Futility Closet

A child releases a toy boat in a stream that flows at 3 miles an hour. At that instant, a kayaker 14 miles downstream begins paddling upstream at 7 miles per hour. How long will it take him to reach the toy?

I'll give the solution tomorrow.

"I said there was a society of men among us, bred up from their youth in the art of proving by words multiplied for the purpose, that white is black and black is white, according as they are paid. To this society all the rest of the people are slaves. For example, if my neighbour hath a mind to my cow, he hires a lawyer to prove that he ought to have my cow from me. I must then hire another to defend my right, it being against the rules of law that any man should be allowed to speak for himself. Now in this case, I who am the true owner lie under two great disadvantages. First; my lawyer, being practised almost from his cradle in defending falsehood, is quite out of his element when he would be an advocate for justice, which as an office unnatural, he always attempts with great awkwardness, if not with ill-will." — Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels, part IV, ch. 5

A giraffe's tongue is 18 inches long.

Poet Charles Bukowski's gravestone reads "Don't Try."

The longest English word with only one vowel is strengths.

Recruiting poster, 1917.

George Bernard Shaw said, "Patriotism is a pernicious, psychopathic form of idiocy."

spoffish
adj. fussy, officious

If you love megaliths but live south of the equator, check out Stonehenge Aotearoa, located in New Zealand about an hour's drive from Wellington.

It's a replica of Stonehenge adapted for the Southern Hemisphere, with 24 pillars about 4 meters high.

An optical illusion. There is no triangle.

In the 1920s, the U.S. military devised a contingency plan for attacking Canada. After a first strike with poison gas, we'd occupy Halifax, invade Montreal and Quebec from New England, strike at the Great Lakes from Detroit and Buffalo, and impose a naval blockade on British Columbia.

At the same time, Canada's Col. James Sutherland Brown developed a counter-invasion strategy where flying air columns would occupy Seattle, Portland, Oregon, Minneapolis, and St. Paul. Gen. George Pearkes called it a "fantastic desperate plan [that] just might have worked," but it was withdrawn in 1931.