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While at Eton, Winston Churchill’s son Randolph was “immensely impressed” to hear his friend Freddie Furneaux recite the following passage without notes. Ostensibly it’s about Henry VIII: “This monarch was sincere, open, gallant, liberal, intrepid, inflexible and courageous; but with these virtues he combined the vices of violence, cruelty, profusion, rapacity, obstinacy, injustice, arrogance, presumption and conceit.” When Churchill asked the source of the...

An odd detail from the autobiography of Bertrand Russell: “The summers of 1903 and 1904 we spent at Churt and Tilford. I made a practice of wandering about the common every night from eleven till one, by which means I came to know the three different noises made by night-jars.” He adds, “(Most people only know one.)” He says nothing more.

In a set of weights, no weight exceeds 10 kg. If the set is divided arbitrarily into two groups, the combined mass of one of these groups also will not exceed 10 kg. What’s the greatest possible mass of the full set of weights?

“A red rose absorbs all colours but red; red is therefore the one colour that it is not.” — Aleister Crowley, of all people

Some personal names used in the land moiety of the Miwok people of Northern California, listed in Brian Bibby’s Deeper Than Gold: Indian Life in the Sierra Foothills, 2005: akaino: bear holding its head up engeto: bear bending its foot in a particular manner while walking esege: bear showing its teeth when cross etumu: bear warming itself in the sun sutuluye: bear making noise...

Paris newspapers once carried an ad offering a cheap and pleasant way of travelling for the price of 25 centimes. Several simpletons mailed this sum. Each received a letter of the following content: ‘Sir, rest at peace in bed and remember that the earth turns. At the 49th parallel — that of Paris — you travel more than 25,000 km a day. Should you...

There was a fence with spaces you Could look through if you wanted to. An architect who saw this thing Stood there one summer evening, Took out the spaces with great care And built a castle in the air. The fence was utterly dumbfounded: Each post stood there with nothing round it. A sight most terrible to see. (They charged it with indecency.) The...

“Marriage is the only legal contract which abrogates as between the parties all the laws that safeguard the particular relation to which it refers.” — Shaw

Kevin Purbhoo invented this vivid puzzle while a student at Northern Secondary School in Toronto: On a remote Norwegian mountain top, there is a huge checkerboard, 1000 squares wide and 1000 squares long, surrounded by steep cliffs to the north, south, east, and west. Each square is marked with an arrow pointing in one of the eight compass directions, so (with the possible exception...

A remarkable number of apparently intelligent people are baffled by the fact that a different group of apparently intelligent people profess to a knowledge of God when common sense tells them — the first group of apparently intelligent people — that knowledge is only a possibility in matters that can be demonstrated to be true or false, such as that the Bristol train leaves...

Occasionally, by coincidence, the gaps between words on a page of printed text will become aligned, producing “rivers” of white space that descend across multiple lines. These occur most commonly when the font is monospaced and justification is full. Because they’re distracting, these artifacts are generally discouraged; typographers sometimes view a printed page upside down in order to spot them. In ordinary text long...

Memorable passages from the pulp detective stories of Robert Leslie Bellem (1902-1968): “There were tears brimming on her azure peepers, and tremulous grief twisted her kisser.” (“Forgery’s Foil”) “She wrapped her arms around my neck; glued her crimson kisser to my lips. She fed me an osculation that sent seven thousand volts of electricity past my tonsils.” (“Design for Dying”) “And then, from the...

Unusual personal names collected by the Society for the Verification and Enjoyment of Fascinating Names of Actual Persons, listed by curator Allan Fotheringham in 1991: Procter R. Hug Polly Wanda Crocker Sexious Boonjug Philander Philpott Pettibone Zilpher Spittle Petrus J.G. Prink Burke Uzzle Pansy Reamsbottom Dunwoody Zook Bastion Hello Fang W. Wang Montague Tyrwhitt-Drake Nimrod Spong Dulcie Pillage Jake Moak Sir Tufton Beamish Sir...

What do you call a person from Connecticut? Today we’d call them a Connecticuter or a Connecticutian (or, colloquially, a Nutmegger), but in a 1987 address etymologist Allen Walker Read announced that he’d also found these options: Connecticotian, used in 1702 by Cotton Mather Connecticutensian, used in 1781 by historian Samuel Peters Connectican, used in 1942 in a letter to the Baltimore Evening Sun...

Sydney Smith wrote a recipe for salad dressing: Two boiled potatoes, strained through a kitchen sieve, Softness and smoothness to the salad give; Of mordant mustard take a single spoon — Distrust the condiment that bites too soon; Yet deem it not, thou man of taste, a fault, To add a double quantity of salt. Four times the spoon with oil of Lucca crown,...

Draw an arbitrary quadrilateral and divide each of its sides into three equal parts. Draw a line through adjacent points of trisection on either side of each vertex and you’ll have a parallelogram. Discovered by Austrian engineer Ferdinand Wittenbauer.

Titles of paintings by Salvador Dalí: Debris of an Automobile Giving Birth to a Blind Horse Biting a Telephone Bed and Two Bedside Tables Ferociously Attacking a Cello Premature Ossification of a Railroad Station Rock and Infuriated Horse Sleeping Under the Sea Fifty Abstract Paintings Which as Seen From Two Yards Change Into Three Lenins Masquerading as Chinese and as Seen From Six Yards...

In 1897, German mathematician August Leopold Crelle published a book listing all the products of pairs of 3-digit numbers. He offered it as a useful aid in the multiplication of large numbers. Suppose we want to multiply 26457081 by 247183. Divide each factor into 3-digit “chunks”: 026 457 081 and 247 183. Now think of each full chunk as a digit — instead of...

The September 1981 University Computing Center Newsletter at the University of Southern California included this recipe for “Famous Rum Cake,” written in Assembler by a systems programmer for the IBM 360: RUMCAKE CSECT * THIS INTRODUCES SOME NEW MNEMONICS * MX MIX * MXL MIX UNTIL LIGHT * BSOP BEAT UNTIL SOFT PEAKS * BSTP BEAT UNTIL STIFF PEAKS * BKE BAKE (SECOND OPERAND...

An interesting query by Bob High, posed in the May-June 1994 issue of MIT Technology Review: Suppose a billiard ball with a small black dot precisely on its top is rolled around the full circumference of a circle of the same radius. Assuming no slippage or twisting, where is the dot when the ball returns to its starting point?

A very efficient poem by Leigh Hunt: Here, without any more ado, we have the whole history of a couple of successful rural lovers comparing notes. They issue forth in the morning; fall into the proper place and dialogue; record the charms and kindness of their respective mistresses; do justice at the same time to the fields and shades; and conclude by telling their...

From an appreciation of Ernest Rutherford by C.P. Snow in the November 1958 issue of The Atlantic: Worldly success? He loved every minute of it: flattery, titles, the company of the high official world. He said in a speech: ‘As I was standing in the drawing room at Trinity, a clergyman came in. And I said to him: “I’m Lord Rutherford.” And he said...

In the 1950s, mathematician C. Dudley Langford was watching his son play with blocks, two of each color, when he noticed that they formed a curious pattern: one block lay between the red blocks, two between the blue blocks, and three between the yellow blocks. Langford found that by rearranging the blocks he could add a green pair with four blocks between them. This...