In May 2005, someone delivered a box of ashes to the council chambers of Queanbeyan, a city in New South Wales, Australia. It was engraved with the words “Elizabeth Clarke Cunningham, Aged 59 years, Died 13 June 1997.”
The box was passed on to the New South Wales police, but no one has been able to discover who Cunningham was, whether she had any relatives, or who delivered her ashes.
There are only two books in the Bible that do not contain the word God.
They are Esther and Song of Solomon.
The word eternity occurs only once in the King James Bible (in Isaiah 57, verse 15).
“The next day I was sad and sick at heart, for I felt how dull it was to be thus cut off from all the rest of the world. I had no great wish for work: but there was too much to be done for me to dwell long on my sad lot. Each day as it came, I went off to the wreck to fetch more things; and I brought back as much as the raft would hold.”
— From Robinson Crusoe in Words of One Syllable by Mary Godolphin, 1869
You’d think it would be an honor to appear on a magazine cover, but at Sports Illustrated it’s a curse. Braves third baseman Eddie Mathews appeared on the magazine’s very first issue, then suffered a hand injury a week later and missed seven games. Here’s what happened to other cover subjects:
The magazine acknowledged the jinx by putting a black cat on a 2002 issue. Rams quarterback Kurt Warner refused to pose with the cat — and the Rams won their next two games and their second consecutive NFC championship.
The Bavarian village of Oberammergau has a special deal with God. While the bubonic plague was ravaging Europe, the town’s citizens vowed that if they were spared they would perform a play every 10 years depicting the life and death of Jesus.
God, apparently, accepted. The death rate among adults rose from 1 in October 1632 to 20 in March 1633, but then it dropped again to 1 in July 1633.
True to their word, the villagers staged a play in 1634, and they’ve done so every 10 years ever since.
A palindrome is a word or phrase that is spelled the same backward and forward. A semordnilap (“palindromes” spelled backward) produces a different word when reversed:
flog — golf
edit — tide
knits — stink
leper — repel
lager — regal
pupils — slipup
drawer — reward
diaper — repaid
Most palindromes are spelled symmetrically, so their letters produce the same phrase whether read backward or forward:
Able was I ere I saw Elba.
But it’s also possible to do this at the level of words, as in this example:
You can cage a swallow, can’t you, but you can’t swallow a cage, can you?
When this is read backward, word by word, it produces the same sentence as when read forward. And it’s true!
The Bible does not contain the word bible.
“The boy who explained the meaning of the words fort and fortress must have had rather vague ideas as to masculine and feminine nouns. He wrote: ‘A fort is a place to put men in, and a fortress a place to put women in.'”
— Henry B. Wheatley, Literary Blunders, 1893