What?

If a train remains at the station from two to two to two-two (from 1:58 to 2:02), a passenger who misses it must wait from two-two to two to two.

Tom, while playing a game of Scrabble against Dick, who, while considering the last word that Harry (who had had HAD) had had had had, had had HAD, had had HAD. Had HAD had more letters, he would have played it.

Wouldn’t the sentence “I want to insert a hyphen between the words Fish and And and And and Chips in my Fish And Chips sign” have been clearer if quotation marks had been placed before Fish, and between Fish and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and Chips — and after Chips?

Every spring, the town of March in Cambridgeshire holds a “long, flat, pointless walk” across the Fens to Cambridge. “It has no purpose other than to be called the March March march.” There is an associated song, which is sometimes called the “March March March March.”

| Language

Homework

In March 1893, weary and vexed in his work classifying ancient finger rings, German archaeologist H.V. Hilprecht went to bed and dreamed that a tall priest led him to a Babylonian treasure chamber. The priest explained that the fragments were not finger rings but earrings for a statue of the god Ninib, cut from a votive cylinder sent by King Kirigalzu to the temple of Bel. “If you will put the two together you will have a confirmation of my words,” he said. “But the third ring you have not yet found in the course of your excavations, and you never will find it.”

“With this the priest disappeared,” Hilprecht wrote. “I awoke at once, and immediately told my wife the dream, that I might not forget it. Next morning — Sunday — I examined the fragments once more in the light of these disclosures, and to my astonishment found all the details of the dream precisely verified in so far as the means of verification were in my hands. The original inscription on the votive cylinder read: ‘To the god Ninib, son of Bel, his lord, has Kurigalzu, pontifex of Bel, presented this.'”

(Reported in The American Naturalist, October 1896)

| Oddities

The Mensa Diet

Finding himself hot and overweight at an Air Force base during World War II, Jerry Salny decided he could shed pounds by drinking scotch and soda. Here’s his reasoning:

  • It takes 1 calorie of heat to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water by 1° Celsius.
  • A glass holds about 200 cc of scotch, soda, and ice. Its temperature is 0° Celsius.
  • As he drinks the scotch and soda, his body must supply enough heat to raise 200 grams to body temperature, or 37°C.
  • That’s 200 grams × 37°C, or 7,400 calories.
  • “Since all the calorie books show scotch as having 100 calories per ounce, and none at all for the soda, we should be able to drink scotch and soda all day and lose weight like mad.”

“This has been tried,” Salny reported, “and although the experimenter hasn’t lost any weight in the process, he doesn’t worry about it much anymore.”

Why doesn’t it work?

Click for Answer
| Puzzles · Science & Math

Oh

Dylan Thomas’ 1954 play Under Milk Wood is set in the town of Llareggub.

Is that a real Welsh village? Or is it a stand-in for Laugharne, where Thomas lived in the 1930s?

Neither — read it backward.

| Literature

“Instance of Extraordinary Affection in a Badger”

The following circumstance is related in a letter to a friend from Chateau de Venours:–

‘Two persons were on a short journey, and passing through a hollow way, a dog which was with them started a badger, which he attacked, and pursued, till he look shelter in a burrow under a tree. With some pains they hunted him out, and killed him. … Not having a rope, they twisted some twigs, and drew him along the road by turns. They had not proceeded far, when they heard a cry of an animal in seeming distress, and stopping to see from whence it proceeded, another badger approached them slowly. They at first threw stones at it, notwithstanding which it drew near, came up to the dead animal, began to lick it, and continued its mournful cry. The men, surprised at this, desisted from offering any further injury to it, and again drew the dead one along as before; when the living badger, determining not to quit its dead companion, lay down on it, taking it gently by one ear, and in that manner was drawn into the midst of the village; nor could dogs, boys, or men induce it to quit its situation by any means, and to their shame be it said, they had the inhumanity to kill it, and afterwards to burn it, declaring it could be no other than a witch.’

— Pierce Egan, Sporting Anecdotes, Original and Selected, 1822

See also “Monkeys Demanding Their Dead.”

| Oddities