About

This is the first of a series of occassional pages on fun. It might be jokes and humour. Or puzzles.

Resolutions

My New Year's resolution, besides staying alive, is to finish reading Procrastination for Beginners. Once done with that some self-improvement: The Bluffer Guide to Self-Knowledge.

Tom Gauld

I very much enjoy the Tom Gauld's wry cultural cartoons on The Guardian newspaper. Here's a couple of recent ones I've really liked:

• the pandemic and baking
• a customisable Christmas card

xkcd

Randall Munroe visually captures the idea for covid too much is not enough.

• covid precaution level

By the way, xkcd is now mainstream. The New York Times run his monthly Randall's Good Question, since November 2019. And they used an xkcd cartoon in a news story about students and covid testing.

How many presents?

Finally, a math puzzle that you might enjoy, On the twelfth day of Christmas my true love gave to me $$ 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 7 + 8 + 9 +10 + 11 + 12 $$ presents. Because $$ 13 = 1 + 12 = 2 + 11 = 3 + 10 = 4 + 9 = 5 + 8 = 6 + 7 $$ that makes $6 \times 13 = 78$ presents on the twelfth day.

So the problem is to calculate how many presents my true love gave me altogether. (Here assume that I got a partridge in a pear tree twelve times.)

At what price?

All these presents. How much did they cost? Here, just the 78 presents on the last day. Well, there's already an index for that.

The PNC Bank runs the annual PNC Christmas Price Index. This year it comes in at $16,168. This is down 58% from last year, largely because ten lords, eleven pipers and twelve drummers are unavailable due to covid preventing live arts performances. (Like Father Christmas, the maid-a-milking are essential workers. The leaping lords are not.)

What does PNC stand for?

I had to look this up to find out. It turns out that the PNC bank was formed in 1983 out of a merger between Pittsburgh National Corporation and Provident National Corporation.

It was at the time the largest bank merger in US history (see wikipedia). Are there any other notable mergers, between organisation that have the same initials?

About xkcd and lfth

Randall Monroe chose xkcd as the name for his cartoon strip because it's

a word with no phonetic pronunciation – a treasured and carefully-guarded point in the space of four-character strings (see xkcd about).

So here's a question. How, if possible, do you pronounce lfth?