The Sundial
It happened once that the people of Khelm made a sundial. But a rainstorm came along and drenched it. So the Khelmites built a roof over their sundial to keep it from getting wet.
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Glossary
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Annotations
TELLER: Anon., from Galicia (southern Poland), (no date recorded)COLLECTOR: Benyomin Volf Segel (pen name of B. V. Shiper).
SOURCE: Segel (1892), p. 29.
man these Khelmites are so dumb haha people from Khelm just got dunked on. what angel went and spilled the jar of town fools all over Khelm am I right chavertes. fuckin' Khelm.
Khelm is a real place and it's just, like, a normal small Polish city. Obviously not much of a Jewish population because, uh...
Anyway it makes me very happy that this whimsical village of fools is not remotely fictitious, it's just a collection of weird stories that got told about an actual real place
[manual post]
Not only is Khelm a real place, but the tradition of dunking on Khelm dates back to at least 1597:
functions as an imaginary city of fools, similar to that of the Greek Abdera, the English Gotham, and the German Schilda, among numerous others.
Currently re-evaluating my opinion about Batman's relationships to crime and privilege.