In 1948, a few months before his death, Babe Ruth visited Yale to donate a copy of his autobiography. He presented it to the captain of the school’s baseball team.
The captain’s name was George Bush.
Martha Tabram
In the early morning hours of Aug. 7, 1888, a London resident noticed a woman lying on a stair landing in his apartment building. He assumed she was a vagrant, and another hour passed before someone discovered she was dead — she had been stabbed 39 times in the body and neck.
Was Martha Tabram an early victim of Jack the Ripper? Like Jack’s other victims, she was a poor prostitute knifed in the early morning in a secluded but public area in Whitechapel. (Jack struck first on Aug. 31.) But Martha’s throat was not cut nor her body eviscerated, as Jack’s “canonical” victims’ were, and an autopsy suggested a weapon longer and stouter than Jack’s.
Martha’s murder was never solved. If Jack didn’t kill her — who did?
See also Långrocken.
Math Notes
115132219018763992565095597973971522401 = 139 + 139 + 539 + 139 + 339 + 239 + 239 + 139 + 939 + 039 + 139 + 839 + 739 + 639 + 339 + 939 + 939 + 239 + 539 + 639 + 539 + 039 + 939 + 539 + 539 + 939 + 739 + 939 + 739 + 339 + 939 + 739 + 139 + 539 + 239 + 239 + 439 + 039 + 139
Unquote
“Just so-so in center field.” -– New York Daily News on the debut of Willie Mays, 1951
Heat Wave
A blast of hot air passed from south to north through portions of New Ulm and Renville County last Sunday evening. It lasted only a minute or two, but so intense was the heat that people rushed out of their houses believing them to be on fire.
— Minneapolis Tribune, July 10, 1879
One-Sided Issue
The international symbol for recycling depicts a Möbius strip.
Regicide
A chess problem posed by Sam Loyd, published in Le Sphinx, 1866:
“Construct a game which ends with Black delivering discovered checkmate on move four.”
What’s In a Name?
Henry Honychurch Gorringe (1841-1885) certainly deserved a hero’s remembrance. A naval officer and captain of the USS Gettysburg, he discovered an undersea mountain and moved Cleopatra’s needle from Egypt to New York.
Instead, he’s remembered for a verse by Arthur Guiterman:
In Sparkill buried lies that man of mark
Who brought the Obelisk to Central Park,
Redoubtable Commander H.H. Gorringe,
Whose name supplies the long-sought rhyme for “orange.”
Boo?
Undoctored photo of a church window at Fremantle Prison in Western Australia.
Skeptics say the image in the center is just rippled glass. Believers say it’s the face of Martha Rendell, who was hanged there in 1909 for killing her children.
“I can believe anything,” wrote Oscar Wilde, “provided that it is quite incredible.”
“Curious Post-Office”
The smallest post-office in the world is kept in a barrel, which swings from the outermost rock of the mountains overhanging the Straits of Magellan, opposite Terra del Fuego. Every passing ship opens it to place letters in or take them out. Every ship undertakes to forward all letters in it that it is possible for them to transmit. The barrel hangs by its iron chain, beaten and battered by the winds and storms, but no locked and barred office on land is more secure.
— Frank H. Stauffer, The Queer, the Quaint and the Quizzical, 1882