“Instead of saying ‘cut’ at the end of a take, he would say, ‘That’s enough of that shit.’ After your own close-up, it’s hilarious, but when I saw him doing it to himself, it really made me laugh.” — Laura Dern, of Clint Eastwood
Entertainment
Pseudonyms
Fictitious correspondents invented by T.S. Eliot in kick-starting a letters page in The Egoist in 1917:
The Rev. Charles James Grimble
Muriel A. Schwarz
Charles Augustus Conybeare
Helen B. Trundlett
J.A.D. Spence
Apparently this wasn’t unusual for Eliot, who wrote for The Tyro in 1921 as Gus Krutzsch. When I.A. Richards invited Krutzsch to meet him in Peking, Eliot replied, “I do not care to visit any country which has no native cheese.”
As a hedge against hard times, W.C. Fields used to open bank accounts under assumed names, including Sneed Hearn, Dr. Otis Guelpe, Figley E. Whitesides, and Professor Curtis T. Bascom.
“He had bank accounts, or at least safe-deposit boxes, in such cities as London, Paris, Sydney, Cape Town, and Suva,” said his friend Gene Fowler in 1949. “I do not know this for a fact, but I think that much of his fortune still rests in safe-deposit boxes about which, deliberately or not, he said nothing.”
Fore!
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.
Star Turn
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.
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.
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.)
Discernment
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
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.)
Misc
- 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.)
First Flight
Paper airplanes existed long before real airplanes.
Every Little Boy’s Book, from 1864, includes instructions for a “paper dart”:
“The paper dart, when thrown from the hand, rarely hits the object aimed at, as it generally makes a graceful curve in passing through the air.”
Via Vox.