Sells

In Columbus, Ohio, Mrs. Christian Sells Jaeger, historian of the Columbus Genealogical Society, trailing the Sells family back through the ages in genealogical libraries in Chicago, Washington and New York, solemnly announced that she had tracked it down to Adam. Her course (going backward): Rhode Island's Roger Williams, Britain's Plantagenets, 21 generations of Scottish kings, 19 centuries of Irish kings, Egypt's Pharaoh Nectonidus; Judah's Zedekiah, Israel's David, Enos, Seth and thus (4,000 B.C.) Adam.

Baby

In Manhattan, an unidentified 18-month-old boy in a pink zipper suit turned up in a Woolworth 5-&-10-c- store, talking his own private language, grabbing merchandise indiscriminately. Because the customers were amused, the management let him alone until he started painting the floor with shoe polish. At the police station, he pulled plugs out of the signal switchboard, nearly wrecked the teletype machine, dined on cheese, jelly sandwiches and milk, went to sleep, awoke and prowled in the basement coal bin, found a sleeping Negro there, kicked him in the face, refused a bath. At the New York Foundling Hospital, nurses agreed he was the dirtiest child they had ever seen, bathed him.

Exhibition

In Canton, China, the local fire department scheduled an exhibition leap from a burning three-story platform. With 10,000 spectators watching, two Chinese firemen climbed to the top. Someone set fire to the gasoline-soaked frame before the life net was ready. When the flames reached the top, the two firemen jumped to their death.

Puzzlers

At their semi-annual convention in Manhattan, members of the National Puzzlers' League teased one another's brains for three days with: an anagram for "a counterfeit nickel" (solution: "Notice, fake lucre, tin"); a transdeletion or progressive anagram from '"sod" to "countryside" in eleven changes; a rebus of an H written inside a G, both over a W (since it is The H and writ in G on the W all, the solution is: "The handwriting on the wall"); and interminable alphagrams, charades, transposals, cryptograms, rhomboids, antigrams, palindromes, inverted pyramids and plain puzzles. Outstanding contribution was a "seventeen pyramid" (crossword puzzle whose bottom line has 17 letters, top one). Most useful contribution was a new longest word in the English language, 45-letter "pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanokoniosis," to replace 28-letter "antidisestablishmentarianism." The new one means a kind of silicosis caused by particles of siliceous volcanic dust.

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