A flea and a fly in a flue

I’m behind schedule! So today I post about what I’m reading – more of the A-Z. I have to add that this memoir I’m reading mirrors my life a bit. Or perhaps the other way around. He writes about how his wife has to deal (ie. is annoyed) with him peppering their conversations with random facts from the encyclopedia reading. I’ve been finding I’ve been doing that too, over the holidays and my brother was getting annoyed. Simple trick though I found in the end. Replace, “I was just reading that….” with “Did you know….” Seemed to work, for awhile, until he realized that the source must be from the book.



So, did you know...

- Elisha Gray was just a few hours late. He filed papers with the patent office on February 14, 1876, for his telephone device just a couple of hours after Alexander Graham Bell filed his.

- Capitonyms. You know about antonyms and synonyms. Capitonyms are when the meaning changes due to capitalizing the first letter, like Polish and polish.

- Liar paradox from ancient times goes: If the sentence “This sentence is not true” is true, then it is not true, and if it is not true, then it is true.

- The flower Hyacinth is named after Apollo’s male lover, whom Apollo accidentally killed while teaching him to throw the discus. Nice.




But it was under limerick that I found, “another reason to be happy – the following poem:”



A tutor who taught on the flute

Tried to teach two tooters to toot.

Said the two to the tutor,

“Is it harder to toot,

Or to tutor two tooters to toot?”



Which I have to admit puts a smile on my face. But doesn’t compare to a limerick I found the other week while I was trying to write some of my own.



A flea and a fly in a flue

Were caught, so what could they do?

Said the fly, "Let us flee."

"Let us fly," said the flea.

So they flew through a flaw in the flue.

-Anonymous