Futility Closet

Take … a common visiting-card, and bend down the two ends, and place it on a smooth table, as represented in the annexed diagram, and then ask any one to blow it over.

This seems easy enough; yet it is next door to an impossibility. Still, it is to be done by blowing sharply and not too hard on the table, about an inch from the card.

– Frank Bellew, The Art of Amusing, 1866

Amiable together.
Am I able to get her?

Suppose you flip three fair coins.

Necessarily two will match, and it's an even chance whether the third will be head or tail.

Therefore the chance that all three will match is 1/2.

cingulomania
n. a desire to hold another in one's arms

Also:

basorexia
n. a craving to kiss

When Martha Mitchell, the wife of Nixon attorney general John Mitchell, began to claim that the White House was engaged in illegal activities, she was rumored to be mentally ill.

But events proved her right. Nixon later told David Frost, "If it hadn't been for Martha Mitchell, there'd have been no Watergate."

Psychologists remember this as the "Martha Mitchell effect" — when a client insists that he's being chased by the mob, or that the police have been spying on him, he's not necessarily delusional. In the words of psychotherapist Joseph Berke, "even paranoids have enemies."

Fly due south from Key West, Fla., and you'll pass entirely west of South America.

The following ludicrous direction to a letter was copied verbatim from the original and interesting document:—

too dad Tomas
hat the ole oke
otchut
I O Bary pade
Sur plees to let ole feather have this sefe.

The letter found the gentleman at 'The Old Oak Orchard, Tenbury.' In another letter, the writer, after a severe struggle to express 'Scotland,' succeeded at length to his satisfaction, and wrote it thus: 'stockling.' A third letter was sent by a woman to a son who had settled in Tennessee, which the old lady had thus expressed with all phonetic simplicity, '10 S C.'

– Robert Conger Pell, Milledulcia, 1857

"There is no moral precept that does not have something inconvenient about it." — Denis Diderot

In 1939 a Great Dane was officially enlisted in the Royal Navy. "Just Nuisance" earned his name by lying at the top of the gangplanks at a South African dockyard. When he began to follow sailors onto local trains, the Navy decided to accept him as a sailor, thus supporting morale (and granting him free rail travel).

Nuisance generally stayed ashore, and his record shows that he went AWOL, lost his collar, and was found sleeping in a petty officer's bed. But his faithfulness eventually earned him a promotion to Able Seaman, and he was even "wed" to another Great Dane, producing five puppies that were auctioned off in Cape Town.

He was discharged in 1944 and buried later that year with full naval honors, and he's remembered today with an annual parade of Great Danes in Simon's Town.

These sentences read the same backward as forward:

• King, are you glad you are king?
• So patient a doctor to doctor a patient so.
• Dollars make men covetous, then covetous men make dollars.
• Husband by murdered wife lies cold, and cold lies wife, murdered by husband.