Her eyes are velvet, soft and fine,
That none can antedate;
Her hair’s fine strands seem all divine,
Her form is, oh! so
Her teeth, like driven snow, are white;
And when she wills to blush
There is no tint can equal quite
Her rounded cheek’s fine
Could I but hold a hand like that
Just once, I would not care
If afterwards I stood quite pat
Forever, on a
— Thomas Lansing Masson
In January 1950, senator Victor Biaka-Boda of French West Africa was touring his homeland when his car broke down in a region with a history of cannibalism.
His charred bones were found in November. Apparently he had been eaten by his constituents.
“If the triangles made a god, they would give him three sides.” — Montesquieu
In a quarry at Baalbek, in modern Lebanon, lies “the stone of the south” — a single hewn stone weighing 1500 tons. It’s not surprising that the ancients abandoned it; if they’d got it out of the quarry it would have been the largest stone ever moved.
But a retaining wall nearby contains a row of three stones weighing 750 tons apiece. Somehow they were raised 22 feet into position. No one knows how.
A currency curiosity discovered by Lewis Carroll:
Write down any number of pounds not more than 12, any number of shillings under 20, and any number of pence under 12. Under the pounds figure write the number of pence, under the shillings the number of shillings, and under the pence the number of pounds, thus reversing the line.
Subtract. [If you need to make exchanges, 1 pound = 20 shillings = 240 pence.]
Reverse the line again.
Add.
“Answer, 12 pounds 18 shillings 11 pence, whatever numbers may have been selected.”
We have heard of the fall of Lucifer, and the fall of Cromwell, and the fall of Wolsey, but one of the pleasantest tumbles upon record was that of a Mr. John Fell, who, when he removed from one part of the metropolis to another, wrote over his door—I Fell from Holborn Hill.
— A Collection of Newspaper Extracts, 1842
At Honolulu on Dec. 12, 1794, the American merchant sloop Lady Washington fired a 13-gun salute to greet the English schooner Jackal.
The Jackal returned the salute — instantly killing the other ship’s captain and several crewmen.
One of its cannon had been loaded with real grapeshot.
A puzzle by Isaac Asimov:
“Name a common English word that contains somewhere in it, at the beginning, end, or middle, the three letters U-F-A in that order.”
I’ll withhold the answer. There’s no trick — it’s an ordinary English word.
Marie Curie’s laboratory papers are still so radioactive that they’re kept in lead-lined boxes.
Researchers who consult them must agree to work at their own risk.
