To a dining companion, William Hogarth once sent a card inscribed with a knife, a fork, and these letters:
Η Β Π
It was an invitation to “eta beta pi.”
Exasperated that Nicholas Rowe kept borrowing his snuffbox, Samuel Garth wrote these letters on the lid:
Φ Ρ
“Fie! Rowe!”
Their friend John Dennis observed, “A man who could make so vile a pun would not scruple to pick a pocket.”
Before eating the forbidden fruit, Adam and Eve either knew that disobeying God was evil or they didn’t.
If they didn’t, then they can’t be blamed for disobeying him.
If they did, then they already possessed the knowledge that God had forbidden.
Either way, God could not justly banish them from Eden.
(Adduced by Richard R. La Croix.)
Modern meteorologists might envy Patrick Murphy: In compiling his Weather Almanac for the Year 1838, Murphy had made a year’s forecasts at once, including the prediction that Jan. 20 would be “fair” with probably the “lowest degree of winter temperature.”
The weather complied in spades: On Jan. 20 the thermometer plunged 56 degrees and stood below zero for several hours, marking the coldest day of the century. Such a throng filled Murphy’s London shop that police were called in to keep order, and the forecaster was immortalized in verse:
Murphy has a weather eye,
He can tell whene’er he pleases
Whether it will be wet or dry,
When it thaws and when it freezes.
The almanac made £7,000 and went through 50 reprintings, and for many years afterward the winter of 1837-38 was remembered as Murphy’s Winter.
Somehow he never repeated the feat, though.
See Lucky Guess.
If vampires are immortal, must feed regularly, and make a new vampire of each victim …
… shouldn’t we all be vampires by now?
Worshipful natives are rolling a giant statue of me across their island. The statue rests on a slab, which rests on rollers that have a circumference of 1 meter each. How far forward will the slab have moved when the rollers have made 1 revolution?