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In our book on Divination by Punctuation, we note this marvelous take on the hyphen by the great scholar of anomalies, Charles Fort: "We have to get along with the logical-illogical, in our existence of the hyphen. Everything that is said to be logical is somewhere out of agreement with something, and everything that is said to be illogical is somewhere in agreement with something. . . . In an existence of the hyphen, it is impossible to be altogether wrong—or right" ( Wild Talents, 1932). While on the subject of hyphens: Here's a hyphen-shaped cloud. Is this a hyphen trapped in time? A page emblazed with the words "This page intentionally left blank" is hilarious to folks blessed with the ability to comprehend irony (recall our previous post in which a person with irony-challenges proudly stepped out from under a rock, discordance be damned!). But we surely approve of working a hyphen into such ironically non-blank pages. Speaking of irony, we're reminded of a great line in the classic comedy series Black Adder: "'Have you no idea what 'irony is?' 'Yeah, it's like goldy and bronzy, only it's made of iron."
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Printed collections of Forgotten Wisdom diagrams are available: Volume I from Mindful Greetings and Volumes II, III and IV from Amazon. Selected posters are also available via Zazzle. |
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I Found a Penny Today, So Here's a Thought |
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Why waste your time in a living hell? You can live in cloudland just as well. — Holly Johnson, "Heaven's Here"
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The Ghost in the [Scanning] Machine |
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~ Classic Sightings ~ 
Portrait from Memoir of Rev. James M. Challiss.
“Surely a ghost.” —Regan Forest, Secrets of Tyrone
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 "The surprising truth, that life over there is much the same as life over here." — Blackwood's Magazine (1978)
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I Found a Penny Today, So Here's a Thought |
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"Writing is just a version of reading." — Geof Huth. . . which reminds us of Hemingway's description of "eyes like inkwells."
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Imagine a game of "What's My Line," in which either a cherub or an imp whispers into a blindfolded panelist's ear.
Are the whispered words pictured on the right of an angelic or a diabolical nature?
Answer: Diabolical. "'Move on to a more elevated existence,' the demon whispered." —Bob Blackman, The Commission, 2004, p. 130. (The answer is in black text on the black background. Highlight it to view.)
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"Rhetoric, as hardly bears repeating, bears only a distant relationship to truth." —Wlad Godzich, "The Domestication of Derrida"
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"Faint songs visited my ears, and the gray day was only gray like a dove's breast." —Mary Johnston, 1492 ( via Gary Barwin)
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The Ghost in the [Scanning] Machine |
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~ Classic Sightings ~ 
Portrait from A Memoir of Charles Mayne Young.
“He made a ghost-shaped sooty mark.” —The Walker Book of Ghost Stories
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Playing on the old Zen chestnut, we ask: If a traffic light hangs at an intersection and there's no one there to see it, does it see red? Our favorite virtual traffic light answers this question here. (Thanks, Gordon!)
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From our former outpost at Twitter: Kudos to Gary Barwin for this Googlewhack: "Metaphor, it's really something else!"
(And we're sorry, Gary, for ruining your Googlewhack the moment Google indexes this page!)
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NASA astronaut Randy Bresnik and family.
"It's not rocket science," says Margaret Watson. "People learn to be parents every day.”
To which we say: "out of this world!"
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The Ghost in the [Scanning] Machine |
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~ Classic Sightings ~ 
Portrait from The Best of Balzac.
“‘It’s a blue smudge,’ Phil said. ‘Maybe it’s a flaw in the photo.’” —Elaine Viets, Killer Cuts
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We're honored to illustrate an article about L.A.'s mysterious public gardens. Our photo depicts the beautiful Descanso Gardens.
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Our friend Jonathan Caws-Elwitt spotted this lovely pfft variant in the wild: We can verify that p'fft is an appropriate response to "blankety-blank nonsense" (as noted on the first page of Budget Weddings For Dummies). Relatedly, Wodehouse has written: "He had a dim sort of idea that it began with an F or a G, but beyond that his mind was a blank" ( The Small Bachelor). But did you know that p'fft comes down to us from an ancient Chinese expression meaning, "May your children and grandchildren never murmur as they carry out the careful and brilliant virtue of their predecessors"? It's commonly assumed that the apostrophe in p'fft stands for an f, the concept being that an f-too-many is overwhelming. Indeed, Wodehouse notes: "You could have knocked me down with a f" ( Right Ho, Jeeves). Yet the truth is more interesting. The apostrophe actually stands for a hyphen, swept upwards as it were by the breath of the expression.
