"The answer is simple. Perhaps the answer is much simpler that you would believe. You must practice.”

—Alex Nekritin, Naked Forex (2012)

An illustration from a 1904 issue of Metropolitan magazine.  The caption reads: "Bob can neither sleep nor play, free from the intrusion of these spectral shoes."

"I am four hundred and three years of old to-day."  From Metropolitan Magazine, 1904.

An illustration from a 1905 issue of Metropolitan magazine.

An illustration from a 1905 issue of Metropolitan magazine.

An illustration from an 1897 issue of Cosmopolitan magazine.  The caption reads: "They rise upon me tattered and dog-bitten."

To readers who have ever juggled more than one book at a time, we present the Bibliofool, whom we found in Bibliophile magazine, 1908:

"We're like handshadows illuminated by stars, and the shadow on the wall, lit by a star, is really a shadow of what isn't us." —Gary Barwin

An illustration from a 1903 issue of Saturday Evening Post.

Dedicated to the Master of Masks, Jeff McBride.

An illustration from a 1908 issue of Metropolitan magazine.  The caption reads: "Silence, emptiness, and beside the bed, burning steadily, the lighted candle."

The DVD release of Anthony Newley's series The Strange World of Gurney Slade doesn't feature subtitles, so we took it upon ourselves to transliterate the following rather marvelous made-up words:

From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook, for Navid Sinaki:

An illustration from a 1903 issue of Cosmopolitan magazine.  The caption reads: "The vicar prodded most of the them with his stick."

An illustration from a 1912 issue of Metropolitan magazine.

"The sooner you catch yourself in the act of building your mental snowball, the easier it is to stop."
—Richard Carlson, The Big Book of Small Stuff

"This might surprise you, but I don' t really hate rap.  I like the fact that it tells a story.  I just can't sing it. It's not me—"
—John Nieman, The Wrong Number One

Years ago we quipped that John Venn traveled in many circles.

But as it's been too long since our last Venn joke, here's a new one:

John Venn's favorite way to waste time was running in circles.

(One might think these jokes write themselves, but the process is protracted and requires protractors.)