Futility Closet

cacographic
adj. badly written or spelled

When you my friends are passing by,
And this inform you where I lie,
Remember you ere long must have,
Like me, a mansion in the grave,
Also 3 infants, 2 sons and a daughter.

– Tombstone in Pittsfied, Mass., cited in English as She Is Wrote, 1884

Monet lost his vision, but not his hearing.

Beethoven lost his hearing, but not his vision.

The Church of St. George in Lalibela, Ethiopia, was cut from a single block of stone in the 12th century.

See also Rock-Cut Architecture.

(Image: Wikimedia Commons)

What’s unusual about this magic square?

It works just as well upside down:

In the early 1960s, a computer analysis showed that six different authors had written the Epistles of St. Paul.

That would be big news, but it also showed that James Joyce’s Ulysses had been written by five people — none of whom had composed A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

The Third Punic War didn’t end until 1985.

Begun in 149 B.C., the contest never reached a peace treaty because Rome utterly destroyed Carthage. 2,134 years passed before the cities’ mayors “officially” ended the conflict.

In Africa, World War I dawned with a buzz and a howl. The British Indian Army was trying to sneak up on an eastern seaport held by the Germans when they disturbed huge hives of aggressive African bees, which drove them into the sea. “I would never have believed that grown-up men of any race could have been reduced to such shamelessness,” said a British officer. One engineer was stung 300 times.

The Times wrote that the bees had been sprung by the German commander, Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck. When asked about this, he merely smiled and said, “Gott mitt uns.”

“What can be more palpably absurd than the prospect held out of locomotives traveling twice as fast as stagecoaches?” — The Quarterly Review, March 1825

3⁴ × 425 = 34425

31² × 325 = 312325