Futility Closet

In central Bahrain stands a large mesquite known as the Tree of Life. It's the only tree that survives in this part of the desert, and it's been here for 400 years. No one knows where it's finding water and nutrients.

See also Spectacularly Bad Driving.

imparlibidinous
adj. pertaining to an unequal state of desire between two people

A Lusitanian physician had a patient who insisted upon it he was perpetually frozen, and would sit before a great fire even in the dog-days. The Portuguese Esculapius procured him a dress of rough sheep skins, saturated with aqua vita, and set him on fire. The patient then declared he was quite warm, rather too much so, and was cured.

– Cabinet of Curiosities, Natural, Artificial, and Historical, 1822

More nouns of assemblage:

• a business of ferrets
• a cartload of chimpanzees
• a coalition of cheetahs
• a congress of baboons
• a gang of elk
• a huddle of penguins
• a kaleidoscope of butterflies
• a labour of moles
• a prickle of porcupines
• a quarrel of sparrows
• a romp of otters
• a tiding of magpies
• a tower of giraffes
• a ubiquity of sparrows
• a whiteness of swans
• a zeal of zebras

My sources insist that a group of gnus is called an implausibility. Should I believe them?

"Two apparent prints or impressions of the human foot in a tabular mass of limestone," discussed in Schoolcraft's Travels in the Central Portions of the Mississippi Valley, 1825:

The rock containing these interesting impressions is a compact limestone of a grayish blue color. It was originally quarried on the left bank of the Mississippi at St. Louis, and is a part of the extensive range of calcareous rocks upon which that town is built. Foundations of private dwellings, and the military works erected by the French and Spaniards, from this material, sixty years ago, are still as solid and unbroken as when first laid.

"The probability … of their having been imparted by some individual of a race of men who were unacquainted with the art of tanning skins, and at a period much anterior to that to which any tradition of the present race of Indians reaches, derives additional weight from this peculiar shape of the feet."

Higgamus hoggamus
"Anton Von Leewenhoek
Has a small problem," con-
Fided his wife.

"Microbiology
Doesn't disturb me; his
Microanatomy's
Blighting my life!"

– Theodore L. Drachman

2025 = (20 + 25)²
3025 = (30 + 25)²
9801 = (98 + 01)²

When the Russian prince Dimitri, the son of Ivan II, was assassinated on May 15, 1591, at Uglich, his place of exile, the great bell of that town rang the signal of insurrection. For this serious political offence the bell was sentenced to perpetual banishment in Siberia, and conveyed with other exiles to Tobolsk. After a long period of solitary confinement it was partially purged of its iniquity by conjuration and re-consecration and suspended in the tower of a church in the Siberian capital; but not until 1892 was it fully pardoned and restored to its original place in Uglich. A like sentence was imposed by a Russian tribunal on a butting ram in the latter half of the seventeenth century.

– E.P. Evans, The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals, 1906

Countries with the lowest high points:

1. Maldives: 2 meters
2. Tuvalu: 5 meters
3. Tokelau: 5 meters
4. Cocos (Keeling) Islands: 5 meters
5. Marshall Islands: 10 meters
6. Cayman Islands: 43 meters
7. Turks and Caicos Islands: 49 meters
8. The Gambia: 53 meters
9. The Bahamas: 63 meters
10. Anguilla: 65 meters

The Maldives may eventually disappear altogether — sea levels have risen about 20 centimeters in the last century.

"To be agreeable in society, you must consent to be taught many things which you already know." — Talleyrand