~feeds_feedburner_com | Bookmarks (200)

Song of a neighborhood nightingale transcribed in 1868 by German naturalist Johann Matthäus Bechstein: Tioû, tioû, tioû, tioû. Spe, tiou, squa. Tiô, tiô, tiô, tiô, tio, tio, tio, tix. Coutio, coutio, coutio, coutio. Squô, squô, squô, squô. Tzu, tzu, tzu, tzu, tzu, tzu, tzu, tzu, tzu, tzi. Corror, tiou, squa pipiqui. Zozozozozozozozozozozozo, zirrhading! Tsissisi, tsissisisisisisisis. Dzorre, dzorre, dzorre, dzorre, hi. Tzatu, tzatu, tzatu, tzatu,...

In his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550), Giorgio Vasari notes that in January 1494, while Michelangelo was working on his first full-scale stone figure, “there was a heavy snowfall in Florence and Piero de’ Medici, Lorenzo’s eldest son … wanting, in his youthfulness, to have a statue made of snow in the middle of his courtyard, remembered and sent...

If all the good people were clever, And all clever people were good, The world would be nicer than ever We thought that it possibly could. But somehow ’tis seldom or never The two hit it off as they should, The good are so harsh to the clever, The clever, so rude to the good! So friends, let it be our endeavour To make...

Reader William Walkington devised this “hollow” cube of order 4, each of whose faces is a magic square that draws on numbers from 1 to 56. The lines of four numbers in each row, column, long diagonal, and even some of the broken diagonals, produce the magic sum 114. Further, remarkably, when the figure is “scrambled” like a Rubik’s cube, the result is often...

“Description of things and atmosphere” from the notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald: “The island floated, a boat becalmed, upon the almost perceptible curve of the world.” “The first lights of the evening were springing into pale existence. The Ferris wheel, pricked out now in lights, revolved leisurely through the dusk; a few empty cars of the roller coaster rattled overhead.” “Farther out in the...

The second stanza of this poem is an anagram of the first: A girl once kept a tiny sheep, Widely famed for whiteness: This pet would dog her every step, No certain sign of brightness. ‘Twas viewed, the pest, one day in class By impish children there; Kids laugh to see pets, goofing off, Weren’t trying — open, err! Composed by James Rambo of...

Caprices of Oxford dons, recounted in Maurice Bowra’s Memories: 1898-1939: “In his quiet way [Wadham College Warden Joseph Wells] had an impressive authority, and it was told that once, when he heard a fearful row in the back quad, he walked up in the dark and said, ‘If you don’t stop at once, I shall light a match.’ They stopped.” “[Oxford administrator Benjamin Parsons]...

In judging others we can see too well Their grievous fall, but not how grieved they fell; Judging ourselves, we to our minds recall, Not how we fell, but how we grieved to fall. — George Crabbe, “Boys at School,” 1819