"So I'd like to know where you got the notion," says the song.

Ans.: At the Notions Counter, obvs.  —Jonathan Caws-Elwitt

Forget how many angels can dance upon the point of a needle (for St. Thomas Aquinas' answer, see our previous post.)  How many angels can play see-saw on a quill?  We find our answer in The Wilful Willoughbys by Evelyn Everett Green, 1893.

Q: "Obviously, a preface should not be the first thing, or the first thing for thirty years, that the editor composes in Latin.  Need it be, though?" (Michael Reeve, "Cuius in Usum? Recent and Future Editing," The Journal of Roman Studies)
A: Well, the short answer is "yes."

Q: "Who owns all this?" —Christian Century magazine, 1920

A: "Well, that's complicated." —Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, The Burning City, 2000

Q: Why paint cats?

A: Why Paint Cats.

"I went to the window to ask of Night the reason why dreams must be so tenuous that they break and shred at the slightest opening of the eyes or turning of the body, and do not endure.  Night did not answer me straightway.  She was deliciously beautiful; low hills were pale with moonlight and the space died into silence.  As I insisted, she made known to me that dreams were no longer under her juristiction.  When they dwelt on the island that Lucian had given them, where she had her palace, and from whence she sent them forth with their faces of divers aspect, she might have given me possible explanations.  The times had changed everything.  The ancient dreams had been pensioned off, and the modern ones dwelt in a person's brain.  And these, though they tried to imitate the former, could not do it: the isle of dreams, like the isle of love, and all the islands of all the seas, are now the object of the ambition and rivalry of Europe and the United States." —Machado de Assis, Dom Casmurro

Just as diving into water is to seek life's secrets, and immersion in water is to purify or be reborn, "crossing the waters is to effect a transformation from one state to another" (El Palacio, 1992).  If so, then what state has jurisdiction over the crossing of lakes Eerie and Ladoga?  Answer: Freedonia, under the rule of Rufus T. Firefly.

(Our image appears in The British Isles, translated from Nouvelle Géographie Universelle by Ernest Georg Ravenstein, 1887.)  

Q: How many times can you chase a ghost and not become one yourself? —William Keckler

A: The popular answer is "13," but the true, chilling answer is: zero.  (The answer is in black text on the black background. Highlight it to view.)

Q: Why is "cat" not a pronoun? —William Keckler

A: A cat actually is a pronoun, as we see in this scan from A Computational Model of Natural Language Communication: Interpretation by Roland R. Hausser, 2006, p. 336.  There are also cats of nonfinite verbs and cats of auxiliaries.

To become your own cat, see How to Be Your Own Cat.

Q: What is the purpose of this spoiler/disclaimer?  When I was a kid, our jack-in-the-boxes didn't warn us.  No way, no how.  If you were going to have a heart attack, you were just going to have a heart attack when the evil troll that lives in that box came for you at an astonishing rate of speed.  Plain and simple.  But now there are warnings on the damn thing.  The funniest part is I don't think too many two-year-olds read.  So the point is...? —William Keckler

A: It's conceptual art. —William Keckler