The Matterhorn at Disneyland contains a basketball goal. Near the top of the mountain is a small preparation room used by the “mountaineers” who are sometimes seen scaling the exterior. The climbers installed a hoop and backboard so they could pass the time during bad weather.
The Matterhorn space is too cramped for a full game — for that you’ll need to visit the Supreme Court.
The London Post says a wager came off, the terms of which were as follows. I will bet any man one hundred pounds, that he cannot make a million strokes, with pen and ink, within a month. They were not to be mere dots or scratches, but fair down strokes, such as form the child’s first lesson in writing. A gentleman accepted the challenge. The month allowed was the lunar month of only twenty-eight days; so that for the completion of the undertaking, an average of thirty-six thousand strokes a day was required. This, at sixty a minute, or three thousand six hundred an hour–and neither the human intellect nor the human hand can be expected to do more–would call for ten hours’ labor in every four and twenty. With a proper feeling of the respect due to the Sabbath, he determined to abstain from his work on the Sundays. By this determination he diminished by four days the period allowed him, and at the same time, by so doing, he increased the daily average of his strokes to upwards of forty-one thousand. On the first day he executed about fifty thousand strokes; on the second, nearly as many. But at length, after many days, the hand became stiff and weary, the wrist swollen, and it required the almost constant attendance of some assiduous relation or friend, to besprinkle it, without interrupting its progress over the paper, with a lotion calculated to relieve and invigorate it. On the twenty-third day, the million strokes, and some thousands over, were accomplished; and the piles of paper that exhibited them testified, that to the courageous heart, the willing hand and the energetic mind, hardly anything is impossible.
— Francis Channing Woodworth, American Miscellany of Entertaining Knowledge, 1852
Robert Benchley kept a special shelf of books that he favored for their titles:
In a review of the New York City telephone directory, he wrote, “The weakness of plot is due to the great number of characters which clutter up the pages. The Russian school is responsible for this.”
On March 1, 1934, a scientist at New Hampshire’s already-odd Mount Washington observatory was digging in the snow before a garage when he was shocked to see that the holes he had dug “were promptly filled with deep blue light.”
Investigating, the man confirmed that the light could not be a “reflection from the sky or of bacteria collecting on the snow.” But no explanation was ever found, and no blue light has been reported since.
(Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 1934)
‘Wordsworth,’ said Charles Lamb, ‘one day told me that he considered Shakespeare greatly overrated. “There is an immensity of trick in all Shakespeare wrote,” he said, “and people are taken in by it. Now if I had a mind I could write exactly like Shakespeare.” So you see,’ proceeded Charles Lamb quietly, ‘it was only the mind that was wanting.’
— Frank Leslie’s Ten Cent Monthly, December 1863
Raymond Smullyan devised this puzzle in 1957 while a student at the University of Chicago. The white king has just been knocked off the board during a legal game. Where was it standing?
While editing The Sun Also Rises, Maxwell Perkins had to decide how to handle the many obscenities in Hemingway’s text. He planned a lunch with the author and kept a list of words to discuss with him.
While Perkins was at lunch, Charles Scribner came looking for him and, finding his office empty, consulted his calendar. It read “shit piss fuck bitch.”
When Perkins returned, Scribner said, “You must be exhausted.”
nod-crafty
adj. nodding to give an air of wisdom
From Henry Dudeney:
A banker in a country town was walking down the street when he saw a five-dollar bill on the curb. He picked it up, noted the number, and went to his home for luncheon. His wife said that the butcher had sent in his bill for five dollars, and, as the only money he had was the bill he had found, he gave it to her, and she paid the butcher. The butcher paid it to a farmer in buying a calf, the farmer paid it to a merchant who in turn paid it to a laundry woman, and she, remembering that she owed the bank five dollars, went there and paid the debt.
The banker recognized the bill as the one he had found, and by that time it had paid twenty-five dollars worth of debts. On careful examination he discovered that the bill was counterfeit. What was lost in the whole transaction, and by whom?
