Futility Closet

James Boyle patented this hands-free hat-tipping device in 1896.

“The hat is detachably secured to the working parts of the device that raise the hat, completely rotate it, and deposit it correctly on the head of the wearer every time said person bows his head and then assumes an erect posture.”

There’s no record of how the ladies received it.

curglaff
n. the shock felt on plunging into cold water

“Numero deus impare gaudet [the god delights in odd numbers].” — Virgil

“Why is it that we entertain the belief that for every purpose odd numbers are the most effectual?” — Pliny

“This is the third time; I hope good luck lies in odd numbers. … They say there is divinity in odd numbers, either in nativity, chance, or death.” — Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor

In the early morning hours of Dec. 3, 2003, assistant U.S. attorney Jonathan Luna drove north out of Baltimore. At about 1 a.m. he withdrew $200 from an ATM in Newark, Del., and at 3:20 a.m. he bought gas at a Pennsylvania service plaza. At 4:04 he exited the Pennsylvania Turnpike with a bloodstained toll ticket.

At 5:30 a.m. his car was discovered in a stream behind a Pennsylvania well drilling company. Luna’s body was under the engine. He had been stabbed 36 times with his own penknife and drowned.

Despite a federal reward of $100,000, no one has ever explained what happened that night.

Before his students arrived for a graduate course in logic, Raymond Smullyan wrote on the blackboard:

PLEASE DO NOT ERASE — BECAUSE IF YOU DO, THOSE WHO COME LATER WON’T KNOW THAT THEY SHOULDN’T ERASE.

“Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.” — Pascal

A puzzle from Henry Ernest Dudeney:

Here is a simple question that will require just a few moments’ thought to get an exact answer. I have a piece of cheese in the shape of a cube. How am I to cut it in two pieces with one straight cut of the knife so that the two new surfaces produced by the cut shall each be a perfect hexagon? Of course, if cut in the direction of the dotted line the surfaces would be squares. Now produce hexagons.

Click for solution …

During a business trip in the late 1950s, George D. Bryson registered at the Brown Hotel in Louisville, Ky., accepted the key to Room 307, and jokingly asked whether any letters had arrived for him.

He was confused to learn that there was indeed a letter for George D. Bryson in Room 307.

It wasn’t for him: The room’s previous occupant had also been named George D. Bryson.

In the ecclesiastical courts of 16th-century France, lawyer Bartholomew de Chasseneux made his name by prosecuting the local vermin (“O snails, caterpillars, and other obscene creatures, which destroy the food of our neighbours, depart hence!”).

Impressed with his argument, the authorities in Autun asked him to advocate for the rats, which they put on trial in 1510 for eating the harvest of Burgundy.

That’s a tall order for even a master lawyer, but, amazingly, Chasseneux won the day:

In his defence, Chasseneux showed that the rats had not received formal notice; and, before proceeding with the case, he obtained a decision that all the priests of the afflicted parishes should announce an adjournment, and summon the defendants to appear on a fixed day.

At the adjourned trial, he complained that the delay accorded his clients had been too short to allow of their appearing, in consequence of the roads being infested with cats. Chasseneux made an able defence, and finally obtained a second adjournment. We believe that no verdict was given.

(From Sabine Baring-Gould, Curiosities of Olden Times, 1896)