I appreciate there not being a paywall on A2K as it is more democratic for the media to be available for all and not a commodity to be purchased by a few. I’m happy to make a contribution so others with joie de vivre still have access to Jabberwocky.
Talking about Euchre - lead with a singleton off-suit ace, if you have one. If no other cards of that suit are in your hand, there is a higher probability that they are in your opponents’ hands, preventing them from trumping your ace. Your best chance for an ace to make it around the table and win a trick is on the opening lead.
This week’s lexical meat-fest was gammongate, or perhaps Armagammon: a row about whether calling people “gammon” was racist or just stupid.
Pork-based insults are of course very old. “Gammon-faced” is an insult from 1604, and no actor likes to be called a ham. In 18th-century thieves’ cant, a “gammon” was an accomplice who distracted the victim’s attention. And “gammon” could also mean nonsensical talk or ideas – it is used by Dickens in The Pickwick Papers, but had existed for decades.
In John Liddiard Nicholas’s 1817 travelogue, Narrative of a Voyage to New Zealand, our doughty explorer, visiting Maori chiefs, decides that their customs are “all gammon”: they retort, not unreasonably, that the preaching of his missionary friend is “gammon” too.
Two hundred years ago, Nicholas explains, to say that something was “gammon”, or nonsense, was “the language of vulgar ridicule”. Not much progress is to be expected, perhaps, in the evolution of this thread.
And so it has come to pass that I’ma skooled in the art of Dingbats by the venerable Eke AKA: Hell 2 – 1 Heaven. I am also moved to say and I’ma not Jo King, but your use of demonstrative pronouns caused considerable mirth amongst the inmates.
It would be remiss of me not to congratulate you on your good fortune at cards, however I am somewhat dismayed that you will be tampering with the ‘tools of your trade,’ as I fail to see how your Tassels/ G-string/ and Pole Dancing ensemble can possibly effect the outcome of the die.
In this case Die is the singular form of dice. It comes from the French word des, a plural word for the same objects. In English, the most common way to make nouns plural is to add an S. If die followed that rule, its plural form would be dies. However, English is full of irregular plurals. Along with wolf, cactus, and appendix, die does not follow the normal pattern. The plural form is dice. If you roll dice, you are rolling two or more game pieces. If you roll a die, you are only using one piece.
Back to your intriguing question: on a die opposite sides sum to 7, so 5 is opposite 2. The more material removed to form the number makes that side lighter and gravity dictates its opposite number (being heavier) will appear less often.
Therefore, by adding weight to the 5 will reduce its appearance. How to ensure its ratio to the one specified I am not sure. It should be noted however that in professional casinos, each face on a die is re-drilled and filled to ensure each weighs the same regardless of the number.
I wondered why the baseball was getting bigger. Then it hit me!
Life is all about ass. You're either covering it, laughing it off, kicking it, kissing it, busting it or trying to get a piece of it.
Before sex was invented – where did babies come from?
Yo bro, in several mythologies, storks are also a symbol of fidelity and monogamous marriage because storks are widely believed to mate for life. In truth, they don’t actually mate for life, but do have a tendency to return to the same nests every year and usually mate with the same partner.
The natural behaviour of storks lends a clue to their association with birth. As a migratory bird, white storks would fly south in the fall and return to Europe nine months later. Usually they could be seen heading north and nesting around March and April. Babies born in March and April were likely conceived in June of the previous year. Midsummer’s Eve, which takes place on June 21, is a celebration of the summer solstice, but it is also a pagan holiday of marriage and fertility. As many marriages and other couplings would take place during this time, many babies would be born around the time that the storks could be seen flying north, making the connection that the “stork brought the baby.”
However they are absent from the poles, most of North America and large parts of Australia, so why do birds fly south in the fall?
A little help please:
There is a chain nailed to a wall in an unnumbered room at A2K Towers. The chain is 10 feet long and the center of the chain dips down 5 feet from where each side of the chain is nailed to the wall. I have been told its used for some undisclosed Moderator ceremony – but the question remains…
How far are the 2 ends of chain from each other?
0 Replies
ekename
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Thu 31 May, 2018 11:19 pm
Questions involving 5 always seem to have me at 6's and 7's, together with chain ends (to say nothing of putative plurals, prokaryotic reproduction and euchre expectation).
Fill in the blank and use the answer as a clue to name the island and the author:
The five letters form an acronym essential to identifying the island and the author.
0 Replies
Tryagain
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Sat 2 Jun, 2018 12:52 pm
Admittedly this is a long shot, although I’m pretty (not in the literal sense you understand) sure the missing letter is ‘S’, which would spell POETS.
So far so good and if that was the full answer I would not be T.S.A.
However, POETS day is a term used by workers in the United Kingdom and Australia, to jocularly refer to Friday as the last day of the working week.
The letters in "POETS" are an acronym for "Piss Off Early Tomorrow's Saturday": hence Friday becomes a Poet's day.
Friday was a Native American who lived on an island off the coast of Venezuela (near Trinidad, and the nearest island to that is therefore Tobago) and was befriended by Robinson Crusoe – A novel by Daniel Defoe (1719)
This insight has been brought to you by the Angular Gyrus in association with Oronyms.
No seriously, Oronyms are sequences of words or even complete phrases that sound similar to each other, and our brain employs them often – particularly with those who have trouble hearing. Unlike homonyms where the words sound the same with different spelling (e.g. there, their, they’re), oronyms can be multiple words used in conjunction together to confuse the brain.
There is a specific region of the brain called the angular gyrus that uses all previous knowledge to fill in gaps with predictable words. If you are missing whole phrases or even just the last syllable of a word, it is this section of the brain that completes the sentence for you without you consciously having to employ this method. If you hear the waiter tell you the fish of the day is “sal,” your brain will fill in the missing “mon” syllable.
So if that sounds fishy…
Riddle me this: In the foyer of A2K Towers there is a rather large fish tank containing ten exquisite fish. I have always admired its juxtaposition to the Aspidistra elatior.
Unfortunately due to a filtration malfunction – 2 drown, 4 swim and hide, and 3 die.
Can you tell me how many are left?
Vis-à-vis
Man that ceral is good -
"Nah bro, dat cereal is good"
"Shut up Munchkin, just quit now…"
Welcome to Hotel California, we haven't had that spirit here since nineteen sixty-nine. You defy your name with (if I may say) a brilliant answer. I shall name my first born after you in your honor.
BTW You can check out any time you like,
But you can never leave…
Unlike my bro as each of us has an equal stake in a dairy farm, but after the price of milk dropped, we have decide to go our separate ways and start raising lambs instead.
We decided to sell off our cows, and sell each cow for as many dollars as we have cows. In that way we used that money to buy lambs for $10 apiece.
Once we had purchased as many lambs as we could with the money from the cow sales, we had a little left over, which we used to buy a kid goat.
So we now have purchased an even number of animals and have split the animals evenly - but the problem I dun got is, my brother who got the goat wants a sum of money from me because I got all lambs to equalize the value.
My first thought was to tell him to go hug a bear bare, but bless his heart, even a Trump supporter deserves compassion – so how much should he receive?
