Futility Closet

Solution to Requiescat In Pace, from Thursday:

Just ignore the punctuation:

"Beneath
this stone reposeth
Claud Coster,
tripe-seller, of Impington,
as doth his consort Jane."

(Cited in William Andrews, Curious Epitaphs, 1899)

In the 1970s, Anthony Hopkins won a role in the film The Girl From Petrovka. The story was based on a novel by George Feifer, and Hopkins sought it out in several bookstores, without success. He was waiting at the Leicester Square underground station when he noticed a discarded book on a bench nearby. It was The Girl from Petrovka, with notes written in the margins.

Two years later, while shooting the project in Vienna, Hopkins met Feifer, and during their conversation he learned that the novelist had no copy of the book. He had lent his to a friend, who had lost it somewhere in London.

Incredulous, Hopkins handed him the book he had found two years earlier. "Is this the one?" he asked. "With the notes scribbled in the margins?" It was Feifer's book.

A puzzle from 1796. "This curious inscription is humbly dedicated to the penetrating geniuses of Oxford, Cambridge, Eton, and the learned Society of Antiquaries." Can you decipher it? I'll give the answer tomorrow.

"If there is ever another war in Europe, it will come out of some damned silly thing in the Balkans." — Otto von Bismarck, 1898

July 5, 1766. At eight o'clock in the evening, a man who had laid a wager to cross the Thames in a butcher's tray, set out in the same from Somerset Stairs, and reached the Surrey shore with great ease, using nothing but his hands. He had on a cork jacket, in case of any accident. It was said 1400l. was depending on this affair; and upwards of seventy boats full of spectators were present.

– Annual Register, 1766

On March 23, 1989, a 1,000-foot asteroid missed the Earth by 400,000 miles.

If it had passed 6 hours earlier it would have struck us, creating the largest explosion in recorded history.

4² = 2⁴

In December 1974, Australian police arrested a man they believed was Lord Lucan, a British peer who had fled a murder investigation in London.

They were mistaken. It wasn't Lord Lucan — it was British MP John Stonehouse, who had faked his suicide a month earlier.

If you're the trusting sort, you might be pleased to carry this recommendation from Cardinal Richelieu to the French ambassador at Rome.

You wouldn't last long, though. Rather than scan each line straight across, the ambassador would fold the page in half and read the truth about you in the left column.

(From Charles Bombaugh, Gleanings From the Harvest-Fields of Literature, 1860)

On March 23, 1944, RAF tail gunner Nick Alkemade was over Berlin when a Luftwaffe attack set his bomber ablaze.

His parachute was in the flaming cabin, so he resigned himself to a quick death and jumped without it.

Alkemade fell head down for 18,000 feet, trying to relax and thinking of death. But after the impact he found himself looking up at the stars through a canopy of pines. The trees and snow had apparently slowed his fall, and he escaped with only a sprained leg.

The Gestapo refused to believe his story until they found his burned parachute at the crash site.