In a Word
ostreophagist
n. an eater of oysters
(Such as James I.)
Map Twist
Montana, Wyoming, and South Dakota meet at one point. Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia meet at two — at Washington’s westernmost and southermost points along the Potomac River.
Name three U.S. states all three of which meet at three different points.
A Grave Summons
Humphrey Bogart was buried, creepily, with a whistle.
He had given it to Lauren Bacall after their first film together, To Have and Have Not, and she deposited it with his remains at Forest Lawn.
It’s inscribed “If you want anything, just whistle.”
“Business Signs in London”
A stranger is surprised in London by some of the signs, which have been handed down for generations, which are used to distinguish particular places of business. Many of them are perfectly unmeaning, but are corruptions of the original signs. A public house was called ‘The Bag of Nails,’ which was derived from the old name, ‘The Bacchanals.’ ‘The Bull and Goat’ was corrupted from ‘The Bologne Gate,’ as the place was called in compliment to Henry VIII, who took the place in 1642. There is another public house called ‘The Goat and Compasses.’ It was established in the old Puritan times. In the days of Cromwell, it was ‘God encompasses us;’ but in Queen Victoria’s time it is ‘The Goat and Compasses.’ There is one public house called ‘The Three Loggerheads.’ The sign has a picture of two men, and the inscription underneath:
‘We three
Loggerheads be.’And the passer by wonders, as he reads it, where on earth the third loggerhead can be.
— Ballou’s Monthly Magazine, June 1861
Print Charming
During the Depression, magazines and newspapers regularly carried advertisements for “talent bureaus” promising to assess the writing of undiscovered authors. Sensing a scam, Author & Journalist editor Willard Hawkins asked his daughter to compose “the most impossible, inane and childish semblance of a story that it was possible to conceive.” She obliged with “Her Terrible Mistake,” the story of 17-year-old Mary Jane Smith, who “fell devinely in love with a very nice fellow who was a machinic by the name of Jack Berry.” When a stranger seduces Mary Jane, her “fionce” exposes him as “a villian in sheeps clothing.”
Universal Scenario Co. of Hollywood declared this “admirably suited to talking picture presentation” and for $10 offered to submit it “personally to those producers whose current production demands call for this particular type of story.”
Encouraged, Hawkins now had Lottie Perkins write a 30,000-word novel, The Missing Twin:
‘Mr. Jones I think something has happened at home. I think we ought to have left someone to take care of our children. What will I do if someone has kidnapped them out from under my nose. How can you sit there and let them be stolen from me. O my babies. How could anyone be so crule as to steel you.’
Economy Publishers of Tacoma, Wash., read this “with ever increasing pleasure and admiration for the author. My! how your characters live and breathe and walk out into the room before one … !” They agreed to publish the book for $375, returning 40 percent of all royalties to Perkins.
In the end, Author & Publisher found that in most such cases, the publisher printed only about 100 copies — and profited $200.
Pop Physics
A can of Diet Coke floats in water, while regular Coke sinks:
Why? The Diet Coke contains 190 mg of aspartame, but the regular Coke contains 39 grams of sugar. So the regular Coke is denser.
Retractor
An oldie but a goodie:
From this position, White retracts his last move, then Black retracts his and replaces it with a move that permits White to mate him immediately.
Wanted
A young gentleman on the point of being married, is desirous of meeting a man of experience who will dissuade him from such a step.
— Advertisement, London Times, quoted in William Shepard Walsh, Handy-Book of Literary Curiosities, 1892
A Dedicated Reader
Between August 2000 and May 2002, more than 1,100 ancient books disappeared from the French monastery of Mont Saint-Odile. There was no sign of forced entry; the monks changed the locks and reinforced the library door with steel, but the books continued to vanish. The thief even left a rose, taunting them.
Finally police installed a video camera and caught Stanislas Gosse, a Strasbourg engineering teacher, entering the darkened library through a cupboard. He confessed that he had discovered a lost map in public archives that revealed the secret entrance — he climbed the exterior walls of the monastery, entered the attic, descended a narrow stairway, and operated a hidden mechanism to open the back of the cupboard. He then browsed the library by candlelight. Apparently the passage had been used to spy on monks in medieval times, when the library had served as the monastery’s common room.
Gosse was convicted of “burglary by ruse and escalade,” fined, and given a suspended sentence. “I’m afraid my burning passion overrode my conscience,” he said. “It may appear selfish, but I felt the books had been abandoned. They were covered with dust and pigeon droppings, and I felt no one consulted them anymore.”
“There was also the thrill of adventure–I was very scared of being found out.”