Postal Inspector

In 1897, to help inaugurate New York City’s new pneumatic mail system, officials sent a live black cat in a canister from the Produce Exchange Post Office on Bowling Green to the General Post Office on Park Row, a distance of 3,750 feet.

“How it could live after being shot at terrific speed from Station P in the Produce Exchange Building, making several turns before reaching Broadway and Park Row, I cannot conceive, but it did,” recalled postal supervisor Howard Wallace Connelly. “It seemed to be dazed for a minute or two but started to run and was quickly secured and placed in a basket that had been provided for that purpose.”

At its peak the system would carry 95,000 letters a day through 27 miles of tubes connecting 23 post offices. It was discontinued in 1953, outmoded by the growing volume of mail and the advent of the automobile.

| Oddities · Technology

Nothing Doing

Recess, County Galway, Ireland:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Monument_to_nothing,_Recess_-_geograph.org.uk_-_381638.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

Aspelt, Luxembourg:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aspelt_Plaque_Nothing_happened.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

Bechyne, Czech Republic:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bechyn%C4%9B,_Z%C3%A1%C5%99e%C4%8D%C3%AD_481,_zde_v_tomto_dom%C4%9B.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

(“In this house, no important person was born, lived, and most importantly did not die, and that is why we live well here.”)

Záblatí-Hlásná Lhota, Czech Republic:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hl%C3%A1sn%C3%A1_Lhota_(Z%C3%A1blat%C3%AD)_07.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

(“Hlásná Lhota – a stone in whose surroundings nothing significant has demonstrably happened for several hundred years”)

Míšov, Czech Republic:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:M%C3%AD%C5%A1ov_-_Cimrman.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

(“On 8 May 1915 in Míšov, the great Czech genius Jára Cimrman just barely missed being involved in something historically important.”)

O’Hungry’s Café, Old Town San Diego State Historic Park:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:On_This_Site_in_1897_Nothing_Happened_-_Sign_in_O%27Hungry%27s_Cafe_-_San_Diego_State_Historic_Park_-_San_Diego,_CA_-_USA_(6930668317).jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

York, Western Australia:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:On_this_site_in_1897_nothing_happened_(4525842700).jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

Villa de Leyva, Boyacá Department, Colombia:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Villa_de_Leyva,_Colombia_02.jpg

(“On October 13, 1825, nothing happened in this house, nor was anyone important born.”)

| Humor · Oddities

Friendly Numbers

The divisors of 30 are 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 10, 15, and 30. Add those up and divide the sum by 30 itself and you get 12/5.

The divisors of 140 are 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 10, 14, 20, 28, 35, 70, and 140. Add those up and divide the sum by 140 and you also get 12/5.

This makes 30 and 140 a friendly pair. Other members of their little club are 2480, 6200, and 40640.

Interestingly, no one knows whether 10 has such a partner. If it does, its smallest friend is at least 1030.

| Science & Math

In a Word

intendiment
n. intention or purpose

auspicate
v. to begin an undertaking

mercation
n. the act of purchasing something

Alnaschar
n. a person given to unrealistic dreams, expectations, or plans

In the summer of 1967, the Beatles briefly considered buying a set of Greek islands where they could live and work together.

“We were all going to live together now, in a huge estate,” Derek Taylor says in Anthology. “The four Beatles and Brian [Epstein] would have their network at the centre of the compound: a dome of glass and iron tracery (not unlike the old Crystal Palace) above the mutual creative/play area, from which arbours and avenues would lead off like spokes from a wheel to the four vast and incredibly beautiful separate living units. In the outer grounds, the houses of the inner clique: Neil [Aspinall], Mal [Evans], Terry [Doran] and Derek, complete with partners, families and friends.”

John, Paul, and George got as far as touring the islands south of Athens and visiting one they considered buying. But indulging the idea for an afternoon seemed to be enough for them. George said, “We got back on the boat and sailed away, and never thought about the island again.”

“It’s a good job we didn’t do it,” Paul said later, “because anyone who tried those ideas realised eventually there would always be arguments, there would always be who has to do the washing-up and whose turn it is to clean out the latrines. I don’t think any of us were thinking of that.”

| Entertainment · Language

Faith and Hope

In 1915, British evangelist Elizabeth Reid Cotton claimed that she had visited Charles Darwin shortly before his death in 1882, and that he’d told her he regretted advancing the theory of natural selection.

“I was a young man with unformed ideas,” he’d said. “I threw out queries, suggestions, wondering all the time over everything, and to my astonishment, the ideas took like wildfire. People made a religion of them.” He begged her to preach to a gathering at his summer house the following day. “If you take the meeting at three o’clock this window will be open, and you will know that I am joining in with the singing.”

It’s not impossible that Cotton did meet Darwin, but his family denied that he had ever recanted the theory. “Dear Sir,” he had written in an 1880 letter, “I am sorry to inform you that I do not believe in the Bible as a divine revelation, & therefore not in Jesus Christ as the son of God.”

| Religion · Science & Math

Reflection

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Liste_des_femmes_aim%C3%A9es_par_Stendhal.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

In September 1835, Stendhal wrote on the shore of Lake Albano the initials of the women he had loved: Virginie Kubly, Angela Pietragrua, Adèle Rebuffel, Mina de Griesheim, Mélanie Guilbert, Angelina Bereyter, Alexandrine Daru, Angela Pietragrua, Matilde Dembowski, Clémentine Curial, Giulia Rinieri, and Madame Azur-Alberthe de Rubempré.

“I dreamed deeply of these names, and of the astonishing follies and stupidities they made me commit,” he wrote. “The habitual condition of my life is that of an unhappy lover.”

(From his unfinished autobiography The Life of Henry Brulard, 1890.)

| Literature

Portrait

A problem from Joseph Madachy’s Mathematics on Vacation (1966): If these statements are all true, what can we deduce about Major Perkins?

  1. Only bleary-eyed military men ever try to shave with a toothbrush.
  2. No bleary-eyed military men are at all musical.
  3. Men who never try to shave with a toothbrush never play golf.
  4. Major Perkins plays the tuba on Wednesdays.
  5. Only musical people who are golfers forget to change their socks.
Click for Answer
| Puzzles

Unquote

“A man doesn’t learn to understand anything unless he loves it.” — Goethe

“A man ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.” — Samuel Johnson

“We soon forget what we have not deeply thought about.” — Proust

| Quotations