“David Hulk Banner”

Silliest British name changes of 2005, according to The Sun:

  • Tim Mind Your Own Business And Kiss My Arsenal Swain
  • Solar Fruitbat Samba
  • Nineteen Sixty-Eight
  • Rhyme-Master Joey Joe Joe Toasterface
  • Jellyfish McSaveloy
  • Nigel Bottomface

In 2002, Richard James of St. Albans agreed to change his name to Mr. Yellow-Rat Foxysquirrel Fairydiddle in exchange for a pint of beer. He paid $70 to make the change official, then realized he didn’t have enough money to change it back.

Dud Bust

In 1979 author Stephen Pile published The Book of Heroic Failures, a celebration of human ineptitude.

The first edition included an application to join the Not Terribly Good Club of Great Britain; this was removed when the club received more than 30,000 applications and was judged a “failure as a failure.”

The club held two “disastrously successful” meetings, during which president Pile was deposed for showing “alarming competence” by preventing a mishap involving a soup tureen. Shameful.

Clerihews

A clerihew is a four-line humorous verse about a well-known person. They’re named for Edmund Clerihew Bentley, who invented them, and they get pretty erudite, for some reason:

Sir Karl Popper
Perpetrated a whopper
When he boasted to the world that he and he alone
Had toppled Rudolf Carnap from his Vienna Circle throne.
(by Armand T. Ringer)

Sir Christopher Wren
Said, “I am going to dine with some men.
If anyone calls,
Say I am designing St Paul’s.”

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Lived upon venison;
Not cheap, I fear,
Because venison’s dear.
(credited to Louis Untermeyer)

George the Third
Ought never to have occurred.
One can only wonder
At so grotesque a blunder.

The world’s densest clerihew was composed, over breakfast, by W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman, in honor of New Yorker poetry editor Howard Moss. It manages to rhyme the names of three people in four lines:

To the Poetry Editor of the New Yorker

Is Robert Lowell
Better than Noël
Coward,
Howard?

Poser

Q: What is the difference between a rhododendron and a cold apple-dumpling?

A: The one is a rhododendron and the other is a cold apple-dumpling.

— Angelo Lewis, Drawing-Room Amusements, 1879

He adds, “You surely wouldn’t wish for a greater difference than that.”

Obscure Holidays

Obscure holidays:

  • Pi Day (March 14, or “3/14”)
  • Pi Approximation Day (22 July, or “22/7”)
  • No Pants Day (the first Friday in May)
  • National Talk In Elevators Day (the last Friday in July)
  • National Underwear Day (August 11)
  • International Orgy Day (September 3)
  • International Talk Like a Pirate Day (September 19)
  • Ask a Stupid Question Day (September 28)
  • October Fool’s Day (October 1) (the Southern Hemisphere’s version of April Fool’s Day)
  • Mole Day (6:02 on 10/23) (ask a chemist)

The first Friday the 13th of the year is “Blame Someone Else Day.”

“An Orthographic Lament”

If an S and an I and an O and a U
With an X at the end spell Su;
And an E and a Y and an E spell I,
Pray what is a speller to do?

Then, if also an S and an I and a G
And an HED spell side,
There’s nothing much left for a speller to do
But to go and commit siouxeyesighed.

— Charles Follen Adams

Limerick

There was a young man of St. Bees
Who was stung in the arm by a wasp.
When they asked, “Does it hurt?”
He replied, “No, it doesn’t;
I’m so glad it wasn’t a hornet.”

— W.S. Gilbert