Content-Type: text/shitpost

St. Petersburg was not founded until 1703. I had assumed it was ancient, like Moscow, but it's newer than Philadelphia.

I mentioned the following story I had once read:

A lawyer for the plaintiff in a libel case was explaining that the defendant had libeled his clients by making their names the answers in a crossword puzzle. So for example one of the clues was "bibulous bishop", and the answer had space for four letters; there were only three bishops in England with four-letter names, and the only one that could be made to work with the crossing clues was his client's name.
But the defendant was claiming that it wasn't he that had committed libel; if anyone had, it was the people who wrote the name into the answer grid.

On looking into this futher, I found that it appears to have been written by A.P. Herbert and published in Misleading Cases in the Common Law.

I looked to see if the Internet Archive had a scan of Misleading Cases, but it does not. It did, however, have a scan of Herbert's book Sundials Old and New: or, Fun with the Sun. I glanced through this and soon happened across this bit:

In 1942 I was sick for a week or two, and, convalescing, I sat up in bed and renamed the stars. I still maintain that this is a good notion.

Following up on this, I found that Herbert had previously published a very short book on that topic, titled A Better Sky. This article has a summary.

I had not heard of A.P. Herbert before, but he sounds wonderful, someone I should know.

[Wikipedia has a page on List of all lists which do not contain themselves. (Since 2004 it has been an automatic redirect to Russell's Paradox. But check out the edit history.)