 007 0 981. The same plate is retrieved from sharks in both Jaws and Deep Blue Sea.
Skyward
When Orville Wright died, Neil Armstrong was already 17 years old.
Fair Enough
Joseph Grinnell’s Game Birds of California (1918) notes that the avocet is known as the lawyer bird because of “its long bill and its oft-repeated vociferations.”
Trivium
The smallest U.S. state, Rhode Island, has a larger population than the largest U.S. state, Alaska.
Misc
- When written in all caps, the title of John Hiatt’s song “Have a Little Faith in Me” contains no curves.
- Tycho Brahe kept a tame elk.
- It isn’t known whether the sum of π and e is irrational.
- Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, Ulysses Grant, and James Garfield died without wills.
- “Selfishness is one of the qualities apt to inspire love.” — Nathaniel Hawthorne
The medieval Latin riddle In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni (“We enter the circle at night and are consumed by fire”) is a palindrome. The answer is “moths.”
Neighborly
Cimarron County, Oklahoma, is the only county in the United States that borders four states (Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, and Texas).
It’s also the only U.S. county to border six counties in five different states (two in Texas and one each in Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, and Oklahoma).
Destiny
The pickle industry’s “man of the year” in 1948 was named Dill L. Pickle.
I can’t think of anything to say about this.
Misc
- The clock face on the Marienkirche in Bergen auf Rügen, Germany, has 61 minutes. Does this mean time moves more slowly there — or more quickly?
- To ensure quiet, poet Amy Lowell hired five rooms at every hotel — her own and those on either side, above, and below.
- A perplexing sentence from a letter by Dorothy Osborne, describing shepherdesses in Bedfordshire, May 1653: “They want nothing to make them the happiest people in the world but the knowledge that they are so.”
- OVEREFFUSIVE is a palindrome in Scrabble — its letter values are 141114411141. (Discovered by Susan Thorpe.)
- The sum of the digits of every multiple of 2739726 up to the 72nd is 36. (E.M. Langley, Mathematical Gazette, 1896)
- I’ll bet I have more money in my pocket than you do. (Of course I do — you have no money in my pocket!)
- In 1996 a model airplane enthusiast was operating a remote-controlled plane in Phoenix Park in Dublin when the receiver died and the plane flew off on its own. It flew five miles to the northeast, ran out of fuel, and glided to a landing … on the taxi-way to Runway 28 at Dublin Airport.
(Thanks, Brian and Breffni.)