Newport, Ore., and Boston, Mass., contain signs directing motorists to one another, despite being more than 3,000 miles apart.
They’re at opposite ends of U.S. Route 20.
Likewise Sacramento, Calif., and Ocean City, Md., at either end of Route 50. Wilmington, N.C., used to reciprocate with Barstow, Calif., at the other end of Interstate 40, but gave up because the sign kept getting stolen.
In the 1890s, traveler Henry Attwell found that the residents of rural Holland used their hands to recall which months of the year have 31 days:
The knuckles of the hand represent months of thirty-one days, and the spaces between represent months of thirty days. Thus, the first knuckle is January (thirty-one), the first space February (twenty-eight or twenty-nine, the exception), the second knuckle March (thirty-one), the second space April (thirty), &c. The fourth knuckle, July (thirty-one), is followed by the first [of the other hand], August [thirty-one], and so on, until the third knuckle is reached a second time. This sequence of two knuckles corresponds with the only sequence of months (July and August) which have each thirty-one days.
“This memoria tecnica certainly gives a more ready result than the rhyme [‘Thirty Days Hath September’].”
(From Angus Trumble, The Finger: A Handbook, 2010.)
Butterflies in the genus Diaethria are commonly called “eighty-eights” because their wings bear a pattern that resembles the number 88 or 89.
The Australian ringneck parrot has four subspecies, one of which is known as the 28 parrot for its triple-noted call, which sounds like “twentee-eight.”
belute
v. to cover with mud or dirt
lutose
adj. covered with mud
squage
v. to dirty with handling
Every regulation major league baseball, roughly 240,000 per season, is rubbed with “magic mud” from a single source, a tributary of the Delaware River. It’s harvested by a single man, 62-year-old Jim Bintliff, who keeps the precise location secret even from Major League Baseball.
“I know the mud,” he told Sports Illustrated. “I’m the only one on the planet who does.”
(Thanks, Peter.)
… is an 11-letter word that contains 11 curved lines and 11 straight lines.
THREE = 03
Advance each character in that expression four steps in the alphabet or the number line and you get:
XLVII = 47
(Discovered by Dave Morice and Daniel McGrath. From “Kickshaws,” Word Ways 32:4 [November 1999], 283-293.)
Muhammad Ali’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame is the only one not set in the pavement — it hangs on a wall near the entrance to the Dolby Theatre.
When he accepted the honor in 2002, Ali said, “I bear the name of our beloved Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, and it is impossible that I allow people to trample over his name.”
(Thanks, Eloy and Alejandro.)
Before 1997 there were exactly three countries in the world that were both geographically contiguous and alphabetically adjacent in a list of nations. (One country changed its name.) What were they?
There are almost exactly as many inches in a mile (63,360) as there are astronomical units in a light-year (63,241.1).
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