Prince Hamlet thought uncle a traitor
For having it off with his Mater;
Revenge Dad or not —
That’s the gist of the plot —
And he did — nine soliloquies later.
— Stanley J. Sharpless
The Indecisive Rower
A rower rows regularly on a river, from A to B and back. He’s got into the habit of rowing harder when going upstream, so that he goes twice as fast relative to the water as when rowing downstream. One day as he’s rowing upstream he passes a floating bottle. He ignores it at first but then gradually grows curious about its contents. After 20 minutes of arguing with himself he stops rowing and drifts for 15 minutes. Then he sets out after the bottle. After some time rowing downstream he changes his mind, turns around, and makes his way upstream again. But his curiosity takes hold once more, and after 10 minutes of rowing upstream he turns and goes after the bottle again. Again he grows ashamed of his childishness and turns around. But after rowing upstream for 5 minutes he can’t stand it any longer, rows downstream, and picks up the bottle 1 kilometer from the point where he’d passed it. How fast is the current?
“Map of the Road to Hell!!”
This is literally the first thing you find if you search the Library of Congress for “map of the road”. I.N. Barrillon drew it in 1858. “Reader! how far have you travelled on this dreadful road? Examine thyself! Turn ye turn ye for why will you die!!”
You can’t make out all the details here (the library has some beautiful larger scans), but it’s amazing what will land you in trouble. The major rivers in Hell are Gambling River, Drunkenness River, and Perdition River, but the tributaries include Chess Creek, Backgammon Branch, Lottery Creek, Egg Nog Creek, Cider Branch, and Lemonade Branch.
In his 1973 Atlas of Fantasy, J.B. Post writes, “The quickest way to the Great Lake of Fire and Brimstone is by the Suicide Rail Road and the Duelist’s Rail Road. One can meander along the road but shortcuts are provided for liars, drunkards, gamblers, and perjurors. All, however, finally go ‘blip’ into the Great Lake.”
“Not shown is the road to Heaven called ‘the Path of Ennui.'”
Memorable Numbers
In 1995 psychologists Marisca Milikowski and Jan Elshout tested 597 undergraduates to see which of the numbers 1-100 they found easiest and hardest to remember. The students were given 90 seconds to memorize an array of numbers from this range; after an hour’s interval they were given another 90 seconds to recall the numbers they’d seen.
The most successfully recalled numbers were 8, 1, 100, 2, 17, 5, 9, 10, 99, and 11, and the least 82, 56, 61, 94, 85, 45, 83, 59, 41, and 79. The most memorable categories seem to be single-digit numbers; “teen” numbers (10-19); doubled numbers such as 22 and 44; and numbers that appear in multiplication tables, such as 49 and 36.
Interestingly, when the experimenters asked the subjects to rate numbers subjectively as “good” or “bad,” all the numbers judged good belonged to one of these privileged categories, and none of the bad numbers did.
(Marisca Milikowski and Jan J. Elshout, “What Makes a Number Easy to Remember?” British Journal of Psychology 86 [November 1995], 537-47.)
For What It’s Worth
SWEATERDRESSES is typed entirely with the left hand, JOHNNY-JUMP-UP with the right. ANTISKEPTICISM alternates.
Podcast Episode 227: The Christmas Tree Ship
In the late 1800s Chicago families bought their Christmas trees from the decks of schooners that had ferried them across Lake Michigan. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll meet Herman Schuenemann, known as “Captain Santa,” who brought Christmas to the city for 30 years until a fateful storm overtook him.
We’ll also peruse some possums and puzzle over a darkening phone.
Reflection
“All comfort must be based on discomfort. Man chooses when he wishes to be most joyful the very moment when the whole material universe is most sad.” — G.K. Chesterton, introduction to Dickens’ Christmas Books, 1907
“Death”
There is a little garden full of white flowers before this house, before this little house, which is sunken in a green hillock to the lintel of its door. The white flowers are full of honey; yellow butterflies and bees suck at them. The unseen wind comes rushing like a presence and a power which the heart feels only. The white flowers press together before it in a soft tumult, and shake out fragrance like censers; but the bees and the butterflies cling to them blowing. The crickets chirp in the green roof of the house unceasingly, like clocks which have told off the past, and will tell off the future.
I pray you, friend, who dwells in this little house sunken in the green hillock, with the white flower-garden before the door?
A dead man.
Passes he ever out of his little dwelling and down the path between his white flower-bushes?
He never passes out.
There is no chimney in that grassy roof. How fares he when the white flowers are gone and the white storm drives?
He feels it not.
Had he happiness?
His heart broke for it.
Does his heart pain him in there?
He has forgot.
Comes ever anybody here to visit him?
His widow comes in her black veil, and weeps here, and sometimes his old mother, wavering out in the sun like a black shadow.
And he knows it not?
He knows it not.
He knows not of his little prison-house in the green hillock, of his white flower-garden, of the winter storm, of his broken heart, and his beloved who yet bear the pain of it, and send out their thoughts to watch with him in the wintry nights?
He knows it not.
Only the living know?
Only the living.
Then, then the tombs be not for the dead, but the living! I would, I would, I would that I were dead, that I might be free from the tomb, and sorrow, and death!
— Mary E. Wilkins, “Pastels in Prose,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, December 1892
Clockwise
When cattle buyers had trouble finding John Byron Plato’s farm, they gave up and went home. “That killed a mighty profitable bargain,” he told a reporter, which “got me thinking about rural addresses.” The buyers had left a note saying “it takes time to find your place.” Plato looked at his watch and saw that it “smiled back the answer.”
Plato’s “clock system” assigns numbers to directions — 12 is due north, 5 is southeast by south, and so on. Within each of these sectors, a location can be identified by its distance from the town center. “Thus if a man lived four miles west of his post office, his number would be 94 (nine for west and four for distance). If he lived two miles south, his number would be 62.” This could be refined further by adding one more character: 32T means “about 2.75 miles east of the post office.”
Plato claimed that this system could have led his lost cattle buyers to within a hundred yards of his house without a map or a compass. He published a series of “rural directories” using the clock system in western and central New York State in the 1920s and 1930s, but his business faded as the Depression pummeled agriculture, and the patent lapsed.
Unquote
“The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.” — Bertrand Russell