You always know when it’s 11 a.m. at Memphis’ Peabody Hotel: Five ducks are escorted from their penthouse suite, down the elevator to the lobby, along a red carpet (accompanied by a Sousa march), and into the fountain, where they spend the day. At 5 p.m. they return, with equal ceremony.
This has happened every day since the 1930s.
Most adult cats are lactose-intolerant.
The Rev. William Archibald Spooner (1844-1930) was famously reputed to swap consonants in his speech (“The weight of rages will press hard upon the employer”).
His legend has grown so popular that today it’s hard to known which “spoonerisms” really happened. For instance, Spooner might really have asked, “Is the bean dizzy?”, but he almost certainly never said, “You have hissed all my mystery lectures and were caught fighting a liar in the quad. Having tasted two worms, you will leave by the next town drain.”
But we can be fairly certain that when he proposed a toast to “The Boar’s Head” (a pub), it was not a spoonerism.
He was a priest, after all.
Copernicus, that learned wight,
The glory of his nation,
With draughts of wine refreshed his sight,
And saw the Earth’s rotation;
Each planet then its orb described,
The Moon got under way, sir;
These truths from nature he imbibed
For he drank his bottle a day, sir!
— From “The Astronomer’s Drinking Song,” in Augustus De Morgan’s Budget of Paradoxes, 1866
Teller, of the magician duo Penn and Teller, has no first or middle name. His parents named him Raymond Joseph Teller, but he had the given names legally removed. On government documents his first name is listed as NFN, meaning “no first name.”
Do you recognize this passage?
Homme petit d’homme petit, s’attend, n’avale
Homme petit d’homme petit, à degrés de bègues folles
Anal deux qui noeuds ours, anal deux qui noeuds s’y mènent
Coup d’un poux tome petit tout guetteur à gaine
No? Try reading it aloud.
Cognitive scientists use it to illustrate the complexity of human communications.
More anagrams:
Louis XIII appointed a Provencal to be his royal anagrammatist. He was paid 1,200 livres a year.
“We are here on Earth to do good to others. What the others are here for, I don’t know.” — W.H. Auden
Short on human help, England enlisted another species at its Sheffield munitions plant during World War I.
Write your own joke.
The International Zetetic Challenge offered a prize of 200,000 euros to “any person who could prove any paranormal phenomenon.” It ran for 15 years, starting in 1987.
Magician James Randi has offered $1 million to anyone who can show evidence of any paranormal, supernatural, or occult power or event, under test conditions agreed to by both parties.
Both prizes have gone unrewarded.