OPERAS is the plural of OPERA, which is the plural of OPUS.
Away From It All
If you’re looking for a challenge, see if you can reach 82°06’S 54°58’E — it’s the most inaccessible point in Antarctica, the farthest from the ocean and the coldest place in the world.
You’ll know you’ve arrived because you’ll find a bust of Lenin peering weirdly across the ice toward Moscow.
Dig down 20 feet and you’ll uncover a pair of locked doors. Get those open and you can enter an old Soviet research hut, now completely entombed in snow.
And inside the hut is a golden visitors’ book to sign.
Doubletalk
A 12th-century version of the liar paradox:
Socrates swears that he will speak only falsehoods about you.
Then he says, “You are a stone.”
This shows that a man can lie and speak the truth at the same time.
Unquote
“Where there’s a will there’s a won’t.” — Ambrose Bierce
Crashproof
This is clever — in 1895, Henry Latimer Simmons invented ramp-shaped railroad cars:
“When one train meets or overtakes another train, one train will run up the rails carried by the other train, and will run along the rails and descend onto the rails at the other end of the lower train.”
See? With good design, everybody wins.
Naturally
Fielding positions in “Who’s on First?”:
- First base: Who
- Second base: What
- Third base: I Don’t Know
- Left field: Why
- Center field: Because
- Pitcher: Tomorrow
- Catcher: Today
- Shortstop: I Don’t Care
When Dodgers shortstop Chin-Lung Hu singled in a 2007 game against the Padres, announcer Vin Scully said, “And Hu’s on first.”
The Dodge La Femme
Dodge introduced an alluring new option package in 1955: For $143, you could have the Custom Royal Lancer feminized, with rose paint, gold script, and a pink interior complete with rosebuds.
“The first car ever exclusively designed for the woman motorist” came with a rain cape, rain hat, and matching umbrella, plus a pink purse with a compact, lipstick, comb, and cigarette lighter. The marketing brochure read, “By Special Appointment to Her Majesty … the American Woman.”
It went nowhere. Fewer than 1,500 La Femmes were sold, and the model disappeared in 1957.
A Geometry Problem
A poser from 1821:
Mathematicians affirm that of all bodies contained under the same superficies, a sphere is the most capacious: But they have never considered the amazing capaciousness of a body, the name of which is now required, of which it may be truly affirmed, that supposing its greatest length 9 inches, greatest breadth 4 inches, and greatest depth 3 inches, yet under these dimensions it contains a solid foot?
What is this body?
Misc
- SCINTILLESCENT contains 7 pairs of letters.
- Rub two pennies together and you’ll see a third between them.
- Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were born on the same day.
- 1285 = (1 + 28) × 5
- Squeeze an orange peel into a candle flame and you’ll produce a burst of fire.
Land of Opportunity
There are only two places on earth where diamonds can be found at their original volcanic source. The first is South Africa … and the second, improbably, is Arkansas, where visitors to Crater of Diamonds State Park unearth more than 600 diamonds each year.
More than 25,000 have been found to date — including the 40-carat “Uncle Sam,” which Wesley Bassum sold in 1924 for $150,000.
“Let us not be too particular,” wrote Mark Twain. “It is better to have old secondhand diamonds than none at all.”