Futility Closet

Excerpt from the 1791 will of an English gentleman who had been sent unwillingly to live in Tipperary:

I give and bequeath the annual sum of ten pounds, to be paid in perpetuity out of my estate, to the following purpose. It is my will and pleasure that this sum shall be spent in the purchase of a certain quantity of the liquor vulgarly called whisky, and it shall be publicly given out that a certain number of persons, Irish only, not to exceed twenty, who may choose to assemble in the cemetery in which I shall be interred, on the anniversary of my death, shall have the same distributed to them. Further, it is my desire that each shall receive it by half-a-pint at a time till the whole is consumed, each being likewise provided with a stout oaken stick and a knife, and that they shall drink it all on the spot. Knowing what I know of the Irish character, my conviction is, that with these materials given, they will not fail to destroy each other, and when in the course of time the race comes to be exterminated, this neighbourhood at least may, perhaps, be colonized by civilized and respectable Englishmen.

From Virgil McClure Harris, Ancient, Curious and Famous Wills, 1911.

In the navy, you’re not a true sailor until you’ve crossed the equator. So whenever a ship makes the crossing, it holds a ceremony in which a sailor representing “King Neptune” challenges “pollywogs” for invading his domain, and there follow two days of general hazing from which the newbies emerge “shellbacks.”

In the centuries since this started, there has emerged a kind of graduate school of advanced crossings. Cross the equator at the international date line and you become a golden shellback; cross it at the prime meridian, near West Africa, and you’re an emerald shellback.

This becomes an exercise in spherical geometry. Presumably a member of the Order of Magellan (a sailor who has circled the globe) automatically joins the Order of the Golden Dragon (for crossing the international date line) unless he’s also joined the Orders of the Blue Nose and the Red Nose (for crossing the Arctic and Antarctic Circles). There must be a chart somewhere.

exungulate
v. to pare the nails

onychophagy
n. nail-biting

This literary knight’s tour appeared originally in the Sussex Chess Magazine.

Start on d4, “Our”, and jump from square to square in the manner of a chess knight to assemble an eight-line verse. Like a chess knight’s tour, the correct solution visits every square on the board.

Click for solution …

On June 18, 1964, an elderly woman was walking through a Los Angeles alley when a blond woman with a ponytail pushed her to the ground and stole her purse. The blond woman escaped in a yellow car driven by a bearded black man.

Police arrested Janet Collins, a ponytailed blond woman whose bearded black husband drove a yellow Lincoln. At trial, a local mathematics instructor testified that there was 1 chance in 12 million that another couple would meet this description, and the jury convicted the Collinses of second-degree robbery. Sound reasonable?

Well, no. The California Supreme Court reversed the conviction, noting that the prosecution had offered no statistical evidence and that the mathematician had simply invented estimates for each of the six factors and multiplied them together, without adjusting for dependence or the possibility of mistake.

“The testimony as to mathematical probability infected the case with fatal error and distorted the jury’s traditional role of determining guilt or innocence according to long-settled rules,” wrote justice Raymond Sullivan. “Mathematics, a veritable sorcerer in our computerized society, while assisting the trier of fact in the search for truth, must not cast a spell over him.”

This verse by Lewis Carroll is remarkable for more than its melancholy:

It can be read both “across” and “down.”

Charles Clerke was midshipman on HMS Dolphin during her first circumnavigation of the world, under John Byron. Immediately on his return in April 1767, he appeared before the Royal Society with an account of enormously tall natives in Patagonia:

They are of a copper colour, with long black hair, and some of them are certainly nine feet, if they do not exceed it. The Commodore, who is very near six foot, could but just reach the top of one of their heads, which he attempted on tip-toes; and there were several taller than him on whom the experiment was tried. They were prodigious stout, and as well and proportionally made as ever I saw people in my life. The women, I think, bear much the same proportion to the men as our Europeans do: there was hardly a man there less than eight feet, most of them considerably more; the women, I believe, run from seven and a half to eight feet. (Philosophical Transactions, vol. 57)

By that time such reports had been accumulating for more than two centuries: See Tall Tale and More Tall Argentines.

The seven seas contain seven Cs:

Some thirty years ago, there was published an English book, that received considerable attention, entitled ‘Bealings Bells.’ The principal statements are as follow: On February 2, 1834, the bells in Major Moor’s residence, at Great Bealings, began to ring, without any visible cause, and continued to do so daily for nearly two months. A row of nine bells was almost constantly in motion, at times all of them ringing at once, at other times only five. The ringing was witnessed by a great number of people, and many efforts were made to discover the agency, but in vain. Major Moor published an account of the annoyance in the Ipswich Journal, and, much to his surprise, received numerous letters from different parts of the kingdom, giving accounts of similar ringings, occurring at about the same time. At Greenwich Hospital, the phenomena took place under so remarkable circumstances as to excite general attention. All persons were excluded from the apartments where the bell-pulls were, and the bells were watched night and day. In some localities, where the ringings were heard, the bell-pulls were cut, to end the disturbance; but the bells rang on as merrily as ever. When once under way, they seemed to be electrified; nothing could stop them but force.

– Appletons’ Journal of Literature, Science and Art, 1870

Choir practice normally started at 7:20 p.m. at the West Side Baptist Church in Beatrice, Neb. But on March 1, 1950, all 15 members were late.

One pair of sisters had car trouble; they called for a ride from a third member, who was delayed by homework. A mother and daughter were detained at a relative’s house. The choir director was late because her daughter, the pianist, had fallen asleep. Other members needed to finish a letter or hear the end of a radio program. One was “just plain lazy.”

So no one was present at 7:25 when the building exploded. The blast shattered local windows and forced a nearby radio station off the air.

The church furnace, it seems, had ignited a gas leak.