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After a rain, the Bolivian salt flat Salar de Uyuni becomes the world’s largest mirror. The letter J appears nowhere in the periodic table of the elements. 9(9 – 6) yields same result upside down: (9 – 6)6 = 729. (Erich Friedman) Rearrange the letters in SUPRARATIONAL and you get PRO-AUSTRALIAN. “A good book praises itself.” — German proverb

Cruising off Rhode Island in 1717, pirate Samuel Bellamy plundered a Boston sloop and granted his crew’s wish to sink her. Before putting the captain ashore, Bellamy told him: I am sorry they won’t let you have your sloop again, for I scorn to do any one a mischief, when it is not to my advantage; damn the sloop, we must sink her, and...

John Alexander Smith, Waynflete Professor of Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy at Oxford, opened a course of lectures in 1914 with these words: “Gentlemen — you are now about to embark upon a course of studies which will occupy you for two years. Together, they form a noble adventure. But I would like to remind you of an important point. Some of you, when you...

David Morice posed this puzzle in the February 1989 issue of Word Ways. The following sentence is such a thicket of interrupting clauses that it’s difficult to divine its meaning. Who is accused, what’s the verdict, what are the crimes, and what’s the real name of the real criminal? “Let’s see you unChandler this one!” Big Mike, when Susan, without whom he, whose rugged...

With Love and with Lust, I often have reckoned, Whichever comes first soon turns into the second. (By Oxford English professor Nevill Coghill, 1899-1980.)

An industrious ant sets out to travel the length of a rubber rope 1 kilometer long. Just as it begins, the rope starts to stretch uniformly at a constant rate of 1 kilometer per second, so that after 1 second the rope is 2 kilometers long, after 2 seconds it’s 3 kilometers long, and so on. The ant advances heroically at 1 centimeter per...

Corresponding with the Daily Mail in 1933, Compton Mackenzie presented two lists of the 10 most beautiful words in English. The first was phrased in blank verse: Carnation, azure, peril, moon, forlorn, Heart, silence, shadow, April, apricot. The second was an Alexandrine couplet: Damask and damson, doom and harlequin and fire, Autumnal, vanity, flame, nectarine, desire. In his 1963 autobiography he said that these...

By Vincent Pantaloni, a wordless proof that the sum of the first n odd integers is n2.

The 1937 phrasebook Collins’ Pocket Interpreters: France paints an alarming picture of a typical visit to France: I cannot open my case. I have lost my keys. I did not know that I had to pay. I cannot find my porter. Excuse me, sir, that seat is mine. I cannot find my ticket! I have left my gloves (my purse) in the dining car....

This is believed to be the oldest puzzle of its type, offered by Angelo Lewis in 1893. “Of these six segments the experimenter is required to form a cube.”

crastin n. the day after, the morrow festinate adj. hurried hammajang adj. in a disorderly or chaotic state disceptation n. disputation, debate, discussion What time did various incidents happen? Everyone agrees that the Titanic hit the iceberg at 11:40 p.m. and sank at 2:20 a.m. — but there’s disagreement on nearly everything that happened in between. … There was simply too much pressure. Mrs....

“A planet doesn’t explode of itself,” said drily The Martian astronomer, gazing off into the air — “That they were able to do it is proof that highly Intelligent beings must have been living there.” — John Hall Wheelock

Sydney Smith suggested this inscription for William Pitt’s statue in Hanover Square: To the Right Honourable William Pitt Whose errors in foreign policy And lavish expenditure of our Resources at home Have laid the foundation of National Bankruptcy And scattered the seeds of Revolution, This Monument was erected By many weak men, who mistook his eloquence for wisdom And his insolence for magnanimity, By...

When Japanese authorities sought to honor Tokyo’s oldest man in 2010, they were rebuffed repeatedly by his family. When police finally broke into the house, they found Sogen Kato’s mummified corpse in a first-floor bedroom (1), together with a newspaper from 1978 (2) and a rotary telephone (3). An official said, “His family must have known he has been dead all these years and...

In 1620, the Grand Duke of Tuscany wrote to Galileo with a puzzling problem. In rolling three fair six-sided dice, it would seem that the sums 9 and 10 should appear with equal frequency, as there are six ways to produce each result: 10 = 6 + 3 + 1 = 6 + 2 + 2 = 5 + 4 + 1 = 5...

A striking passage from Avrahm Yarmolinsky’s 1959 biography of Ivan Turgenev: By the end of May [1840] the traveler was back in Berlin. Before he reached the capital he touched at Leghorn, Pisa, Genoa, sailed on Lago Maggiore, traveled to St. Gotthard in a sleigh, visited Lucerne, Basel, Mannheim, Mainz, Frankfort and Leipzig, all within thirteen days. In the same period he managed to...

Next year’s date, 2025, is remarkable: It’s a square (452). It’s a product of squares (92 × 52). It’s the sum of three squares (402 + 202 + 52). It’s the sum of the cubes of the first nine positive integers (13 + 23 + 33 + 43 + 53 + 63 + 73 + 83 + 93). Equivalently, it’s the square of the...

“Lately in a wreck of a Californian ship, one of the passengers fastened a belt about him with two hundred pounds of gold in it, with which he was found afterwards at the bottom. Now, as he was sinking — had he the gold? or had the gold him?” — John Ruskin, Unto This Last, 1860

Art dealer Ambroise Vollard was acquainted with many of the foremost artists of the early 20th century, and as a result he appears often in their work. Above are portraits by Cézanne, Renoir, and Bonnard, and he sat also for Rouault, Forain, Vallotton, Bernard, and Picasso. Picasso wrote, “The most beautiful woman who ever lived never had her portrait painted, drawn, or engraved any...

In checkless chess it’s illegal to give check without giving checkmate. This changes the whole complexion of the game. T.R. Dawson published this example in Die Welt in 1951. White is to mate in two moves. The answer, 1. f6, threatens 2. Qf5, which strangely is mate because the black king can’t move off the long light diagonal, since that would discover check by...

A sentence must contain forty letters to be true. This sentence does have a total of forty letters. Therefore the second sentence is a true sentence. This logic seems to hold up. Unfortunately, sentences 1 and 2 have 40 letters each — and sentence 3 has 41. (David Morice, “Kickshaws,” Word Ways 22:1 [February 1989], 44-52.)

THOUGH I can never pay enough to your Grandfather’s Memory, for his tender care of my Education, yet I must observe in it this Mistake; That by keeping me at home, where I was one of my young Masters, I lost the advantage of my most docile time. For not undergoing the same Discipline, I must needs come short of their experience, that are...

A creature living in the plane can’t see through a unit square — the square’s four line segments block its line of sight from any angle. Is there a way to achieve the same result using fewer building materials? Removing one of the square’s sides does the job — this requires only 3 units of line segment and still prevents anyone from seeing across...