Futility Closet

It was an evening in November,
As I very well remember,
I was strolling down the street in drunken pride,
But my knees were all a-flutter,
And I landed in the gutter
And a pig came up and lay down by my side.

Yes, I lay there in the gutter
Thinking thoughts I could not utter,
When a colleen passing by did softly say
“You can tell a man who boozes
By the company he chooses” –
And the pig got up and slowly walked away.

– Anonymous

Lawrence Sterne, after a lifetime of peculiarities, and becoming notorious as an eccentric, curious and able writer, at his death was buried in a graveyard near Tyburn, belonging to the Parish of Mary-le-bone, and the ‘resurrection man’ disinterred his corpse and conveyed it to the professor of anatomy at Cambridge where being laid upon the dissecting table, was at once recognized by one of those present who knew him well while living.

– Bizarre Notes & Queries, February 1886

On April 25, 1908, the American liner St. Paul collided in the English Channel with the cruiser HMS Gladiator, killing 27 sailors.

Ten years later the St. Paul was chartered by the Navy to serve as a troopship in World War I. While in Brooklyn to be fitted out and repainted, she heeled over mysteriously in New York Harbor. Divers found that a port had been left open, flooding the lower boiler room.

No one ever discovered a reason for this, but it was noted that the St. Paul sank at 2:30 p.m. on April 25, 1918 — 10 years almost to the minute after she had sunk the Gladiator.

Henry Dudeney says this puzzle is “supposed to be Chinese, many hundreds of years old, and never fails to interest.” White to play and mate, moving each of the three pieces exactly once.

Click for solution …

“Perfection is finally attained, not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away.” — Antoine de Saint Exupéry

James, Earl of Lonsdale, sent a Christmas pie to King George III, which contained 9 geese, 2 tame ducks, 2 turkeys, 4 fowls, 6 pigeons, 6 wild ducks, 3 teals, 2 starlings, 12 partridges, 15 woodcocks, 2 Guinea fowls, 3 snipes, 6 plovers, 3 water-hens, 1 wild goose, 1 curlew, 46 yellow-hammers, 15 sparrows, 15 chaffinches, 2 larks, 4 thrushes, 12 fieldfares, 6 blackbirds, 20 rabbits, 1 leg of veal, half a ham, 3 bushels flour, and 2 stones of butter. It weighed 22 stones, was carried to London in a two horse wagon, and if it was not as dainty as the celebrated pie containing four-and-twenty blackbirds, which, when the pie was opened, began to sing, it was, at all events, a ‘dish to set before the king.’

– Bizarre Notes & Queries, January 1886

American philologist Revilo P. Oliver had a palindromic name — it reads the same backward and forward. In his family, he said, the name “has been the burden of the eldest or only son for six generations.”

And it cost him — at least one journal rejected his articles as fraudulent.

10! (that is, 10 × 9 × 8 × 7 × 6 × 5 × 4 × 3 × 2 × 1) equals 3,628,800.

That’s also precisely the number of seconds in 6 weeks.

On the way to one of his many duels, Georges Clemenceau requested a one-way railway ticket.

“Isn’t that a little pessimistic?” asked his second.

“Not at all,” Clemenceau said. “I always use my opponent’s return ticket for the trip back.”

“The Hartford Times tells a curious story of a flock of crows in that vicinity who recently lost their way in a fog. They lost their bearings at a point directly above the South Green, in Hartford. For a good while they hovered there, coming low down, circling and diving aimlessly about, like a blindfolded person in ‘blind man’s buff,’ and keeping up a hoarse cawing and general racket beyond description. It was plain enough that of the entire company each individual crow was not only puzzled and bothered, but highly indignant, and inclined to utter ‘cuss words’ in his frantic attempts to be heard above the general din, and tell the others which way to go. Once or twice the whole flock swept down to a distance of not more than one hundred feet above the street. Finally, after going around for many times, they saied away in a southerly direction, evidently having got some clue to the way out of the fog, or desperately resolved to go somewhere till they could see daylight.”

– Frank H. Stauffer, The Queer, the Quaint and the Quizzical, 1882