“Is not every garden a botanical garden?” — Samuel Johnson
Podcast Episode 203: Notes and Queries
In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll explore some more curiosities and unanswered questions from Greg’s research, including a misplaced elephant, a momentous biscuit failure, a peripatetic ax murderer, and the importance of the 9 of diamonds.
We’ll also revisit Michael Malloy’s resilience and puzzle over an uncommonly casual prison break.
Inspiration
“Westminster Quarters,” the clock chime melody associated most closely with Big Ben, consists of four notes played in a characteristic permutation at each quarter of the hour:
In 1933 composer Ernst Toch fled Germany for London, where one foggy night he was crossing Westminster Bridge and heard the familiar chimes strike the full hour. He wrote:
The theme lingered in my mind for a long while and evolved into other forms, always somehow connected with the original one. It led my imagination through the vicissitudes of life, through joy, humour and sorrow, through conviviality and solitude, through the serenity of forest and grove, the din of rustic dance, and the calm of worship at a shrine; through all these images the intricate summons of the quarterly fragments meandered in some way, some disguise, some integration; until after a last radiant rise of the full hour, the dear theme, like the real chimes themselves that accompanied my lonely walk, vanished into the fog from which it had emerged.
On the boat to New York he wrote Big Ben: Variation-Fantasy on the Westminster Chimes:
(From Chris McKay, Big Ben, 2010.)
06/04/2018 The chimes also inspired Louis Vierne’s 1927 organ piece Carillon de Westminster. (Thanks, Jon.)
Total Victory
The familiar posture of victory — raising the arms, tilting the head back, and expanding the chest — appears to be hard-wired into the human brain, probably because it was a universal sign of dominance in our ape ancestors.
In 2008, psychologists Jessica Tracy and David Matsumoto compared the expressions and body language of sighted, blind, and congenitally blind judo competitors representing more than 30 countries in the 2004 Olympic and Paralympic Games. They found that the blind athletes used the same gestures as their sighted peers, even though they’d never seen anyone else use them.
“Since congenitally blind individuals could not have learned pride and shame behaviours from watching others, these displays of victory or defeat are likely to be an innate biological propensity,” Tracy told the Telegraph.
The same victory gesture is seen in children as young as 3. Tracy said she was studying similar behaviors in chimps and that “anecdotal evidence mentioned in the paper suggests that, yes, the human pride and shame displays are very similar to non-human displays of dominance and submission, seen in a wide range of animals.”
(Jessica L. Tracy and David Matsumoto, “The Spontaneous Expression of Pride and Shame: Evidence for Biologically Innate Nonverbal Displays,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105:33 [August 19, 2008], 11655-11660.)
Commentary
Notes left in manuscripts and colophons by medieval scribes and copyists, from the Spring 2012 issue of Lapham’s Quarterly:
New parchment, bad ink; I say nothing more.
I am very cold.
That’s a hard page and a weary work to read it.
Let the reader’s voice honor the writer’s pen.
This page has not been written very slowly.
The parchment is hairy.
The ink is thin.
Thank God, it will soon be dark.
Oh, my hand.
Now I’ve written the whole thing; for Christ’s sake give me a drink.
Writing is excessive drudgery. It crooks your back, it dims your sight, it twists your stomach and your sides.
St. Patrick of Armagh, deliver me from writing.
While I wrote I froze, and what I could not write by the beams of the sun I finished by candlelight.
As the harbor is welcome to the sailor, so is the last line to the scribe.
This is sad! O little book! A day will come in truth when someone over your page will say, “The hand that wrote it is no more.”
In her History and Uncertain Future of Handwriting, Anne Trubek lists another: “Here ends the second part of the title work of Brother Thomas Aquinas of the Dominican Order; very long, very verbose, and very tedious for the scribe.”
Pole Position
A puzzle from James F. Fixx’s More Games for the Superintelligent, 1976:
A rope 150 feet long is strung between the tops of two flagpoles, each 100 feet high. At its lowest point the rope sags to within 25 feet of the ground. How far apart are the flagpoles?
Express
To film the dramatic approach of the train in High Noon, director Fred Zinnemann and cinematographer Floyd Crosby put their camera flat on the ground between the rails a few hundred yards ahead of the station. Zinneman wanted the train to appear as a dot that grew larger as it approached.
When the signal was given to start, “It looked beautiful, moving rapidly with white smoke, which looked even better,” Zinneman wrote later. “Then it let out black smoke, which looked even better. What we didn’t know was that this was the signal that the engine’s brakes were failing.”
When Zinnemann and Crosby realized that the train wasn’t going to stop, Crosby grabbed the camera, but one of its tripod hooks caught on a rail and he lost his grip. The camera fell in front of the engine as it roared past the men. It was badly damaged, but the magazine was intact, and the footage of the train’s approach is in the final film.
(From Michael Francis Blake, Code of Honor, 2003.)
Black and White
Zigzag
Free Thinking
Arthur Conan Doyle in Tit-Bits, Dec. 15, 1900:
There is one fact in connection with Holmes which will probably interest those who have followed his career from the beginning, and to which, so far as I am aware, attention has never been drawn. In dealing with criminal subjects one’s natural endeavour is to keep the crime in the background. In nearly half the number of the Sherlock Holmes stories, however, in a strictly legal sense no crime was actually committed at all. One heard a good deal about crime and the criminal, but the reader was completely bluffed. Of course, I could not bluff him always, so sometimes I had to give him a crime, and occasionally I had to make it a downright bad one.
A footnote from Leslie Klinger’s New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, 2005:
Fletcher Pratt computes that by 1914, when the record of Holmes’s detective activities ceases, no crimes had taken place in one quarter of the total published cases. In nine of these cases, there was no legal crime. In six no crime took place because Holmes intervened in time to prevent its occurrence.