“Any man who can drive safely while kissing a pretty girl is simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves.” — Albert Einstein
“The Quick Brown Fox …”
A pangram is a sentence that contains every letter of the alphabet:
- John P. Brady, give me a black walnut box of quite a small size. (48 letters)
- Quixotic knights’ wives are found on jumpy old zebras. (44)
- By Jove, my quick study of lexicography won a prize. (41)
- Sympathizing would fix Quaker objectives. (36)
- Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz. (31)
- Foxy nymphs grab quick-jived waltz. (29)
- Brick quiz whangs jumpy veldt fox. (27)
The 26-letter ones are nearly incomprehensible:
- Nth black fjords vex Qum gyp wiz.
Or “An esteemed Iranian shyster was provoked when he himself was cheated: an alleged seaside ski resort he purchased proved instead to be a glacier of countless oil-abundant fjords.”
I Yam What I Yam
During the Depression, spinach farmers in Crystal City, Texas, erected a statue of Popeye — the cartoon character almost singlehandedly saved the spinach industry.
All the News …
The heaviest newspaper ever printed was the New York Times of Sunday, Sept. 14, 1987.
At 1,612 pages, it weighed more than 12 pounds.
Cadaeic Cadenza
Opening excerpt from “Cadaeic Cadenza,” a short story written in 1996 by Mike Keith:
One
A Poem: A Raven
Midnights so dreary, tired and weary,
Silently pondering volumes extolling all by-now obsolete lore.
During my rather long nap — the weirdest tap!
An ominous vibrating sound disturbing my chamber’s antedoor.
“This,” I whispered quietly, “I ignore.” …
If you write out the number of letters in each word, they form the first 3,834 digits of pi.
Longest Hollywood Resume
Christopher Lee has 211 screen credits, more than any other living actor. He’s performed in English, French, Canadian, German, Russian, Norwegian, Swedish, Italian, Pakistani, Spanish, Japanese, American, Australian and New Zealand productions.
If that’s not impressive enough, he’s also 6 foot 5 and a direct descendent of Charlemagne.
The Weather Outside Is Frightful …
What are these?
They’re snow crystals, magnified by a scanning electron microscope.
A Word to the Wise
“Servants are a necessary evil. He who shall contrive to obviate their necessity, or remove their inconveniences, will render to human comfort a greater benefit than has yet been conferred by all the useful-knowledge societies of the age. They are domestic spies, who continually embarrass the intercourse of the members of a family, or possess themselves of private information that renders their presence hateful, and their absence dangerous. It is a rare thing to see persons who are not controlled by their servants. Theirs, too, is not the only kitchen cabinet which begins by serving and ends by ruling.”
– From The Laws of Etiquette, by “A Gentleman,” 1836
In a Word
petrichor
n. pleasant smell accompanying the first rain after a dry spell
The Stars Align
It’s only a happy accident that our moon “fits” over the sun’s disc during a solar eclipse. The sun is 400 times the diameter of the moon, but it’s nearly 400 times farther from Earth, so to us the two have almost exactly the same angular size.
(Image: Wikimedia Commons)
