Talking fish like "Billy Bass" are nothing new.  This one, for example, ran a university in 1977.  When these types retire, they go on lucrative speaking tours.  Hence, the "Billy Bass" phenomenon.  From Pembroke's 1977 yearbook.

The phrases "ironed sheet ghost" and "laundered sheet ghost" are both Googlewhacks, delivering zero results.  But we may have ruined that with this controversial new release: Of Feeding & Caring For Sheet Ghosts..  Some folks are saying that the booklet doesn't actually exist.  We offer proof, but as with seemingly all paranormal issues, not everyone agrees on what constitutes actual evidence.

When is a white elephant gift not actually a white elephant?  When it's a slime mold.  We were gifted Slime Mould in Arts and Architecture (in honor of our love for Philip K. Dick's character Lord Running Clam, an intelligent slime mold who speaks and has telepathic powers, from the remarkable Clans of the Alphane Moon).  To our surprise, conversation turned to how slime molds urge the legalization of marijuana and an open border to Mexico.  (As the spokesman for the Plasmodium Consortium put it, "Their advice is objective, and transcends our polarized political environment, because they don’t belong to our species.")

Some folks fall asleep by counting sheep, but sheep themselves count ... er ... invisible people in uniforms.  From Nebelspalter, 1922.

A friend visiting England spotted a physical manifestation of branching parallel universes in the Churchill War Rooms.  Both doors were locked, so he remained in this timeline.

Revealed -- a bookworm is the larval stage of a dragon.  From Der Bärenspiegel, 1946.

The phrase "Humpty Dumpty's beard" is a Googlewhack.

Illustration from The Lewis Carroll Society of North America's Knight Letter, 2008.

From Swarthmore's 2004 yearbook.

All mustaches are connected to form a worldwide network fostering fellowship and communicating helpful tips.  From Lustige Blätter, 1906.

This is merely to confirm that castles in the air may form indoors, too.  From Toronto's 1926 yearbook.

All the world's great towers are actually part of an elaborate amusement park that can be seen only macroscopically.  From Der Bärenspiegel, 1940.

Though L. Frank Baum himself said that he derived the wizardly name Oz from a filing cabinet labeled "O-Z," we know that the letters M and N are at the middle of the alphabet, not O.  The secret answer is that just beyond the corner of Dorothy's Kansas lie the Ozark mountains, and the arc of the "Oz ark" is a rainbow.

An atom that looks like a potato?  We found but a single item on the web that corroborates this:  "Carbon atoms are potatoes, oxygen atoms are red peppers and hydrogen atoms are decaf tea bags."  From Northeastern's 1931 yearbook.

Nearly forgotten today -- the chemical composition of a halo.  From Johns Hopkins' 1895 yearbook.

You know of "secondhand smoke," but what's rarely acknowledged is that the second hand is one's shadow's.  From Northeastern's 1925 yearbook. 

"Devil's delight" priestesses and a fire ritual, both on the newspaper's front page.  From Stoutiana, 1916.

"The movies aren't drama, they aren't literature—they're pure mathematics." —Christopher Isherwood, Prater Violet*

*Though we like that particular line, Prater Violet is what today we'd call a blog post, not a novel by any definition of that word.  Anything this light, this flimsy, ought at least to be satirical or outright funny.  One might be tempted to say that the book is, at the very least, an inoffensive slice of life, yet in the end it actually does offend.  And that is because of its central lie.  Isherwood portrays himself in the story as a struggling screenwriter, but he hasn't the imagination to conceive of any legitimate role that his character has been hired to do.  In other words, why is he being paid to be a day-and-night companion to an Austrian film director?  Not as a screenwriter (the film's story has already been written; at most, Isherwood serves as a text doctor, but that's hardly a 24-hours-a-day, months-on-end job).  No -- in fact, what is blazing obvious is that Isherwood was assigned not to a writing job but as a spy/minder of the director.  He portrays his character as being an artist, but in fact he's a government spook.  The dishonesty is disgusting.  We love a good, honest spy story -- but this is a spy story that believes its own cover story and expects the reader to be stupid enough to follow along like an idiot dog.

It's a bizarre and wonderful phenomenon that whenever you see rows of asterisks in a book, they invariably illustrate the text either following or preceding them.  Here's a great example, in which the asterisks are sparkling stars in a cloudy sky, from The Will-o'-the-Wisp by Marie Petersen, 1874.

"It's a funny thing about circles that they have a focal point, and if you stand in the middle, things get bounced back in a strange way."  From The Justice newspaper (Brandeis), 1992.