Futility Closet

From a September 1909 Baseball Magazine account of a Giants-Pirates game:

With the third inning faded into the dim and forgotten past, the fourth spasm in the afternoon’s matinee of Dementia Baseballitis hopped into the glare of the calcium glim. It was the Giants’ turn to paddle the pellet, Murderous Michael Donlin taking his turn beside the glad glum. Mike biffed the bulb on the proboscis and sent it gleefully gliding to the distant shrubbery. … Bresnahan managed to get next to the seamy side of a floater and the Toledo kid sent the denizens of Coogan’s Bluff into Seventh Heaven of Gleefullness by starting the pulsating pill on a line for the extreme backyard. But they reckoned without the mighty Wagner. The Carnegie Dutchman extended a monster paw, the near-two bagger was cleverly captured by a dainty dab of his lunch hook and before you could bat an eye he had whipped the globule over to Abby, who made an earnest effort to put Donlin down and out but missed by a fraction of an inch.

Baseball historian Douglas Wallop translates: “In the New York half of the fourth inning, Mike Donlin singled and catcher Roger Bresnahan lined out to Wagner, who almost doubled up Donlin at first base.”

Now how long before the translation becomes incomprehensible?

In “Partial Magic in the Quixote,” Borges writes:

Let us imagine that a portion of the soil of England has been levelled off perfectly and that on it a cartographer traces a map of England. The job is perfect; there is no detail of the soil of England, no matter how minute, that is not registered on the map; everything has there its correspondence. This map, in such a case, should contain a map of the map, which should contain a map of the map of the map, and so on to infinity.

This sequence tends to a single point, the point on the map that corresponds directly to the point it represents in the territory.

Cover England entirely with a 1:1 map of itself, then crumple the map into a ball. So long as it remains in England, the balled map will always contain at least one point that lies directly above the corresponding point in England.

See Garganta and Papered Over.

‘My dearest Maria,’ wrote a recently-married husband to his wife. She wrote back, ‘Dearest, let me correct either your grammar or your morals. You address me, “My dearest Maria.” Am I to suppose you have other dear Marias?’

– The Illinois Farmer, June 1863

In 1946, while on location shooting The Yearling, Victor Fleming was barraged with interfering telegrams by producer Sidney Franklin. Finally he wired back:

JUST SAT DOWN AND READ SCRIPT AND YOUR TELEGRAM TO DEER + FEEL HE WILL DO BETTER HEREAFTER.

Suppose we fill Yankee Stadium with 50,000 people and ask them to spend the day shaking hands with one another.

Prove that, at the end of the day, at least two participants will have shaken hands with the same number of people.

Click for solution …

When the San Diego Wild Animal Park opened in 1972, it featured a monorail that visitors could ride around the park’s perimeter. The railway was called the Wgasa Bush Line, a suitably exotic name that many visitors assumed was African.

In fact the name arose in a planning meeting. When chief designer Chuck Faust couldn’t think of a name, he wrote WGASA on the plans. “Everybody laughed because they knew what it stood for, but they loved it because it sounded African,” zoo founder Charles Schroeder wrote later. “We thought WGASA would blow over, but it actually stuck.”

It stands for “Who gives a shit anyway?”