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> read more from Pfft! . . . |
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Imagine a game of "What's My Line," in which either a cherub or an imp whispers into a blindfolded panelist's ear.
Are the whispered words pictured on the right of an angelic or a diabolical nature?
Answer: Diabolical. "A mocking demon whispered in her reluctant ear: 'How happy you might be now, if things were only changed a little!'” —M. V. D., "The Story of Margaret,” Frank Leslie's Sunday Magazine, Vol. X, 1881, p. 263. (The answer is in black text on the black background. Highlight it to view.)
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I dreamed my tea leaf reader saw an asterisk.* *To learn what an asterisk means in a tea leaf reading, see Dr. Boli.
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 "This may come as a surprise, but I don't spend a lot of time checking out your wife's breasts." — JoAnn Ross, Far Harbor
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A Moon / Venus semicolon, captured by Greg.
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The Ghost in the [Scanning] Machine |
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~ Classic Sightings ~ 
Portrait from Memoir of the Life of Elizabeth Fry.
“A silhouette appeared and magnified on the display.” —Eric S. Nylund, Halo
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 "This may surprise you. ... Writing is work — hard work." — Thomas Wolfe, quoted in his illustrated biography by Ted Mitchell
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"Calling it a hunch just makes it mysterious, and it isn't." — Isaac Asimov, apparently not referring to Marty Feldman's hunch in Young Frankenstein (given that Marty's hunch mysteriously switches from the left side to the right side of his back)  A still from the perennially hilarious Young Frankenstein.
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The Ghost in the [Scanning] Machine |
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~ Classic Sightings ~ 
Portrait from Memoir of Albert Newsam.
“A ghostly blur of light, the psychic essence, the inner being.” —Kathryn Harrison, Thicker Than Water
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 "For nutritional quality, the surprising truth is that most tomatoes are created equal after all." — Rodale's Organic Gardening (1987)
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From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook:
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Printed collections of Forgotten Wisdom diagrams are available: Volume I from Mindful Greetings and Volumes II, III and IV from Amazon. Selected posters are also available via Zazzle. |
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Imagine a game of "What's My Line," in which either a cherub or an imp whispers into a blindfolded panelist's ear.
Are the whispered words pictured on the right of an angelic or a diabolical nature?
Answer: Diabolical. "But this demon whispered, 'Trust me,' and her soul longed to obey." —Lucy Blue, The Devil’s Knight, 2006, p. 260. (The answer is in black text on the black background. Highlight it to view.)
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A lovely review of our dictionary of magic words, from the Silver Star Journal:
A massive and truly amazing tour de force of linguistic
dexterity, merging sorcery, etymology, history, and literature into a
global cascade of words of power magical and otherwise, drawn from
countless ancient and modern civilizations. The art of Grammarye meets
literary erudition, with each word examined, explained, and illuminated
by wild and witty quotations from countless sources. Spells, mantras and
Qabala meet slang, hokum and poetry. Enormous fun, and about thirty
pages devoted to aspects of Abracadabra and its variants alone! Big fun!
Hours of creative playtime!
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INSTRUCTIONS: Click on the puzzle image below to reveal one possible solution.
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The Ghost in the [Scanning] Machine |
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~ Classic Sightings ~ 
Portrait from Life of Johnson.
“There is no ghost, among all the ghosts haunting London, that we oftener meet at night . . . than old Samuel Johnson’s.” —“Haunted London,” All the Year Round
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"When you do walk away from a flip, keep it short and sweet. This is not rocket science. Either it makes sense or it doesn't." — D. Sidney Potter, The Flip (2010) We find this advice useful whether the flip in question refers to a tract home or a finger.
