Puppy Love

Con man Joseph Weil once paid a Chicago bartender $10 to watch his dog, saying he had an urgent business meeting. He told him it was a pedigreed hunting dog. He then sent in a confederate, who admired the dog and offered to pay the barman $300 for it. When the bartender said he was only watching it, the confederate left him with a phone number, asking him to call if the dog’s owner proved willing to sell it.

Weil returned, looking downcast and saying that his business deal had fallen through. Sensing an opportunity, the bartender offered to buy the dog for $250. Weil declined at first, but the barman persisted, and eventually the deal was struck. Weil departed with the money, the phone number turned out to be fake, and the dog was an unsaleable mutt.

Weil claimed to have earned $8 million over the years in schemes defrauding greedy gamblers and stock manipulators. “Each of my victims had larceny in his heart,” he wrote. “I never fleeced anyone who could not afford to pay my price for a lesson in honesty.”

| Crime

The Great Raft

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Photographic_Views_of_Red_River_Raft_25.jpg

For more than half a millennium, between the 12th century and the 19th, an enormous log jam clogged the Red River in the Southern United States. By the early 1830s, it stretched more than 160 miles, with new logs and vegetation accreting at its upper end while older material decayed and washed out at the lower.

By the start of the 19th century the mass was blocking settlement in the area west of Shreveport, so the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers hired steamboat entrepreneur Henry Miller Shreve, who spent nine years clearing a navigable path using specially designed “snag boats.”

A grateful public named the city of Shreveport after him, but a second raft soon began to form upstream, extending eventually as far as the Arkansas state line. That would have to be removed as well.

(Thanks, Kevin.)

| History · Oddities

R.I.P.

https://www.reddit.com/r/CemeteryPorn/comments/15ifhvw/poet_philosopher_failure_st_peters_church_in/

This stone, behind St. Peter’s Church in Heysham, Lancashire, commemorates the lives of James Jones and his two wives, Sarah and Sadie.

Which of them earned this epithet, and how, is not clear.

(Thanks, Dave.)

| Death

Piecework

Austrian artist Thomas Medicus’ 2014 anamorphic sculpture Emulsifier arranges 160 hand-painted glass strips to present each of four different images, depending on the viewer’s perspective.

Head Instructor, below, uses the same technique. More at his website.

| Art

Inspiration

Anna Rabinowitz’s 80-page poem Darkling is an acrostic of Thomas Hardy’s 1900 poem “The Darkling Thrush” — taking the first letter of each line in Rabinowitz’s poem spells out Hardy’s.

“I found myself … haunted by ‘The Darkling Thrush,'” she said, “by its tone of millennial mourning, by its note of hope in the thrush’s song, and most especially by its opening line which situates the poet at he meditates on the passing century: ‘I leant upon a coppice gate.'”

| Language · Poems

“Fifth Philosopher’s Song”

A million million spermatozoa,
All of them alive;
Out of their cataclysm but one poor Noah
Dare hope to survive.

And among that billion minus one
Might have chanced to be
Shakespeare, another Newton, a new Donne —
But the One was Me.

Shame to have ousted your betters thus,
Taking ark while the others remained outside!
Better for all of us, froward Homunculus,
If you’d quietly died!

— Aldous Huxley

| Poems

Hand Holding

From an old copy of Games magazine:

Four players describe the cards they held in their last game of five-card poker:

Harry: “I had the two, nine, and jack of hearts, and the two and nine of diamonds.”

Edna: “I held four fives and the queen of spades.”

Dave: “I had a black straight flush.”

Frankie: “I held a club flush.”

Georgiana: “I had a straight. Two of my cards were spades; the others weren’t.”

Cleo: “I just had one lousy pair.” (to Frankie:) “But my lowest-ranking card was higher than any of yours.”

An onlooker asks how many of the undealt cards were black, and Dave answers, “No more than three.” What were the contents of Dave’s, Frankie’s, Georgiana’s, and Cleo’s hands?

Click for Answer
| Puzzles