Artist Kamiel Proost makes miniature paintings on dollar bills.
It’s a good thing he lives in Amsterdam, or he could face six months in the slammer.
Down in Front
George Bush and Dan Quayle are famous for fractured oratory, but the godfather of political malaprops is Sir Boyle Roche, an Irish member of Parliament in the 18th century. Highlights:
- “Mr. Speaker, I smell a rat; I see him forming in the air and darkening the sky; but I’ll nip him in the bud.”
- “While I write this letter, I have a pistol in one hand and a sword in the other.”
- “All along the untrodden paths of the future I can see the footprints of an unseen hand.”
- “He is the kind of opponent who would stab you in front of your face and then stab you in the chest when your back is turned.”
- “We should silence anyone who opposes the right to freedom of speech.”
- “I answer in the affirmative with an emphatic no.”
The best I’ve seen: “It would surely be better to give up, not only a part but, if necessary, the whole of our constitution, to preserve the remainder.”
Blackboard Jumble
Assign your own Bart Simpson chalk message.
The Earth Moved
The New Madrid Compendium collects eyewitness descriptions of the worst earthquake in American history. The Richter scale hadn’t been invented in 1811, but this quake would have measured 8.0:
The vibration of the earth shook down trees, thousands of willows were swept off like a pipe stem, about waist high, and the swamps became high ground, and the high land became low ground, and two islands in the river were so shaken, washed away and sunk, as not to be found.
The kicker: This happened in Missouri, rocking the state hard enough to ring bells in Boston. Seismologists say there’s a 90 percent chance of a magnitude 6.0 to 7.0 quake in the same area before 2040, affecting as much as 20 times the area of a West Coast quake. I wonder if their insurance rates reflect this?
A Great Big Hand
Once thought to be a sign of witchcraft, extra digits are actually the most common developmental abnormality found at birth. About two children in a thousand have extra fingers or toes.
They’re even more common among the Amish, probably due to the “founder effect” — because the original settlers were few, their genetic legacy is amplified among their descendants, and apparently one of them had an extra finger.
If it’s so common, why does it creep people out? Fictional villains from Hannibal Lecter to Count Rugen have been given extra digits, to make them seem alien and somehow menacing.
They’re actually in quite good company. Marilyn Monroe didn’t have extra digits, urban legends notwithstanding, but Anne Boleyn and Winston Churchill both did. And Atlanta Braves pitcher Antonio “The Octopus” Alfonseca was born with six fingers and six toes. I’d like to hear him play the piano.
Unquote
“No one can earn a million dollars honestly.” — William Jennings Bryan
Pushbutton Counseling
The Dr. Phil Random Quote Generator has a simple-minded Texas platitude for every occasion:
- “You don’t need stain-resistant pants to join the circus.”
- “You don’t need a rope to learn about proper dental hygiene.”
- “You don’t need help to throw up in Tijuana.”
Truest observation: “You don’t need tap dancing lessons to hate my guts.”
Fractious
The Your Mom! Joke Directory now has a section for math geeks:
Your mom is so stupid she tried to use substitution to find the definite integral of f(x)=x2 over the interval 0
You might want to bring a baseball bat, just in case.
City Lights
Earth’s city lights, seen by satellite. You can make out major transportation networks: the American interstate highway system, the trans-Siberian railroad, the Nile. 100 years after the invention of electric light, only Antarctica is entirely dark.
National and Regional Card Games
From National and Regional Card Games: “Idioten is a game similar to Shithead, which seems to have quite a long tradition in Norway.”
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