Futility Closet

In 1844, Sir David Brewster discovered an iron nail in a block of stone in Scotland's Kingoodie Quarry. The nail was embedded in a Cretaceous block from the Mesozoic era; in 1985, the British Geological Survey dated the bed at between 360 and 408 million years old.

An iron nail has no business in the Mesozoic era, and no ordinary nail could avoid oxidation for more than 400 million years.

So how'd it get there? No one knows.

Letter from a California resident to an officer of Bodie, a gold-rush boom town, circa 1881:

Kind and Respected Cir:

I see in the paper that a man named John Sipes was attacted and et up by a bare whose kubs he was trying to get when the she bare came up and stopt him by eating him in the mountains near your town.

What I want to know is did it kill him ded or was he only partly et up and is he from this plaice and all about the bare. I don't know but he is a distant husband of mine. My first husband was of the name and I supposed he was killed in the war, but the name of the man the bare et being the same I thought it might be him after all and I ought to know if he wasn't killed either in the war or by the bare, for I have been married twise since and there ought to be divorse papers got out by him or me if the bare did not eat him up. If it is him you will know by him having six toes on his left foot.

He also had a spreadagle tattooed on his front chest and a anker on his right arm which you will know him by if the bare did not eat up these sines of it being him.

Find out all yu kin about him without him knowing what it is for, that is if the bare did not eat him all up. If it did I don't see as you kin do anything and you needn't to trouble. Please ancer back.

She added a postscript: "Was the bare killed?"

In 1973, over Ivory Coast, an aircraft collided with a Ruppell's griffon, a kind of vulture.

It had been flying at 37,000 feet — that's seven miles high.

Solution to One Lump or Two?, from Tuesday:

Put five lumps in the first cup, two in the second, and three in the third.

Then sit the third cup in the second cup.

Dioniso Pulido must have angered the gods.

On Feb. 20, 1943, the Mexican farmer watched a volcanic fissure open in the middle of his cornfield. Within 24 hours the cone was 50 meters high; within a week it was twice that. By August his whole town was buried in lava and ash.

The new volcano, called Paricutin, eventually grew to be 10,000 feet high, and it didn't go quiet until 1952.

And the gods got their due. No one died in the eruption — but three people were killed by associated lightning strikes.

How can you put 10 lumps of sugar into three cups so there is an odd number of lumps in each cup?

I'll give the answer tomorrow.

"Who would write, who had any thing better to do?" — Lord Byron

A race among all the world's creatures would show some surprising results. Top speeds:

• Tortoise: 0.23 mph
• Sea trout: 15 mph
• Dragonfly: 18 mph
• Human sprinter: 22 mph
• African elephant: 25 mph
• Cat: 30 mph
• Racehorse: 43 mph
• Ostrich: 45 mph
• Bluefin tuna: 46 mph
• Racing pigeon: 53 mph
• Pronghorn: 55 mph
• Cheetah: 62 mph
• Mallard: 65 mph
• Sailfish: 68 mph

The winner would be the peregrine falcon, which has been clocked in level flight at 217 mph.

AM IN MARKET HARBOROUGH. WHERE OUGHT I TO BE?

– G.K. Chesterton, telegram to his wife

To find the actress to play Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With the Wind, MGM shot 149,000 feet of black-and-white test film and another 13,000 feet of color with 60 actresses, none of whom got the part.

Vivien Leigh eventually got it, but MGM also considered Katharine Hepburn, Norma Shearer, Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Crawford, Lana Turner, Susan Hayward, Carole Lombard, Paulette Goddard, Irene Dunne, Merle Oberon, Ida Lupino, Joan Fontaine, Loretta Young, Miriam Hopkins, Jean Arthur, Tallulah Bankhead, Joan Bennett, Frances Dee, and Lucille Ball.