Managerese
Henry Ford told a visitor to the Ford Motor Company that there were exactly 4,719 parts in a finished car.
Impressed, the visitor asked the supervising engineer if this were true.
“I’m sure I don’t know,” said the engineer. “I can’t think of a more useless piece of information.”
Pen Mystique
Note from poet Thomas Bailey Aldrich to zoologist Edward S. Morse:
My dear Morse:
It was very pleasant to receive a letter from you the other day. Perhaps I should have found it pleasanter if I had been able to decipher it. I don’t think I mastered anything beyond the date, which I knew, and the signature, at which I guessed.
There is a singular and perpetual charm in a letter of yours — it never grows old, and it never loses its novelty. One can say every morning, as one looks at it, “Here’s a letter of Morse’s I haven’t read yet. I think I shall take another shy at it to-day, and maybe I shall be able in the course of a few years to make out what he means by those t’s that look like w’s and those i’s that haven’t any eyebrows.”
Other letters are read and thrown away and forgotten, but yours are kept forever–unread. One of them will last a reasonable man a lifetime.
Admiringly yours,
T.B. Aldrich
Mirror Twins
42263001 is a perfect square, and so is its reversal, 10036224.
The Sedgwick Pie
Most graves in Massachusetts’ Stockbridge Cemetery are oriented with the feet facing east, so that on Resurrection Day the dead will rise facing Jerusalem.
Not so the Sedgwick family — patriarch Theodore Sedgwick ordered that his family’s graves form a circle with their feet toward the center. This way, on Judgment Day, Sedgwicks will see only other Sedgwicks.
It’s been called “the laughingstock of the entire Eastern seaboard.”
(Image: Wikimedia Commons)
Your Move
Playing go requires tremendous concentration, and Hashimoto Utaro and Iwamoto Kaoru shut out all distractions as they resumed an adjourned game in Japan’s Honinbo championship on Aug. 6, 1945.
Unfortunately, they were three miles from downtown Hiroshima.
The explosion damaged the building and injured spectators — but play resumed after lunch.
Unquote
“There are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil.” — Alfred North Whitehead
Born to Run
Three-legged pantyhose, patented by Annette Pappas in 1998.
The third leg is folded into a pocket until you get a run; then you rotate it in.
Or you can use the whole thing as a bagpipe warmer.
Hare Remover
Paul Armand-Delille was angry at the damage that rabbits were doing to his French estate, so on June 14, 1952, he inoculated two of them with a virus, Myxomatosis cuniculi, that he knew had curbed rabbit populations in Australia.
It, um, worked. Within 6 weeks, 98 percent of his rabbits were dead — and by the end of 1954, so were 90 percent of the rabbits in France.
Armand-Delille was charged one franc for illegally spreading an animal disease, then given a medal for services to agriculture. The medal depicts Armand-Delille on one side and a dead rabbit on the other.
Sixty years earlier, essentially the reverse had happened in the United States.
Infallible
Boileau being asked, by Louis XIV, his opinion of some verses which the King had just composed, replied, ‘Nothing seems impossible to your Majesty: you have attempted to make bad verses, and have succeeded.’
– The Poetry and Varieties of Berrow’s Worcester Journal for 1828
In a Word
acnestis
n. that part of an animal’s skin that it cannot reach to scratch
