Sam Loyd was only 17 when his “Trick Mules Puzzle” swept the country in 1858. He finally sold it to P.T. Barnum for $10,000.
Print this page and cut out the three pieces along the dashed lines. Now arrange them so that it looks like each jockey is riding a mule. You may overlap the pieces, but you mustn’t fold them.
It’s harder than it looks.
“helen write anna george will give helen apple simpson will shoot bird jack will give helen stick of candy doctor will give mildred medicine mother will make mildred new dress”
— A letter from Helen Keller to a cousin, three and a half months after Annie Sullivan came to teach her
“At 4:00 a.m., the Flying Dutchman crossed our bows. A strange red light as of a phantom ship all aglow, in the midst of which light the masts, spars, and sails of a brig 200 yards distant stood out in strong relief as she came up on the port bow.”
— Prince Albert Victor, duke of Clarence, aboard H.M.S. Inconstant, July 11, 1881.
Thirteen officers and men saw the object, whatever it was, as did the crews of the corvettes Tourmaline and Cleopatra.
Four light aircraft have been flown under the St. Louis arch.
In 1980, Kenneth Swyers tried to parachute onto the span, hoping to jump back off and land on the ground. He slid all the way down one leg and died.
“Against stupidity,” wrote Schiller, “the gods themselves contend in vain.”
A flight attendant once asked Muhammad Ali to fasten his seat belt.
Ali said, “Superman don’t need no seat belt.”
The attendant replied, “Superman don’t need no airplane, either.”
“Eight Degrees of Drunkenness”:
— Thomas Nash, 1592
Just how much food the brain worker needs is a question which has not yet been decided. In general it appears that a man or a woman whose occupation is what we call sedentary, who is without vigorous exercise and does but little hard muscular work, needs much less than the man at hard manual labor, and that the brain worker needs comparatively little of carbohydrates or fats.
Many physicians, physiologists and students of hygiene have become convinced that well-to-do people, whose work is mental rather than physical, eat too much; that the diet of people of this class as a whole is one-sided as well as excessive, and that the principal evil is the use of too much fat, starch and sugar.
— Public School Domestic Science by Mrs. J. Hoodless, 1898
callipygous
adj. having beautiful buttocks
Mount Rushmore is incomplete. Artist Gutzon Borglum had planned to sculpt the four presidents from head to waist, but he died before he could finish the job.
Mahatma Gandhi’s “seven modern sins”:
