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
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?
Changeable State
UNITED ARAB EMIRATES alternates vowels and consonants.
“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
A Lost Hope
Joseph Merrick once told his doctors he wanted to visit a hospital for the blind.
He said he wanted to find a woman who would not be frightened by his appearance.
In a Word
eyeservice
n. work done only while the boss is looking
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
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.
The Great Crush Collision
Apparently bored in 1896, Texas railroad agent William G. Crush decided to make his own fun. He got two 35-ton train engines, painted one green and one red, and set them at opposite ends of a four-mile track. Then he sent them toward each other at 45 mph:
Viewed strictly as a publicity stunt, it was a great success: Crush’s advertising had attracted more than 40,000 spectators. Unfortunately, falling debris killed two of them. Moral: Stick to pinochle.
Good Boy
A dog with a gas mask. “This dog was employed by a sanitary corps in locating wounded soldiers.”
From Francis Whiting Halsey, The Literary Digest History of the World War, 1920.