Futility Closet

Write down any number:

886328712442992

Count up the number of even and odd digits, and the total number of digits:

10 5 15

String those together to make a new number, and perform the same operation on that:

10515

1 4 5

And keep iterating:

145

1 2 3

You’ll always arrive at 123.

What was the wonderful work of Mark Scalliot? Probably the smallest lock and key ever made. He was a London blacksmith, and this piece of mechanism (1578) was of iron, steel, and brass, all of which, with a pipe-key to it, weighed but one grain of gold. He also made a chain of gold, consisting of forty-three links, and having fastened the chain to the lock and key, he put the chain around the neck of a flea. The flea could hop around with ease in spite of the weight. The lock, key, chain and animal, all in a lump, weighed only one grain and a half.

– Albert Plympton Southwick, Handy Helps, No. 1, 1886

Each book in Dante’s Divine Comedy ends with the word stars.

decumbiture
n. the act of going to bed when sick

Let the rich, great, and noble banquet in the festal halls,
And pass the hours away, as the most thoughtless revel;
Then seek the poor man’s dreary home, whose very dingy walls
Proclaim full well to all how low his rank and level.

“Take away one letter from a word in the above stanza, and substitute another, leaving the word so metamorphosed still a word of the English language; and, by that change, totally alter the syntactical construction of the whole sentence, changing the moods and tenses of verbs, turning verbs into nouns, nouns into adjectives, and adjectives into adverbs, &c., and so make the entire stanza bear quite a different meaning from that which it has as it stands above.”

Click for solution …

In a dialogue prefixed to Lessius’ Hygiasticon (1634), a glutton reforms himself by arguing with his own echo:

Gl. My belly I do deifie.
Echo. Fie.
Gl. Who curbs his appetite ‘s a fool.
Echo. Ah, fool!
Gl. I do not like this abstinence.
Echo. Hence.
Gl. My joy ‘s a feast, my wish is wine.
Echo. Swine.
Gl. We epicures are happie, truely.
Echo. You lie.
Gl. Who ‘s that which giveth me the lie?
Echo. I.
Gl. What? Echo, thou that mock’st a voice?
Echo. A voice!
Gl. May I not, Echo, eat my fill?
Echo. Ill.
Gl. Will ‘t hurt me if I drink too much?
Echo. Much.
Gl. Thou mock’st me, Nymph! I’ll not beleeve ‘t.
Echo. Beleeve ‘t.
Gl. Dost thou condemne, then, what I do?
Echo. I do.
Gl. I grant it doth exhaust the purse.
Echo. Worse.
Gl. Is ‘t this which dulls the sharpest wit?
Echo. Best wit.
Gl. Is ‘t this which brings infirmities?
Echo. It is.
Gl. Whither will ‘t bring my soul? canst tell?
Echo. T’ Hell.
Gl. Dost thou no gluttons vertuous know?
Echo. No.
Gl. Would’st have me temperate till I die?
Echo. I.
Gl. Shall I therein finde ease and pleasure?
Echo. Yea, sure.
Gl. But is ‘t a thing which profit brings?
Echo. It brings.
Gl. To minde or bodie? or to both?
Echo. To both.
Gl. Will it my life on earth prolong?
Echo. O, long!
Gl. Will ‘t make me vigorous untill death?
Echo. Till death.
Gl. Will ‘t bring me to eternal blisse?
Echo. Yes.
Gl. Then, sweetest Temperance, I’ll love thee.
Echo. I love thee.
Gl. Then, swinish Gluttonie, I’ll leave thee.
Echo. I’ll leave thee.
Gl. I’ll be a belly-god no more.
Echo. No more.
Gl. If all be true which thou dost tell,
They who fare sparingly fare well.
Echo. Farewell!

Natural erosion carved this image out of the soil in southeastern Alberta.

Inspired, someone gave it a counterpart on the other side of the world.

Koko the gorilla is famous for mastering more than 1,000 signs based on American Sign Language, which she uses to communicate with Stanford researchers.

That’s not all she’s learned from humans. One day her attendants discovered that a steel sink in her enclosure had been torn from its moorings. When they confronted her, she pointed to her pet kitten.

“Cat did it,” she signed.

“I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.” — Willa Cather