After he left the bathroom floor all wet, Archimedes’ wife beat him to death with a pi.
Archimedes of Syracuse is often confused with Archimedes of Schenectady, who opened the first Greek restaurant in upstate New York.
Archimedes of Syracuse is credited with helping Carthage in the Second Punic War by creating a devastating series of geometric puns to which the Roman Republic had no answer.
He was acute; they were obtuse, and couldn’t get an angle on him.
Later in the Punic Wars, when Hannibal crossed the Alps, the Romans tried recruiting some Germans to repulse the attack. They were right Angles, that lot.
Later on they developed a method of instanteous attack and retreat which they referred to as “Sax-on, Sax-off”.
A 1984 installment of the PBS series Great Performances, which featured a performance of Hannibal Q. Punic’s Concerto for Saxophone and Strings, by the Blawnox Philharmonic Orchestra, was pulled off the air moments before it was to be shown, when the FTC ruled that the show featured too much sax and violins for prime time television.
The long-running PBS series Fairly Adequate Performances will be celebrating thirty years on the air in August 2021 with what is expected to be a perfectly decent rendition of La traviata by those players from the Topeka Operahouse who are not planning on taking their vacations that month.
The Topeka Opera house was built in 1542. It burnt down in 1604 and was rebuilt in1622
and then burnt down again in 1630. Following a rebuild in 1642, it suffered a further down-burning in 1645. This build/burn cycle was thwarted in 1649 when it was rebuilt, and then quickly rebuilt again before it could burn down, thereby confusing the down-burners until 1694, when it burnt down. It was then rebuilt in 1711 - this time inTopeka - and has remained
relatively unburnt-down since then, apart from when it burnt down in 1725.
Prof. Dr. Milford A. C. Challenger, leading authority in Mid-Aztec Semi-Ancient Cultures, recently discovered a vast treasure trove of almost authentic Mid-Aztec cultural items in the second basement of the present day Topeka Opera House. His attempts to extirpate the items from the vault in that Opera House (for some reason he was denied legal access, but that never stops Prof. Dr. Challenger as long as he has dynamite) has resulted in the unfortunate undermining of the buildings structural support, since a load-bearing wall now has an 18-wide gap in it, and the legendary Sinkhole of Quetzalcoatl has appeared to reclaim the treasures. Prof. Dr. Challenger was unable, even so, to reclaim the treasure horde, as the explosion gave him a bad fit of the vapours and he had to rush to the Topeka Semi-Invalid Center and Snack Shoppe for a couple of Pepto-Bismols and a cherry soda.
The fact that the Topeka Opera House has had to focus on rebuilding after fires and explosions, and on curating almost authentic cultural items, explains why it has never in fact housed an opera company. Topeka and Blawnox are believed to be the only American cities where there have never been professional performances of grand opera. A petition was raised to fund a series of Verdi operas, but the general response was essentially “who needs all that screaming? And in Italian!”
Half a production of Gilbert & Sullivan’s operetta The Mikado was performed at the Topeka Opera House, however. It was the “The Mik” part, without any “ado”.
The people responsible for, “Cop Rock,” some years ago tried, in vain, to get Hugh Laurie to sign on for a re-boot of his Fox TV medical show, only this time all music, no dialogue. He declined. The title – Opera House.
Darius Rucker’s attempt to start a second Broadway in Nashville with a high-culture operatic version of the The Grand Ole Opry failed to attract sufficient interest among backers. The only people interested were Jeff Foxworthy, Barbara Mandrell and Willie Nelson, who was under the impression they were gonna do Hamilton as a C&W musical. He wanted to play Washington.
Willie Nelson is actually a distant cousin of Admiral Horatio Nelson, which would have made his playing George Washington highly ironic.
Admiral Horatio Nelson was also a distant cousin of Napoleon Bonaparte, by about 175 miles.
Much confusion has resulted from the fact that Napoleon crossed a temporary land bridge to Elba, which made it at the time the ex-Isle of Elba.
Napoleon was originally exiled to the Panamanian Island of Peelsa. When he awoke after arrival, Napoleon caused such a fuss about it they sent him instead to Elba.
When Napoleon first arrived on Elba, there were over 2000 inhabitants on the island. The exiled emperor complained about feeling overcrowed, and the British permanently removed half of the island’s inhabitants, to give Napoleon more Elba room.
Today there are but 137 inhabitants on Elba. The vast majority were eaten by owlbears back in the 1980’s.