The Girt Dog of Ennerdale

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Thylacineprint.jpg

In 1810, a mysterious creature began killing sheep in northern England. Between May and September it defied the entire county of Cumberland, killing up to eight sheep a night despite being hunted nearly continuously. The “girt dog” never attacked the same flock on successive nights; it ignored poisoned meat left for it and led frustrated farmers on fruitless chases of 20 miles and more, occasionally turning to savage the forelegs of the pursuing dogs but never uttering a sound.

Finally, in September, the creature was run to ground near the Ehen River and shot. In four months it had killed more than 300 sheep. The carcass, which weighed 112 pounds, was stuffed and set up in a museum in Keswick, though it’s since been lost. Its description — a tawny dog with a tiger’s stripes — curiously matches that of the thylacine (above), a wolflike marsupial native to Tasmania. Possibly an exotic predator had escaped from a traveling menagerie and found itself peculiarly adapted to Cumberland farmland. We’ll never know.

| Oddities

Astral Assault

A most interesting problem …, some years ago, engaged the attention of the courts of Georgia. A man named Simpson, standing in South Carolina, fired a pistol with felonious intent at a person who was in a boat, on water embraced within the territorial limits of Georgia. The bullets went wide of the person at whom they were aimed and splashed in the water. It was held by the courts that the defendant was guilty of an assault with intent to murder in Georgia, ‘because,’ said the judge, ‘the balls did strike the water of the river in close proximity to him (the prosecuting witness) within this State, and it is therefore certain that they took effect in Georgia.’

For the purposes of the case the judge held further that the defendant, when he fired the shots, was constructively in the State of Georgia. This holding was upon a theory of the law that where one puts in force an agency for the commission of crime, he, in legal contemplation, accompanies the same to the places where it becomes effectual.

— “Historic Legal Puzzles,” The Green Bag: A Useless but Entertaining Magazine for Lawyers, August 1899

| Society

Grammagrams

A phonetic puzzle by Woody Rowe:
grammagram grid

Across

1. What mosquitoes do.
2. What snakes do.
3. What dogs do.
4. What teeth do.

Down:

1. Insects
2. Optical organs
3. Annoy
4. Comfort

The solution:

grammagram solution - english

Get it? Remarkably, the same idea works in French:

grammagram grid

Across

1. Que font les moustiques
2. Que font les chiens
3. Que font les serpents
4. Que font les dents

Down

1. aime
2. au
3. air
4. dé

grammagram solution - french

| Language

Devil’s Advocate

Calling Halloween “the devil’s holiday,” in 1986 Ralph P. Forbes of London, Ark., filed suit to prevent the public schools from letting kids wear costumes to school.

He filed the suit on behalf of himself, all Christian children, and Jesus Christ. The defendants included the Arkansas Department of Education, “high priests of secular humanism,” and Satan.

U.S. District Judge George Howard Jr. continued the case, whereupon attorney John Wesley Hall Jr. offered to represent Satan pro bono. He pointed out that the Dark One doesn’t transact business, own property, or commit torts in Arkansas, and asked the judge to drop him as a defendant.

The Chicago Tribune reported drily that “efforts to reach Satan for comment were unsuccessful.”

| Religion · Society

Don’t Shoot!

http://books.google.com/books?id=RolJAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_atb#v=onepage&q&f=false

The Schachfreund, edited by M. Alapin, gives the following amusing Chess Skit. A well-known chess master allowed weak opponents to make as many moves as they pleased during five minutes, as odds, before the beginning of a game, with the provision that they confined their moves to their own half of the board. At the end of the five minutes the game commenced, the odds-giver having the first move. During the five minutes one of them had played: [1. a4 2. Na3 3. h4 4. Nf3 5. d4 6. Nd2 7. Rh3 8. Nac4 9. Raa3 10. Ne4 11. Qd2 12. Rhf3 13. g3 14. Bh3 15. Qf4 16. Rae3], whereupon the odds-giver resigned without having made a single move, as he could not avoid mate in two.

— The British Chess Magazine, January 1899

| Puzzles

In a Word

cark
v. to worry

kedogenous
adj. produced by worry

Some of your hurts you have cured
And the sharpest you still have survived,
But what torments of grief you endured
From evils which never arrived!

— Emerson

| Language

Letter From New York

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1840sGreeley.jpg

Horace Greeley had atrocious handwriting. According to William Shepard Walsh’s Handy-Book of Literary Curiosities (1892), Greeley once sent the following note to the Iowa Press Association:

“I have waited till longer waiting would be discourteous, only to find that I cannot attend your Press meeting next June as I would like to do. I find so many cares and duties pressing on me that, with the weight of years, I feel obliged to decline any invitation that takes me away a day’s journey from home.”

After some study, the Iowans deciphered this as:

“I have wondered all along whether any squirt had denied the scandal about the President meeting Jane in the woods on Saturday. I have hominy, carrots, and R.R. ties more than I could move with eight steers. If eels are blighted, dig them early. Any insinuation that brick ovens are dangerous to hams gives me the horrors.”

Their reply is not recorded.

| Literature