Do water polo players ride on sea horses?
Do players on the Chicago Cubs (baseball team) grow up to be Chicago
Bears (football team)?
Do the podiatrists hold a big annual dance called the Foot Ball?
If there is a New Brunswick,
New Jersey, is there also a New
Jersey, New Brunswick?
If there is Chicken of the Sea tuna, is there Tuna of the
Land chicken?
Okay, these are just musings of mine. Here is another
"funny" (at least I hope it's funny) that I have come up with:
It was during the Spanish Inquisition. The Inquisitor has
some poor heretic stretched out on the rack and is inflicting sadistic and merciless
pain upon him. Naturally, the poor fellow cries out loudly in pain. The Inquisitor
says, "My poor fellow, don't you know that they say that pain is all in
your head? In other words, 'The pain in Spain
lies mainly in the brain.'"
Okay, now here are some--not fancies of mine, as above, but
real, actual facts and oddities:
In Chicago,
recently a stretch of a road known as Congress Parkway
was renamed to honor an African-American woman named Ida B. Wells. However,
the Chicago City Council, in its infinite wisdom, was not particularly bothered by the fact that we already had a Wells
Street. In fact, the Wells
Street which has existed for quite some time
actually intersects the new Wells Street
(or Road or Parkway, whichever it is). So you could say to someone, "Meet
me at the corner of Wells and Wells"!
Similarly, you could say, "Meet me at the corner of
Wacker and Wacker." This is possible because Wacker Drive in Chicago
makes a right-angle bend, going from running east-west to running north-south.
In fact, Chicago's Wacker
Drive supposedly is the only street in the world
with street numbers running north, south, east, and west.
Also--a slightly different phenomenon--you would not want to
say to someone, "Meet me at the corner of Broadway and Sheridan
Road," because--would you believe?--Broadway
and Sheridan Road in Chicago
intersect three times! How is this possible? Well, Broadway runs on a diagonal,
and Sheridan runs in sort of a
step-wise fashion, running north-south, then turning east-west, and running
north-south again. I think there are several such steps, so Broadway actually
cuts across Sheridan three times.
Getting back to Wacker Drive
and its peculiarities: Wacker is a decked-over street or road--one of several
in Chicago near the lake (Lake
Michigan) and the river (Chicago River).
That is, it runs at ground level, but there is an upper level that runs above
it. (The two are known as Lower Wacker Drive
and Upper Wacker Drive,
fairly logically. There is also--maybe confusingly--Upper South Water Street,
Lower South Water Street, Upper North Water Street, and Lower North Water
Street. So, as you can see, it's important to not just say "Water
Street" but to remember to add two qualifying
adjectives. Some of these are relatively new and I find it confusing sometimes
to know the ins and outs--or ons and offs.)
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