Pearl Harbor as seen from a Japanese attack plane.
“I can run wild for six months,” Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto had predicted. “After that, I have no expectation of success.”
Elephant Knees
The elephant is the only animal with four knees.
Original Lyrics for “Yesterday”
Paul McCartney’s working lyrics for “Yesterday”:
Scrambled eggs
Have an omelette with some Muenster cheese
Put your dishes in the wash bin please
So I can clean the scrambled eggs
Join me do
There’s a lot of eggs for me and you
I’ve got ham and cheese and bacon too
So go get two and join me do
Fried or sunny side
Just aren’t right
The mix-bowl begs
Quick, go get a pan, and we’ll scramble up some eggs, eggs, eggs, eggs
Scrambled eggs
Good for breakfast, dinner time or brunch
Don’t buy six or twelve, buy a bunch
And we’ll have a lunch on scrambled eggs
“The song was around for months and months before we finally completed it,” John Lennon remembered. “We made up our minds that only a one-word title would suit; we just couldn’t find the right one. Then one morning Paul woke up and the song and the title were both there, completed. I was sorry in a way, we’d had so many laughs about it.”
Largest Organism
What’s the largest living thing in the world? It depends:
- Savannah elephants get up to 26,400 pounds, and of course some land dinosaurs were far larger.
- In the ocean, the blue whale can reach 100 feet and weigh 150 tons. It’s thought to be the largest animal that’s ever lived.
- There’s a fungus in Oregon’s Malheur National Forest that fills 2,200 acres, but technically it’s not one individual organism.
- Likewise, there are some stands of aspens that grow from one gigantic root system. One covers 200 acres and weighs an estimated 6,600 tons.
- Australia’s Great Barrier Reef stretches for 2000 kilometers — it’s not a single creature, but it’s certainly the world’s largest “superorganism.”
- The overall winning candidate is probably this tree, California’s “General Sherman.” It’s 274 feet tall and 36 feet thick at the base, with a trunk volume of 1,487 cubic meters.
The largest bacterium ever discovered, by the way, is Thiomargarita namibiensis — it grows to 0.75 mm in diameter, which means you can see it with the naked eye. Eww.
In a Word
supellectile
adj. of the nature of furniture
Unquote
“I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.” — Douglas Adams
Fayum Mummy Portraits
This is Eutyches, a young boy who died in Egypt during the Roman Empire. How do we know this? Because this portrait was stuffed inside his mummy.
This was actually a common practice in the Fayum region of ancient Egypt, and it’s given us some of the best-preserved paintings from ancient times.
Artists would paint the portraits on wooden panels, using hot, pigmented wax, and they’ve survived remarkably well in the region’s dry heat.
CAT scans show that the portraits match their mummies in age and sex, and they’re strikingly naturalistic, though reportedly a little formulaic.
Many, like Eutyches, were children, a sad mark of the era’s low life expectancy.
Dorothy Parker and Ogden Nash
Dorothy Parker wrote:
Men seldom make passes
At girls who wear glasses.
Ogden Nash responded:
A girl who is bespectacled
She may not get her nectackled
But safety pins and bassinets
Await the girl who fassinets.
John Ritter’s Hospital
By coincidence, John Ritter died in the same hospital in which he was born.
A Postman’s Nightmare
Good luck delivering a letter in Baarle-Nassau. The Dutch municipality contains 24 Belgian exclaves — “islands” of Belgium “floating” in the Netherlands.
Worse, those islands contain islands: The 24 Belgian exclaves contain seven Dutch exclaves. Bring a map.