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“Trust that your ship will come in fully laden with the fruits of your labor, rewards for work well done.” —Nancy Garen
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"Language only works when two or more people agree that it does." — Geof Huth
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"Why didn't you tell me in the map room there was a map missing?" — Gwyn Cready, Aching for Always (2010)
(This delightful snippet is scanned from Book Sales of 1895.)
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The Ghost in the [Scanning] Machine |
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~ Classic Sightings ~ 
Portrait from Autobiography of Andrew Somerville.
“That’s the ghost’s chair, and the time has come!” —Ivy Hooper, Theosophical Review
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The following passage from Robert Irwin's astonishingly brilliant The Arabian Nightmare, in which a character traverses a chessboard-like Cairo, recalls our own manual on using a game of chess to construct a story: If A Chessman Were A Word: A Chess-Calvino Dictionary. Crossing the open spaces of the city was like moving across a chess board, chill and dark in the shadows, still brilliantly warm in the places the sun could reach. He was crossing a dark square now near the Bab al-Luq, where the rich merchants' houses were, when he saw a face, high up in the dark shadows of an upper-storey casement, staring down at him. It was a woman's face, round and plump and shining silver as if it was the moon.
Deliciously, the character in Irwin's novel is about to confront a knight!
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Imagine a game of "What's My Line," in which either a cherub or an imp whispers into a blindfolded panelist's ear.
Are the whispered words pictured on the right of an angelic or a diabolical nature?
Answer: Diabolical. "I do not know what demon whispered to me, 'Take this book home with you.'” —Friedrich Nietzsche, qtd. in R. J. Hollingdale, Nietzsche, 1973, p. 51. (The answer is in black text on the black background. Highlight it to view.)
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INSTRUCTIONS: Click on the puzzle image below to reveal one possible solution.
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The Ghost in the [Scanning] Machine |
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"The adorable living past. One must wallow, just wallow in it. How can anybody be a person of quality if they wash away their ghosts with common sense?" —Leonora Carrington, "Waiting," The Seventh Horse (emphasis ours) ---
~ Classic Sightings ~ 
Portrait from A Memoir of the Life of William Livingston.
"His shadow on the wall was a silhouette from another era.” —Martin Harry Greenberg, Civil War Ghosts
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"This is not rocket science but if you draw four horizontal lines across the page equally spaced down the sheet you will magically produce five sections!" — Essential Skills for Managing in Healthcare (2010) We tried it ... and were delighted to see that the five sections correspond to a rocket's five stages!
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“Your ship will come home and moor.” —Edwin Cranston
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"It is impossible to understand how millions and millions of people all obey a sickly collection of gentlemen that call themselves 'Government!' The word, I expect, frightens people. It is a form of planetary hypnosis, and very unhealthy." —Leonora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet
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 "Even liquids may be magnetic. This may surprise you, but you can easily prove it to your own satisfaction." —Raymond B. Wailes, "Fun With Magnetic Chemicals," Popular Science, April 1938
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We've previously noted that even a squiggle isn’t immune to the corruption inherent in transliteration. Here's our newly updated pictorial study of how Laurence Sterne's elegant and eloquent squiggle (d)evolved through various editions of Tristram Shandy. We call it " Lost in Transliteration." We're proud to be the only place on the Internet that compares Dutch, French, Spanish, German, and English squiggles from literature.
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The Ghost in the [Scanning] Machine |
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~ Classic Sightings ~ 
Portrait from John Greenleaf Whittier.
“The ghost on paper, the poem itself.” —Dylan Thomas
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 "The surprising truth is that an ancient Roman would probably not have known how to decipher any of [the Roman numerals]." — Quantum (1994)
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Here's a guessing game. How many pages did a reader make it through Metaphysics of the Supernatural as Illustrated by Decartes before scrawling an expletive in the margin? There are 65 pages, so your guess should be from 1 to 65. To reveal the bad word in question as well as the correct page number, click the image below.
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Puzzles and Games :: Which is Funnier |
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Which is funnier: last year's fashions or last century's?Clue: This is according to playwright Arthur Wing Pinero. Answer: Last year's. (The answer is in black text on the black background. Highlight it to view.) Citation: Sir Arthur Wing Pinero, Plays (1986)
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Original Content Copyright © 2019 by Craig Conley. All rights reserved.
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