Misc

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sitta_villosa1.jpg

  • NUTHATCH and UNTHATCH are nearly the same word.
  • Vladivostok is farther south than Venice.
  • Thackeray called George IV’s prose style “lax, maudlin slipslop.”
  • dollop reads the same upside down.
  • “I shall stipulate that I will only go into Heaven on condition that I am never in a room with more than ten people.” — Edward Lear
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Misc

  • Angkor Wat and Machu Picchu are roughly antipodal.
  • WONDER is UNDERWAY in Pig Latin.
  • By convention, current flows from positive to negative in a circuit; electrons, which are negatively charged, move in the opposite direction.
  • The immaculate conception describes the birth of Mary, not Jesus.
  • “A man’s style in any art should be like his dress — it should attract as little attention as possible.” — Samuel Butler

10/22/2024 UPDATE: Interesting addendum from reader Mark Thompson: The capital cities Asunción, Canberra, and Kuwait City are nearly equidistant on great-circle routes:

Kuwait City to Canberra: 12,768 km
Canberra to Asunción: 12,712 km
Asunción to Kuwait City: 12,766 km

“Their mutual distances apart (along the earth’s surface) happen to be very close to one Earth-diameter [12,742 km]: so, sadly, they don’t all lie on a single great circle (since pi is not 3).” (Thanks, Mark.)

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Unquote

“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” — Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda’s Thumb, 1980

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Unquote

“If it were not for the intellectual snobs who pay — in solid cash — the tribute which philistinism owes to culture, the arts would perish with their starving practitioners. Let us thank heaven for hypocrisy.” — Aldous Huxley

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Reflections

Epigrams of poet Ralph Hodgson:

  • Oaths in anguish rank with prayers.
  • The wink was not our best invention.
  • When crises pall, humdrum is sensational.
  • But Woman — in whose image made?
  • A sparrow in a snowstorm with a feather in his bill: that is Faith.
  • Forget the slush, but keep the snow / Of Christmasses of long ago.
  • Anniversary: Familiarity breeds content.
  • Some things have to be believed to be seen.
  • Who shall paraphrase a tear!
  • There’s one thing to be said for sin — it does give conscience exercise.
  • Why not Foremothers?
  • The Golden Rule was called new-fangled, once upon a time.
  • Blessed are the children of a nobody.
  • The handwriting on the wall may be a forgery.

And “The ‘last word’ is only the latest.”

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