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Cartoon No Otrac

By Jeremy Meltingtallow

bz panel 04-24-13Bizarro is brought to you today by Confusing Blind Date.

The cleverness of the human mind seems almost boundless. Give people enough spare time and they’ll fill it with all kinds of weird ways to occupy their minds. Palindromes is such an activity. At some point in history, some bored guy who had plenty to eat, a roof over his head, and no predators in sight, decided to see if he could construct a sentence that was spelled the same backwards as forwards. Thus, palindromes were born.

The earliest palindrome was discovered in Herculaneum (even though this sentence starts out this boring, read on!), a city buried by ash in 79 AD, which said “Sator Arepo Tenet Opera Rotas.” Now here’s the cool part: It is remarkable for the fact that the first letters of each word form the first word, the second letters form the second word, and so forth. Hence, it can be arranged into a word square (see below)  that reads in four different ways: horizontally or vertically from either top left to bottom right or bottom right to top left. Palindrome Square

WHAT?!! How the hell do you do that? That’s WAY harder than soduku or sudoku or soduko or whatever it is called. Of course, the translation in English is a bit strange: Pie Dynamite Eyeball Bunny Alien.

For more on this crazy thingamajig and to find out which of the sentences above I stole directly from Wikipedia, click here.