leighster
n. a female liar
And Stylish, Too
In 1920, Gaitley Guise patented a rubber “tongue shield” to prevent “the unpleasantness accompanying the taking of medicine.”
“Medicine will flow over the shield and pass into the throat without affecting the sense of taste so that all unpleasantness of taking the medicine is obviated.”
Presumably it also works with broccoli.
Reference Work
No one knows who compiled the index for George Mivart’s 1889 book The Origin of Human Reason, but apparently he had strong opinions. On page 136 Mivart describes a certain cockatoo that seemed to reply articulately to questions. The indexer made these entries:
Absurd tale about a Cockatoo, 136
Anecdote, absurd one, about a Cockatoo, 136
Bathos and a Cockatoo, 136
Cockatoo, absurd tale concerning one, 136
Discourse held with a Cockatoo, 136
Incredibly absurd tale of a Cockatoo, 136
Invalid Cockatoo, absurd tale about, 136
Mr. —– and tale about a Cockatoo, 136
Preposterous tale about a Cockatoo, 136
Questions answered by a Cockatoo, 136
R—–, Mr. and tale about a Cockatoo, 136
Rational Cockatoo as asserted, 136
Tale about a rational Cockatoo, as asserted, 136
Very absurd tale about a Cockatoo, 136
Wonderfully foolish tale about a Cockatoo, 136
The same index contains entries for “Opening of oysters by monkeys” and “Dough, parrot up to its knees in.” Perhaps the man was just very thorough.
One Man’s Meat
Somebody asked the Baron Rothschild to take venison.—’No,’ said the Baron, ‘I never eatsh wenshon, I don’t think it ish so coot ash mutton.’—’Oh,’ said the Baron’s friend, ‘I wonder at your saying so. If mutton were better than venison, why does venison cost so much more?’ ‘Vy,’ replied the Baron, ‘I vill tell you vy—in dish world de peoples alvaysh prefers vat ish deer to vat is sheep.’
— “Anecdote of Sir Richard Jebb,” recounted in A Collection of Newspaper Extracts, 1842
Those Germans
Anonymous German picture puzzle, 19th century.
Draw your own conclusions.
The Ladder Paradox
Imagine two men. The first is standing in a garage. The second runs into the garage carrying a ladder.
Special relativity tells us that a moving object undergoes a length contraction relative to its observer. So the man in the garage sees the ladder shorten to fit in the garage.
But the man with the ladder sees the garage shorten relative to himself — so the ladder doesn’t fit.
How is this possible?
Horror Show
Vincent Price and Christopher Lee have the same birthday — May 27.
The Lying Nun
Canada saw a sensation in 1836 — a woman named Maria Monk claimed to have been a nun in a Montreal convent where priests from the nearby seminary would enter through a secret tunnel, force sex on the terrified nuns, and dispose horribly of any resulting children:
[Father Larkin] first put oil upon the heads of the infants, as is the custom before baptism. When he had baptized the children, they were taken, one after another, by one of the old nuns, in the presence of us all. She pressed her hand upon the mouth and nose of the first so tight that it could not breathe, and in a few minutes, when the hand was removed, it was dead. She then took the other and treated it in the same way. No sound was heard, and both the children were corpses. The greatest indifference was shown by all present during this operation; for all, as I well knew, were long accustomed to such scenes. The little bodies were then taken into the cellar, thrown into the pit I have mentioned, and covered with a quantity of lime.
Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk became a bestseller, but an investigation showed that the whole thing had been a fake; Monk had apparently never even visited the convent. She fled to Philadelphia, wrote an unsuccessful sequel, had a child out of wedlock, and died in 1839.
Math Notes
45 + 15 + 55 + 05 = 4150
Round Trip
Dave Kunst walked around the world. In June 1970 the county surveyor set out from Waseca, Minn., with his brother John, $1,000, and a mule with the portentous name of Willie Makeit. The brothers walked to New York, flew to Portugal, and had got as far as Afghanistan when John was shot by bandits. Dave recovered from his own wounds and resumed the journey, flying from India to Australia when the Soviet Union denied him entrance. His third mule had died when a Perth schoolteacher agreed to haul his supplies with her car while he walked alongside. He finished the trip in October 1974, having walked 20 million steps and worn out 21 pairs of shoes.
He married the schoolteacher.