Best Served Cold

Excerpt from the will of Joseph Dalby, London, 1784:

I give to my daughter Ann Spencer, a guinea for a ring, or any other bauble she may like better: — I give to the lout, her husband, one penny, to buy him a lark-whistle; I also give to her said husband, of redoubtable memory, my fart-hole, for a covering for his lark-whistle, to prevent the abrasion of his lips; and this legacy I give him as a mark of my approbation of his prowess and nice honour, in drawing his sword on me, (at my own table), naked and unarmed as I was, and he well fortified with custard.

The Eye of Sauron

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fomalhaut_with_Disk_Ring_and_extrasolar_planet_b.jpg

The Eye was rimmed with fire, but was itself glazed, yellow as a cat’s, watchful and intent, and the black slit of its pupil opened on a pit, a window into nothing.

That’s a quote from The Fellowship of the Ring, but this image is actually a star. Fomalhaut, 25 light-years away, is one of the brightest stars in the night sky.

Draw your own conclusions.

Read It Aloud

An Arab came to the river side,
With a donkey bearing an obelisk;
But he would not try to ford the tide,
For he had too good an *.

Boston Globe, cited in Carolyn Wells, A Whimsey Anthology, 1906

The Smith Jones Robinson Riddle

http://www.sxc.hu/photo/311973

On a train, Smith, Robinson, and Jones are the fireman, the brakeman, and the engineer (not necessarily respectively). Also aboard the train are three passengers with the same names, Mr. Smith, Mr. Robinson, and Mr. Jones.

(1) Mr. Robinson is a passenger. He lives in Detroit.

(2) The brakeman lives exactly halfway between Chicago and Detroit.

(3) Mr. Jones is a passenger. He earns exactly $20,000 per year.

(4) The brakeman’s nearest neighbor, one of the passengers, earns exactly three times as much as the brakeman.

(5) Smith is not a passenger. He beats the fireman in billiards.

(6) The passenger whose name is the same as the brakeman’s lives in Chicago.

Who is the engineer?

Click for Answer

“Groaning Boards”

Groaning boards were the wonder in London in 1682. An elm plank was exhibited to the king, which, being touched by a hot iron, invariably produced a sound resembling deep groans. At the Bowman tavern, in Drury Lane, the mantelpiece gave forth like sounds, and was supposed to be part of the same elm tree. The dresser at the Queen’s Arm Tavern, St. Martin le Grand, was found to possess the same quality. Strange times, when such things were deemed wonderful — so much so as to merit exhibition before the monarch.

— Frank H. Stauffer, The Queer, the Quaint and the Quizzical, 1882

Stirred, Not Shaken

Beginning work on a new novel in 1953, Ian Fleming found himself stumped for a name for his hero, a British Secret Service agent. His eye strayed across the bookshelves of his Jamaican estate, and he found “just what I needed.”

It was Birds of the West Indies, by James Bond.

DCLXVI

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sainte_Chapelle_01.JPG
Image: Wikimedia Commons

Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia is fear of the number 666, which is linked to Satan and the Antichrist in the Book of Revelation.

Unfortunately, it’s rather hard to avoid. 666 is the sum of the squares of the first seven primes:

666 = 22 + 32 + 52 + 72 + 112 + 132 + 172

Also:

666 = 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 567 + 89

= 123 + 456 + 78 + 9

= 9 + 87 + 6 + 543 + 21

= 13 + 23 + 33 + 43 + 53 + 63 + 53 + 43 + 33 + 23 + 13

In 1989, after his second term as president, Ronald and Nancy Reagan moved to a new home in the Bel-Air section of Los Angeles. They had the address, 666 St. Cloud Road, changed to 668 St. Cloud Road.