Things I learned while looking up other things, 2025.06.11
Dear friends,
Okay, so this is the kind of thing that is either deeply charming or absolutely unhinged, and you should be really, really sure how it’s going to land before you start:
But Hepburn immediately began wooing Emily in a rather unusual way: He founded a cribbage club, named her president, sent her a cribbage board, and scheduled meetings — at which he was the only other member present. He would write letters that would include messages like “Can’t we have a meeting of the Cribbage Club the first night after I get back?”
I've been really taken lately with the work of Niki Hare: 
You can tell how terrible the world is by how much I just want to reread/read about Samuel Johnson, and unfortunately the Samuel Johnson Index here is trending up. This caught my eye yesterday: "Men will submit to any rule, by which they may be exempted from the tyranny of caprice and of chance." Also running through my head lately: Johnson quoting Bacon that "books can never teach the use of books".
This site lets you make calligrams with whatever text you like (click on the A at the bottom of the screen to change the text).
Graphing calculator // Plot device, Local girl // Near miss, and Telephone pole // Call log are examples of Unparalleled Misalignments, "pairs of non-synonymous phrases where the words in one phrase are each synonyms of the words in the other".
"In most cases, Shaggy is from the fictional town of Coolsville, Ohio."
"American Samoa is the only permanently inhabited territory of the United States whose inhabitants do not have birthright citizenship."
"The puzzle consists of a 100-page prose narrative with its pages arranged in the wrong order."
"Unaware of the historical meaning of the term, the NIS believed that there actually was a woman named Dorothy at the center of a massive ring of homosexual military personnel, so they launched an enormous and futile hunt for the elusive "Dorothy", hoping to find her and convince her to reveal the names of gay service members." (h/t amanda)
Stay well!
Your friend,
Erin