“A Time-Series Analysis of My Girlfriend’s Mood Swings”
“Behavioral Conditioning Methods to Stop My Boyfriend From Playing The Witcher 3”
“Sub-Nyquist Sampling While Listening to My Girlfriend”
“Who Should Do the Dishes? A Transportation Problem Solution”
“Freudian Psychoanalysis of My Boyfriend’s Gun Collection”
“The Future of Romance: Novel Techniques for Replacing Your Boyfriend With Generative AI”
“Winning Tiffany Back: How to Defeat an AI Boyfriend”
Via r/ImmaterialScience.
For a fictional character, Sherlock Holmes has a strangely real presence in the physical world. This plaque is posted near the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland:
This one’s on a cottage in Sussex:
There’s even a plaque at the spot where Holmes met Watson.
Naturalist Gilbert White, author of Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne, seems to have had an imaginary contemporary nemesis. Someone has posted this plaque on the house opposite White’s 18th-century Hampshire home:
(Black is the opposite of white, and Sullivan is the opposite, or at least the complement, of Gilbert.)
Finally, this plaque adorns the Park Street Eye Clinic in Tauranga, New Zealand:
Accurate enough.
(Thanks to readers Tom Race, Brieuc de Grangechamps, and Derek Christie.)
Found this on the Wikimedia Commons — a self-obligating graffito.
Plaque at St. Ann’s Well, Malvern, Worcestershire, August 2009.
Conclusion of a 2021 investigation by physicist Eve Armstrong of her cat’s reactions to a laser pointer:
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fffscinating and merits further investigation.
(Eve Armstrong, “My Cat Chester’s Dynamical Systems Analysyyyyy7777777777777777y7is of the Laser Pointer and the Red Dot on the Wall: Correlation, Causation, or SARS-Cov-2 Hallucination?”, arXiv preprint arXiv:2103.17058 [2021].)
Charles Craik of Weston-super-Mare received this enigmatic postcard from a friend in 1901 and sent it on to the Strand:
I think it rather cleverly done, and it took me some time before I could understand its meaning.
The principal message is on the big island in the centre of the map — an invitation to meet the sender at a café, with the day. The name of the island below on the left-hand side is at once translated, ‘If so, do.’ The names of the land at the bottom of the map are meant for ‘Same time and place as before’ and ‘Don’t let anything hinder you’ respectively.
The following is a translation beginning at the top and working to the right: ‘Straights of cash. If you don’t come, all sorts of ills befall you. Come early. Let me know if you can come or not. I say, there’s a peculiar thing! You’re getting it by degrees. Can’t you see? Bay rhum. Get your hair cut! Deuced bad straights. See you later. Don’t you see? Devil take you. You are a merry cus! Good old flipper. Love to all. Oh! Tut, tut. R.S.V.P. Yours ever, Guy.’
In a 1901 parody edition, the journal Mind! offered £1,000 to any philosopher who could produce adequate documentary evidence that he:
“At first sight it might seem as though the Twelve Labours of Hercules would be in comparison with this a slighter achievement,” the editors wrote. “But in view of the extensive and peculiar knowledge of the Absolute’s Mind which is now possessed by so many philosophers, a large number of solutions may confidently be expected.”
There are several simple little drawing tricks which the nurse may use to arouse the interest of her patient as she uses puzzles and catches. The oldest of these is by Hogarth and represents a soldier and his dog going through a doorway. As is seen by the diagram, it consists of three straight lines and one curved one.
— William Rush Dunton, Occupation Therapy, 1915
In the 1950s, humorist Roger Price invented “Droodles,” simple enigmatic drawings explained by their captions. Frank Zappa used one on the cover of a 1982 album:
It’s called Ship Arriving Too Late to Save a Drowning Witch.
I just found this in a 1950 issue of Pi Mu Epsilon Journal:
Question: How many legs has a horse?
Answer: Twelve; two in front, two behind, two on each side, and one in each corner.
Later in the same volume, Marlow Sholander shows that in fact every horse has an infinite number of legs.
That’s to say nothing of color. And see Chasing Leo.
Excerpts from letters received by the British pensions office, quoted in George Lyttelton’s Commonplace Book, 2002:
