From the Strand, December 1903: These tracks were left by a man in flight leading a child. “In order to throw his pursuers off the trail the man changed his means of locomotion at each of the places marked in numbers on the diagram. The problem consists in discovering the manner of locomotion between each of these stations and the next; what vehicles the man took; what happened to him in the course of his flight; and what he did with the child at the different stages of the journey.”
Full text of a memo from Winston Churchill to his War Cabinet, Aug. 9, 1940:
To do our work, we all have to read a mass of papers. Nearly all of them are far too long. This wastes time, while energy has to be spent in looking for the essential points.
I ask my colleagues and their staffs to see to it that their Reports are shorter.
(i) The aim should be Reports which set out the main points in a series of short, crisp paragraphs.
(ii) If a Report relies on detailed analysis of some complicated factors, or on statistics, these should be set out in an Appendix.
(iii) Often the occasion is best met by submitting not a full-dress Report, but an Aide-memoire consisting of headings only, which can be expanded orally if needed.
(iv) Let us have an end of such phrases as these: ‘It is also of importance to bear in mind the following considerations …’, or ‘Consideration should be given to the possibility of carrying into effect …’. Most of these woolly phrases are mere padding, which can be left out altogether, or replaced by a single word. Let us not shrink from using the short expressive phrase, even if it is conversational.
Reports drawn up on the lines I propose may at first seem rough as compared with the flat surface of officialese jargon. But the saving in time will be great, while the discipline of setting out the real points concisely will prove an aid to clearer thinking.
W.S.C.
He followed this up in November 1951:
BREVITY
Official papers are too long and too diffuse. In 1940 I called for brevity. Evidently I must do so again. I ask my colleagues to read what I wrote then (it is reproduced overleaf) and to make my wishes known to their staffs.
I also invite attention to the Foreign Secretary’s recent despatch to Heads of Missions about the length of telegrams.
W.S.C.
A puzzle by A. Khalamaizer: Move three of these circles to make the triangle point downward.
This famous adagio is commonly attributed to the 18th-century Venetian composer Tomaso Albinoni (1671–1751). In fact it was written in 1958. Musicologist Remo Giazotto said he’d found a fragment of an unfinished Albinoni trio sonata in a Dresden library shortly after World War II and composed a new one-movement work based on two thematic ideas and a figured bass. At most these are Albinoni’s only contributions to the work. In fact Giazotto never produced the manuscript fragment, and no record of its existence has been found in the library records, so it’s conceivable, though far from certain, that Giazotto invented the story of the discovery and in fact composed the whole piece himself.
The prime factorization of 255987 is 33 × 19 × 499.
That’s not very interesting. But when this is expressed in binary, it reads:
111110011111110011 = 1111 × 10011 × 111110011
Each side of that equation comprises the same string of digits.
I don’t know who devised this; I found it in The Batsford Chess Puzzle Book (2002). Black has only a king and a bishop, while White still has all 16 of his men. But Black threatens to take White’s knight, giving mate immediately. If each side uses every legal expedient, what will be the outcome? For a start, White can stave off mate with 1. Bh2!
What word has kst in the middle, and at the end, and in at the beginning?
All teeth and claws, behold this little Jaguar!
A fit companion for the kind of Haguar.
— D.B. Wyndham Lewis
anatine: of or pertaining to, resembling or characteristic of, a duck
cancrine: having the qualities of a crab
caprine: of or relating to a goat
columbine: of, belonging to, or of the nature of, a dove or pigeon
formicine: of, or of the nature of, ants
fringilline: pertaining to the finches
hippotigrine: of or relating to a zebra
leporine: relating to a hare
lutrine: relating to the otter family
musteline: of or like a weasel
pavonine: of, relating to, resembling, or characteristic of a peacock
procyonine: of raccoons
sciurine: of or relating to squirrels
suilline: of or relating to pigs
talpine: relating to the moles
viverrine: resembling or related to the civet
vulpine: characteristic of a fox
“The sight of an old limping horse, tugged forward by one man while another kept beating it with a stick to get it to the knacker’s yard at Colmar, haunted me for weeks,” wrote Albert Schweitzer in his 1924 memoir. “So when my mother had prayed with me and had kissed me good-night, I used to add silently a prayer that I had composed myself for all living creatures. It ran thus: ‘O, heavenly Father, protect and bless all things that have breath; guard them from all evil, and let them sleep in peace.'”
“Genuine works of art carry their own aesthetic theory implicit within them and suggest the standards according to which they are to be judged.” — Goethe, letter, 1808
