Futility Closet

I send you a post-card which I received in the ordinary way by post from my brother, who lives at Sutton Scarsdale, a scattered village near Chesterfield.

An “enigma in praise of women,” from an 1820 miscellany: Happy that man may pass his life, Who’s free from matrimonial chains; Who is directed by a wife, Is sure to suffer for his pains.

Description of the Lyon in Edward Topsell’s 1607 bestiary The History of Four-Footed Beasts: Lyons bones have no marrow in them and are so hard that they will strike fire.

Political controversies, as Mr.

Image: Wikimedia Commons Anne K.

With best play on both sides, conventional tic-tac-toe (noughts and crosses) is always a draw.

Works by German surrealist painter and sculptor Max Ernst: That Makes Me Piss (1919) The Little Tear Gland That Says Tick-Tock (1920) The Dog Who Shits (1920) Winter Landscape: Gassing of the Vulcanized Iron Maiden to Produce the Necessary Warmth for the…

By Mrs.

FDR’s sense of humor was a winner with the press.

Image: Wikimedia Commons This spiral staircase, in the Loretto Chapel in Santa Fe, has no newel, or central pole — its treads are upheld by stringers, notched structural supports as in a conventional stair, but here the stringers make two complete turns as

On what date did Vincent van Gogh paint his 1889 masterpiece The Starry Night?

“I pay the schoolmaster, but ’tis the schoolboys that educate my son.” — Emerson, journal, May 25, 1849

When 22-year-old student Christian LeBlanc fed a basket of bananas to a group of elephants on the Thai island of Koh Phangan in 2015, one of them seized his GoPro camera by its mount, and when the self-timer triggered the shutter he got “the worlds first…

A brilliant device from the Japanese television variety show Kasou Taishou.

Because he had to earn a living painting portraits, Thomas Gainsborough could not spend as much time sketching outdoors as he would have liked.

Holst’s The Planets premiered in 1918, 12 years before Pluto was discovered.

The library of St John’s College, Oxford, used to hold a copy of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene that bore a student’s penciled comment on the last page: “First I thought Troilus And Criseyde was the most boring poem in English.

Fixed to the front of the clock case in the north transept of Chester Cathedral is a poem by Henry Twells (1823–1900): When as a child I laughed and wept, Time crept.

The plot of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in the meter of Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha, by Martin Woodhead: You shall hear how Lady Constance, Tiring of her wounded husband (Poor Sir Clifford, high war-hero, Inconvenienced by shrapnel), Found a gamekeeper call…

Winner of a clerihew contest sponsored by Games magazine in 1983: Did Descartes Depart With the thought “Therefore I’m not”?

In 1986, Michael Kinsley, editor of The New Republic, spotted the headline “Worthwhile Canadian Initiative” in the New York Times and challenged his readers to come up with a more boring one.

In the 19th century, the index to the London Times was compiled by Samuel Palmer.

Take a piece of string about six feet in length, and tie the ends together.

If the last 50,000 years of man’s existence were divided into lifetimes of approximately sixty-two years each, there have been about 800 such lifetimes.

Image: Wikimedia Commons When the local population of rufous-collared sparrows dwindled in Buenos Aires, scientists found an innovative way to teach mating calls to younger birds: They consulted hand-drawn annotations of sparrow songs that had been made in

janiform adj. having two faces, sides, or contrasting aspects esemplastic adj. having the function of moulding into unity; unifying theriomorphic adj. having the form of a wild beast anabiosis n. a coming to life again; revival, resuscitation From the Str…

When IBM released the ThinkPad 701 subnotebook in 1995, users got a surprise.

Someone asked Wellington, at a dinner party, what was the most inane remark he had ever heard.

A paper kite, that soared on high, While looking down was able to descry A joyous butterfly, And cried, “We faintly see your foolish efforts zealous; Confess that you are rather jealous, When you behold our elevated lot.”

A puzzle by Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon, from the October 1991 issue of Games magazine: You’re visiting a familiar island on which each resident either invariably lies or invariably tells the truth.

Now once upon a time the King of Astrakhan, at that, Was sitting on his throne because his throne was where he sat; And comfortably beside him, and magnificently stocked, Was a lacquer liquor locker which a liquor lackey locked.

One problem on the 1982 Scholastic Aptitude Test depicted a circle A adjoining a larger circle B.

Image: Wikimedia Commons Above: A fractal Africa, by Iranian mathematical artist Naderi Yeganeh.

In Abraham Verghese’s 2009 novel Cutting for Stone, a character declares that 10213223 “is the only number that describes itself when you read it.

“No man is a hero to his valet.

In 1882, Lewis Carroll invented a game he called MischMash: The essence of this game consists in one player proposing a ‘nucleus’ (i.e., a set of two or more letters, such as GP, EMO, IMSE), and in the other trying to find a ‘lawful word’ (i.e., a word kn…

Image: Wikimedia Commons I can see the stairs down which Smerdyakov tumbles.

TAFT: FAT is a palindrome.

“The Englishman likes to imagine himself at sea, the German in a forest.

After the first Japanese air raid on Darwin in February 1942, Australian aircraftman Percy Westcott heard whimpering under the ruins of a mess hut and discovered a stray six-month-old Kelpie with a broken leg.

“Think before you speak is criticism’s motto; speak before you think creation’s.” — E.M.

In 2008, the occupants of a Zagreb apartment building proposed converting it into a condominium.

Who knows whether the best of men be known?

Surveying the American South in the 1980s, University of Florida linguist Thomas Pyles found so many unusual personal names that he managed to make a poem of them: Yerdith, Virtus, Frow, LaDonna, Nishie, Alderine, Zollie, Conna; Garalene, Methalene, Ethel…

Martin Gardner wrote a poem called “Simplicity”: .

After last week’s post on Morton’s fork, reader Nick Hare sent three items.

If we heard it said of Orientals that they habitually drank a liquor which went to their heads, deprived them of reason and made them vomit, we should say: ‘How very barbarous!’

In Dante’s Purgatorio, souls are surprised to see that their visitor casts a shadow and thus is not dead: When they perceiv’d that through my body I Gave way not for the rays to pass, their song Straight to a long and hoarse exclaim they chang’d; And two…

From the Strand, December 1903: These tracks were left by a man in flight leading a child.

Full text of a memo from Winston Churchill to his War Cabinet, Aug. 9, 1940: To do our work, we all have to read a mass of papers.