The Half-Bastard

According to mathematician Eugene Northrop, in England between 1907 and 1921 it was legal for a man to marry the sister of his deceased wife, but illegal for a woman to marry the brother of her deceased husband.

Suppose then that twin brothers marry twin sisters. One husband and the opposite wife die, and after a decent interval the surviving woman and man marry. For the man this marriage is legal; for the woman it’s illegal. Thus, if they have a son, he’s legitimate for one parent and illegitimate for the other.

See Proof That a Man Can Be His Own Grandfather.

| Oddities · Society

Dust to Dust

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vasnetsov_Grave_digger.JPG

An ingenious American lately computed that in the United States alone, half-a-ton of pure gold, equivalent to half-a-million of dollars, was annually put, as stuffing, into the teeth of the living, or otherwise employed by the dentist on people’s food-grinding apparatus; and inasmuch as none of this precious metal is ever extracted after death, our shrewd calculator ‘reckoned’ that, at this rate, a quantity of gold equal to all that now in circulation would, in the course of three centuries, be lying buried in the earth. It is strange to think that one digger, the sexton to wit, is constantly returning to mother earth nearly as much gold as the other digger is constantly extracting from her bosom.

— Patrick Maxwell, Pribbles and Prabbles, 1906

| Death

All Greek

To a dining companion, William Hogarth once sent a card inscribed with a knife, a fork, and these letters:

Η Β Π

It was an invitation to “eta beta pi.”

Exasperated that Nicholas Rowe kept borrowing his snuffbox, Samuel Garth wrote these letters on the lid:

Φ Ρ

“Fie! Rowe!”

Their friend John Dennis observed, “A man who could make so vile a pun would not scruple to pick a pocket.”

| Language

Kangaroo Court

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

Before eating the forbidden fruit, Adam and Eve either knew that disobeying God was evil or they didn’t.

If they didn’t, then they can’t be blamed for disobeying him.

If they did, then they already possessed the knowledge that God had forbidden.

Either way, God could not justly banish them from Eden.

(Adduced by Richard R. La Croix.)

| Religion

A Weather Eye

Modern meteorologists might envy Patrick Murphy: In compiling his Weather Almanac for the Year 1838, Murphy had made a year’s forecasts at once, including the prediction that Jan. 20 would be “fair” with probably the “lowest degree of winter temperature.”

The weather complied in spades: On Jan. 20 the thermometer plunged 56 degrees and stood below zero for several hours, marking the coldest day of the century. Such a throng filled Murphy’s London shop that police were called in to keep order, and the forecaster was immortalized in verse:

Murphy has a weather eye,
He can tell whene’er he pleases
Whether it will be wet or dry,
When it thaws and when it freezes.

The almanac made £7,000 and went through 50 reprintings, and for many years afterward the winter of 1837-38 was remembered as Murphy’s Winter.

Somehow he never repeated the feat, though.

See Lucky Guess.

| Oddities

Rock and Roll

Worshipful natives are rolling a giant statue of me across their island. The statue rests on a slab, which rests on rollers that have a circumference of 1 meter each. How far forward will the slab have moved when the rollers have made 1 revolution?

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

Spoon River

“Lines by an Oxford Don,” from the Globe, June 1805:

My brain was filled with rests of thought,
No more by currying wares distraught,
As lazing dreamily I lay
In my Canoodian canay.

Ah me, methought, how leef were swite
If men could neither wreak nor spite;
No erring bloomers, no more slang,
No tungles then to trip the tang!

No more the undergraddering tits
Would exercise their woolish fits
With tidal ales (and false, I wis)
Of my fame-farred tamethesis!

A sentence that makes equal sense when spoonerized: “I must brush my hat, for it is pouring with rain.”

When George S. Kaufman’s daughter told him a friend had eloped from Vassar, he said, “Ah! She put her heart before the course.”

| Language · Poems

Low Art

schon woodcut

We met Erhard Schön’s anamorphic woodcuts back in 2006.

This one, Was sichst du? (What Do You See?), from 1538, seems to promise an edifying religious theme — there’s Jonah on the left being spit out of his whale. But view it edge-on and you’ll see this:

schon woodcut - compressed

So, maybe not.

| Art · Oddities