Random knowledge

There was an Old Man with a beard

Posted in Literature, Nonsense by (kb) on January 14, 2008

350px-edward_lear_a_book_of_nonsense.jpg

There was an Old Man with a beard,
Who said, ‘It is just as I feared!
Two Owls and a Hen,
Four Larks and a Wren,
Have all built their nests in my beard!’

– From A Book of Nonsense (1846) by Edward Lear

Two statisticians

Posted in Narratives, Nonsense, Statistics by (kb) on January 5, 2008

Two statisticians are out hunting when one of them sees a duck. The first takes aim and shoots, but the bullet goes sailing past six inches too high. The second statistician also takes aim and shoots, but this time the bullet goes sailing past six inches too low. The two statisticians then give one another high fives and exclaim, “Got him!”

Literary nonsense

Posted in Literature, Nonsense by (kb) on December 10, 2007

After a time, they saw some land at a distance; and, when they came to it, they found it was an island made of water quite surrounded by earth. Besides that, it was bordered by evanescent isthmuses, with a great gulf-stream running about all over it; so that it was perfectly beautiful, and contained only a single tree, 503 feet high.

-The story of the four little children who went around the world, by Edward Lear

Eh…literary nonsense is an actual genre of literature. Think e.g. Lewis Carroll, James Joyce and Eugene Ionesco.