"I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do." — Willa Cather

At the start of the French revolution, a poet was asked what he thought of the new constitution. He replied with two stanzas: To see what he really thought, read each line straight across. (From Henry Benjamin Wheatley, Of Anagrams, 1862.)

In February 1945, the British 14th Army had surrounded a mass of fleeing Japanese in a mangrove swamp in southern Burma. In the swamp were thousands of saltwater crocodiles, averaging 15 feet long, but the Japanese refused to surrender. The crisis came on the night of Feb. 19: That night was the most horrible that any member of the [marine launch] crews ever experienced. The scattered rifle shots in the pitch black swamp punctured by ...

Ernie and Bert are fishing. "I'll bet you a dollar," says Ernie, "that if you give me two dollars I'll give you three dollars." Bert agrees and gives Ernie two dollars. Ernie says, "I lose," gives Bert one dollar and pockets the other. Ernie goes on to found a successful software company and Bert dies a bitter alcoholic.

A do-it-yourself dancing highlander, from Frank Bellew's The Art of Amusing (1866). Cut him out, stitch him to a glove, and make little socks for your fingers. "You move about the fingers, simulating a man dancing the Highland-fling or double-shuffle, and the result will be very curious and eminently satisfactory."

Here's an achievement — in 1936 Buckminster Fuller explained Einstein's theory of relativity in a telegram: EINSTEIN'S FORMULA DETERMINATION INDIVIDUAL SPECIFICS RELATIVITY READS QUOTE ENERGY EQUALS MASS TIMES THE SPEED OF LIGHT SQUARED UNQUOTE SPEED OF LIGHT IDENTICAL SPEED ALL RADIATION COSMIC GAMMA X ULTRA VIOLET INFRA RED RAYS ETCETERA ONE HUNDRED EIGHTY SIX THOUSAND MILES PER SECOND WHICH SQUARED IS TOP OR PERFECT SPEED GIVING SCIENCE A FINITE VALUE FOR BASIC FACTOR IN MOTION ...

Imagine two men. The first is standing in a garage. The second runs into the garage carrying a ladder. Special relativity tells us that a moving object undergoes a length contraction relative to its observer. So the man in the garage sees the ladder shorten to fit in the garage. But the man with the ladder sees the garage shorten relative to himself — so the ladder doesn't fit. How is this possible?

Amsterdam, Antwerp, Athens, Berlin, Cairo, Dresden, Dublin, Geneva, Lisbon, London, Marseilles, Milan, Moscow, Rome, Seville, Toronto, and Warsaw … are all towns in Ohio.

No one knows who compiled the index for George Mivart's 1889 book The Origin of Human Reason, but apparently he had strong opinions. On page 136 Mivart describes a certain cockatoo that seemed to reply articulately to questions. The indexer made these entries: Absurd tale about a Cockatoo, 136 Anecdote, absurd one, about a Cockatoo, 136 Bathos and a Cockatoo, 136 Cockatoo, absurd tale concerning one, 136 Discourse held with a Cockatoo, 136 Incredibly absurd ...

Anonymous German picture puzzle, 19th century. Draw your own conclusions.

On Aug. 9 each year in the little Alaskan town of Kotzebue, the sun sets twice. Due to a quirk of the town's location and time zone, the sun goes down just after midnight on that day—and then again just before the following midnight.

Mamihlapinatapais, from the Yaghan language of Tierra del Fuego, is considered the world's most succinct word — and the hardest to translate. It means "a look shared by two people, each wishing that the other will initiate something that both desire but that neither one wants to start."

Duel After a Masquerade Ball, by Jean-Léon Gérôme (1857). For all their romance, duels got a bit silly. English poet Mark Akenside escaped a confrontation with a Counsellor Ballow only because one refused to fight in the morning and the other in the afternoon. In France in 1843, two young men agreed to a duel using billiard balls at 12 paces. Melfant drew the red ball, warned his adversary, "I am going to kill you ...

Suppose some numbers are uninteresting. Put them in a separate class. But now that class contains a largest and a smallest number. That's interesting, so move them back into the class of interesting numbers. You can repeat this until only one or two interesting numbers remain — a fact that makes them interesting. So now that class is empty, and all numbers are interesting.

When Scogin was banished out of France, he filled his shooes full of French earth, and came into England, and went into the king's court, and as soone as he came to the court, the king said to him: I did charge thee that thou shouldest never tread upon my ground of England. It is true, said Scogin, and no more I doe. What! traytor, said the king, whose ground is that thou standest on ...

By W. Bone. White to move and mate in four. The catch: He must mate with the queen — and she's glued to the board. I'll give the solution tomorrow.

On Dec. 7, 1905, British naturalists J. Nicoll and E.G.B. Meade-Waldo spotted "a creature of most extraordinary form and proportions" during a research cruise off the coast of Brazil. Nicoll described a head "shaped somewhat like that of a turtle" above a 6-foot "eel-like" neck that "lashed up the water with a curious wriggling movement." Below the water "we could indistinctly see a very large brownish-black patch, but could not make out the shape of ...

A curious episode from Goethe's autobiography: I rode along the footpath towards Drusenheim, and here one of the most singular forebodings took possession of me. I saw, not with the eyes of the body, but with those of the mind, my own figure coming towards me, on horseback, and on the same road, attired in a dress which I had never worn ; — it was pike-grey with some gold about it. But as I ...

As a teenager, George Washington copied out "110 rules of civility and decent behavior in company and conversation," probably as an exercise in penmanship. Samples: "Every Action done in Company, ought to be with Some Sign of Respect, to those that are Present." "Let your Discourse with Men of Business be Short and Comprehensive." "Be not hasty to believe flying Reports to the Disparagement of any." "Eat not in the Streets, nor in the House, ...

"It is impossible to love and to be wise." — Francis Bacon