Fore!

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

Golfers at the Aroostook Valley Country Club have to play carefully — a stray shot might leave the country. The club straddles the border between the United States and Canada — the course and clubhouse are in New Brunswick, and the parking lot and pro shop are in Maine.

The club was launched in 1929, when enterprising founders built the clubhouse just feet inside the Canadian border, so that visiting American golfers could evade Prohibition without having to pass through customs.

Both nations still play the course today, but border restrictions imposed during the pandemic mean that Americans now have to enter at an official border crossing.

| Entertainment · Oddities

Star Turn

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Stage actor Leo Reuss was just gaining fame in Berlin when the rising Nazi regime began to restrict the work of Jewish actors. So Reuss invented a new character. Retreating to a cabin in his native Austria, he grew out his beard, bathed in hydrogen peroxide to bleach his hair, studied the speech and mannerisms of farmers, and obtained new papers from a local peasant.

After a year’s effort he had recreated himself as Kaspar Brandhofer, a self-educated Tyrolian actor. When he returned to the stage, his former director Max Reinhardt failed to recognize him and in fact recommended him to Ernst Lothar in Vienna, where in 1936 Reuss played a featured role in the stage adaptation of Fräulein Else. The actors he worked among never suspected the ruse, despite their earlier work together.

Critics hailed the performance, calling Reuss “the humble peasant of the Austrian Alps, the finest natural actor of his generation,” and Lothar offered him a three-year contract. But his eventual confession brought on an uproar, and he decided that the Nazi regime had grown too strong. He emigrated to the United States, where he went on to an active movie career as Lionel Royce, appearing in almost 40 films before his death in 1946.

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High and Dry

Since much of the Netherlands is below sea level, Dutch farmers needed a way to leap waterways to reach their various plots of land. Over time this evolved into a competitive sport, known as fierljeppen (“far leaping”) in which contestants sprint to the water, seize a 10-meter pole, and climb it as it lurches forward over the channel. The winner is the one who lands farthest from the starting point in the sand bed on the opposite side.

The current record holder is Jaco de Groot of Utrecht, who leapt, clambered, swayed, and fell 22.21 meters in 2017.

Below: In the Red Bull Stalen Ros in The Hague, two-person teams must navigate tandem bikes along a narrow 80-meter track. Participants are assessed on speed, design of bikes and attire, and creativity.

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Doppelgänger

I don’t normally follow sports, but this seems worth remarking: Tonight Danny Jansen is set to become the first baseball player to play for both teams in the same game.

Jansen was in the lineup for the Toronto Blue Jays when they faced Boston on June 26, a game that was suspended because of rain and scheduled to be made up on Monday. In the meantime, he was traded to Boston, and Red Sox manager Alex Cora has said he will put Jansen in the lineup when the game resumes.

Jansen had been at bat when the game was suspended and will likely be behind the plate as catcher when the Blue Jays send a pinch hitter to finish the at-bat. So he’ll actually play both sides of the same at-bat.

Eric Money is the only NBA player to score for two teams in one game, though others have played for both sides.

(Via MetaFilter.)

| Entertainment · Oddities

Discernment

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The most successful critics are always scribbling things in their programs, largely because it gives them an important and industrious air. Also, it is interesting to try to figure out what you’ve written afterward. Last week, for instance, I made a very helpful note during the second act of a drama called ‘They Walk Alone.’ ‘Lanchstr get face stuck 1 these nights awful if,’ it seemed to say.

— Wolcott Gibbs, “The Theatre,” New Yorker, Jan. 4, 1941

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Capacity

In the 1967 Star Trek episode “The Trouble With Tribbles,” a small furry alien species is introduced on board the Enterprise and after three days grows to 1,771,561 individuals. In 2019 University of Leicester physics undergraduate Rosie Hodnett and her colleagues wondered how long it would take for the creatures to fill the whole starship. Using Mr. Spock’s estimate that each tribble produces 10 offspring every 12 hours and assuming that each tribble occupies 3.23 × 10-3 m3 and that the volume of the Enterprise is 5.94 × 106 m3, they found that the ship would reach its limit of 18.4 × 109 tribbles in 4.5 days.

A separate inquiry found that after 5.16 days the accumulated tribbles would be generating enough thermal energy to power the warp drive for 1 second.

(Rosie Hodnett et al., “Tribbling Times,” Journal of Physics Special Topics, Nov. 18, 2019.)

| Entertainment · Science & Math

Misc

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  • Liza Minnelli, daughter of Judy Garland, married Jack Haley Jr., son of the Tin Man.
  • The Netherlands still sends 20,000 tulip bulbs to Canada each year.
  • Every positive integer is a sum of distinct terms in the Fibonacci sequence.
  • HIDEOUS and HIDEOUT have no vowel sounds in common.
  • “Death is only a larger kind of going abroad.” — Samuel Butler

(Thanks, Colin and Joseph.)

| Entertainment · History · Language · Quotations · Science & Math

No Play Zone

https://pixabay.com/en/the-shoals-course-muscle-shoals-1613273/

In an April 3, 1971, letter to the editor of the Saturday Review, reader K. Jason Sitewell reported some alarming news: A congressman named A.F. Day had introduced a bill that would abolish all private parks of more than 50 acres and all public recreation areas that were used by fewer than 150 people a day. The practical effect would be to abolish the nation’s golf courses.

Sitewell said he understood Day’s motive because he’d grown up with him. The congressman’s grandfather had “perished in a sand trap,” and his father had died of a coronary after hitting 19 balls into a pond.

An uproar followed. Country clubs vowed to fight the bill, constituents besieged their representatives, and editorials decried the measure, which Golf World called “as ominous a threat to golf as anything that has come along.”

But eventually it became clear that there was no such bill and readers saw the link between the purported congressman’s name and the date of Sitewell’s letter. It turned out that the whole thing had been a jape cooked up by Review editor and inveterate prankster Norman Cousins.

“I wrote apologies to each subscriber who had been offended or angered,” Cousins wrote. “I begged my golfing friends, who threatened to have me barred from every course in the nation, to forgive me for my joke. I suffered enough every time I played, I told them, and penance was awaiting me on each tee.”

| Entertainment · Hoaxes