Auguries

In 1900 the Ladies Home Journal made 29 predictions about the year 2000. Sample:

There will be air-ships, but they will not successfully compete with surface cars and water vessels for passenger or freight traffic. They will be maintained as deadly war-vessels by all military nations. Some will transport men and goods. Others will be used by scientists making observations at great heights above the earth.

These prophecies reveal as much about the nature of science fiction as about the nature of science. They’re often utopian, or naive extrapolations of existing knowledge. And change is accelerating. I’m sure the world of 2100 is literally unimaginable to us today. It’s not even worth trying.

| History · Technology

R.I.P.

Epitaphs:

Joseph Palmer
Persecuted for
Wearing a Beard.

— Leominster, Mass., 1873

HE CALLED
BILL SMITH
A LIAR.

— Cripple Creek, Colo., c. 1875

DOROTHY CECIL
Unmarried as yet

— Wimbledon, England, c. 1900

Anna Wallace
The children of Israel wanted bread,
And the Lord he sent them manna,
Old Clerk Wallace wanted a wife,
And the Devil he sent him Anna.

— Ribbesford, England, c. 1770

Here lies my wife,
Here lies she,
Hallelujah!
Hallelujee!

— Ulverston, England, c. 1750

Jared Bates
Sacred to the Memory of Mr.
Jared Bates who Died Aug. the 6th
1800. His Widow aged 24 who mourns
as one who can be comforted lives
at 7 Elm Street this village
and possesses every qualification
for a good wife.

— Lincoln, Maine, 1800

| Death · Humor

Thank You for Not Littering

http://www.sxc.hu/index.phtml

Even the pristine hinterlands aren’t pristine anymore. In the early 1990s, British zoologist Tim Benton took a walk along a mile of shoreline on Ducie Island, a speck of land 4,970 miles east of Australia. Here’s what he found:

  • 268 unidentifiable pieces of plastic
  • 171 glass bottles
  • 74 bottle tops
  • 71 plastic bottles
  • 67 small buoys
  • 66 buoy fragments
  • 46 large buoys
  • 44 pieces of rope
  • 29 segments of plastic pipe
  • 25 shoes
  • 18 jars
  • 14 crates
  • 8 pieces of copper sheeting
  • 7 aerosol cans
  • 7 food and drink cans
  • 6 fluorescent tubes
  • 6 light bulbs
  • 4 jerry cans
  • 3 cigarette lighters
  • 2 pen tops
  • 2 dolls’ heads
  • 2 gloves (a pair)
  • 1 asthma inhaler
  • 1 construction worker’s hat
  • 1 football (punctured)
  • 1 glue syringe
  • 1 truck tire
  • 1 plastic coat hanger
  • 1 plastic foot mat
  • 1 plastic skittle
  • 1 small gas cylinder
  • 1 tea strainer
  • 1 tinned meat pie
  • 1 toy soldier

And “0.5 toy airplane.” That’s 953 items of debris altogether, on an island of 2.5 square miles, in the least populous country in the world.

| Society · Technology

“A Chicken Is a Noble Beast”

William Topaz McGonagall is renowned as the worst poet in the English language. Sample:

Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay!
Alas! I am very sorry to say
That ninety lives have been taken away
On the last Sabbath day of 1879,
Which will be remember’d for a very long time.

He didn’t even get the facts right here — 75 died.

In the opening to his Poetic Gems, McGonagall wrote, “The most startling incident in my life was the time I discovered myself to be a poet.” Millions agreed. Stephen Pile, in The Book of Heroic Failures, calls him “so giftedly bad he backed unwittingly into genius”; his temperance speeches were wildly popular with “poet-baiters” in Dundee, who pelted him with eggs and vegetables, and he was allowed to play Macbeth only if he paid in advance.

When Tennyson died, McGonagall visited Balmoral to ask if he might become poet laureate. He was told the queen was not at home.

| Art · Humor · Poems

Three of a Perfect Pair

The Incompatible Food Triad is a culinary puzzle: Name three foods such that any two of them go together, but all three do not.

The puzzle originated with University of Pittsburgh philosopher Wilfrid Sellars, and some notable thinkers have taken a crack at it. Physicist Richard Feynman thought he’d stumbled onto a solution when he accidentally asked for milk and lemon in his tea (ick), but this doesn’t quite work, as one of the “good” pairs (milk and lemon) is bad.

Best attempts so far: salted cucumbers, sugar, yogurt; orange juice, gin, tonic. Honorable mention: “Get pregnant, and you can eat anything.”

| Puzzles

All’indietro

Latin palindromes:

Si bene te tua laus taxat sua laute tenebis
If you are considered praiseworthy, you, elegant man, will keep your own property.

Et necat eger amor non Roma rege tacente,
Roma reges una non anus eger amor
And sick love kills, not from Rome, while the king is silent,
Rome, you will rule together, an old woman is not your sick love.

A favorite among Roman lawyers was Si nummi immunis, which means “Give me my fee, and I’ll warrant you free.”

| Language

Loup-Garou

http://www.sxc.hu/index.phtmlMythologyWeb has the full text of Sabine Baring-Gould’s Book of Werewolves, one of the creepier reference works of the 1860s.

In America we think of lycanthropes as turning into wolves, but legends actually vary throughout the world. People tend to turn into the most important carnivore in the area: dogs in Greece, tigers in India, bears in Northern Europe, foxes in Japan, leopards in Africa, and jaguars in South America. In Polynesia there are even were-sharks.

Correspondingly, there’s a psychiatric syndrome called clinical lycanthropy, in which people think they’ve turned into animals. Here, too, though, wolves are in the minority. Clinicians have reported patients who thought they’d become cats, horses, birds, tigers, frogs, even bees.

Baring-Gould’s vision was quite a bit darker, but he was a weird guy himself. A Victorian hagiographer, antiquarian, novelist, and scholar, he used to teach with his pet bat on his shoulder. His book wanders from lycanthropy down into grave desecration and cannibalism — kind of an odd area for the guy who wrote “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” To each his own.

| Literature · Oddities