Futility Closet

When calculating prodigy Truman Henry Safford was 10 years old, the Rev. H.W. Adams asked him to square the number 365,365,365,365,365,365 in his head. Dr. Adams wrote:

He flew around the room like a top, pulled his pantaloons over the tops of his boots, bit his hands, rolled his eyes in their sockets, sometimes smiling and talking, and then seeming to be in agony, until in not more than a minute said he, 133,491,850,208,566,925,016,658,299,941,583,255!

Safford (1836-1901) went to Harvard and became director of the Hopkins Observatory at Williams College. Strangely, his calculating abilities seemed to wane as he got older.

This relief appears on an 18th-century monument on the grounds of Shugborough Hall, a country estate in Staffordshire, England. The shepherds are pointing to this inscription:

    O•U•O•S•V•A•V•V
D•                   M•

What does it mean? No one knows. If it's a ciphertext, no one's been able to solve it, and that includes the codebreakers at Bletchley Park, who cracked the German Enigma code in World War II.

If you can decipher it, there may be a reward in it for you: Some say the message contains a clue to the location of the Holy Grail.

When Cleopatra was born, the Great Pyramid was already 2,500 years old.

It is well known that during the French Revolution, the wood Kusel, near Deux Ponts, was often the scene of various actions, and that the Prussians encamped in it a considerable time; consequently the wood was so nearly ruined, that only a few oak trees were left standing here and there. These trees were sold in the month of March last, 1803, and one lot fell to a citizen of Strasburgh for fifty florins. Soon afterwards ordering two of them to be cut down, one of them, the largest, was no sooner divided for the purpose of removal, than to the astonishment of the labourers they discovered a human skeleton, from which all the flesh having wasted away, nothing remained near the body at the bottom of the tree but some bits of blue cloth, and part of a hat. A purse half decayed was also found, containing about 100 louis d'ors in gold; and from the buttons upon the blue cloth, it was concluded that the deceased had been a Prussian officer, who not knowing the tree to be hollow, was probably sleeping near the top of the trunk of it, had slipped in, and from cold, or a variety of circumstances, being unable to extricate himself, had there perished. The fact, however, can be attested by the proprietor, the purchaser of the trees, and several other persons.

– Kirby's Wonderful and Scientific Museum, 1803

In the early morning hours of Feb. 25, 1942, someone reported a mysterious object flying over Southern California, and L.A. briefly went nuts. A blackout was ordered, sirens were sounded, and the military fired more than 1,400 anti-aircraft shells into the night sky. Some said they struck the object; certainly they struck several buildings, and killed three civilians.

No one knows what really happened that night. The object could have been a weather balloon, a blimp, a Japanese fire balloon, or nothing at all. Navy secretary Frank Knox chalked the whole episode up to war nerves. With three local residents dead of heart attacks, that seems as good an explanation as any.

"I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library." — Jorge Luis Borges

Most people think of palindromes as being symmetrical arrangements of letters:

SIT ON A POTATO PAN, OTIS.

But they can also work at the level of individual words:

FALL LEAVES AFTER LEAVES FALL.

YOU CAN CAGE A SWALLOW, CAN'T YOU, BUT YOU CAN'T SWALLOW A CAGE, CAN YOU?

And even phonetically: The Hungarian phrase a bátya gatyába ("the brother in underpants") and the Japanese ta-ke-ya-bu ya-ke-ta ("a bamboo grove has been burned") (both transliterated here) sound the same when reversed.

Bonus palindrome, from Stephen Fry:

RETTEBS IFLAHD NOCES, EH? TTU, BUT THE SECOND HALF IS BETTER.

Hate exponents? Just cancel them:

See also Reductio Ad Absurdum.

Who wants my jellyfish?
I'm not sellyfish!

– Ogden Nash

The Spectator once ran a competition asking its readers "What would you most like to read on opening the morning paper?" One reader submitted this entry:

Our Second Competition

The First Prize in the second of this year's competitions goes to Mr. Arthur Robinson, whose witty entry was easily the best of those we received. His choice of what he would like to read on opening his paper was headed, 'Our Second Competition,' and was as follows: 'The First Prize in the second of this year's competitions goes to Mr. Arthur Robinson, whose witty entry was easily the best of those we received. His choice of what he would like to read on opening his paper was headed "Our Second Competition," but owing to paper restrictions we cannot print all of it.'