Prepared

https://www.fbi.gov/wanted/topten/topten-history/hires_images/FBI-236-JamesRobertRingrose.jpg/view

Verbatim from the FBI’s “most wanted” website:

Former Ten Most Wanted Fugitive #236: On March 29, 1967, [James Robert] Ringrose was apprehended in Osaka, Japan, by Japanese police while attempting to pass bad checks. He was arrested in Hawaii after his return to the United States from Japan. He told the FBI agents he had been saving an item for several years and now he needed it. He then presented them with the Monopoly game card, ‘Get out of jail free.’

I’m pretty sure they’d have to honor this, wouldn’t they? It’s in the rules.

| Crime

The Big Picture

https://www.maxpixel.net/Space-Biosphere-Planet-Solar-System-Earth-1272884

Give a hundred people a picture of the earth, identify the North Pole for them, and a hundred will hold the photo with the North Pole toward their head and the South Pole toward their feet. Of course, what they are really doing, if they are standing up, is pointing the South Pole at the center of the earth and, if they are standing at the equator, pointing the North Pole at some spot in the sky, which, as the earth turns, traces a circle intersecting the plane of the ecliptic at 23 1/2 degrees. Now why people persist in this foolishness I don’t know. In my living room I have a small framed photograph showing a thin crescent against a black background. Even though the colors are wrong, people always say, ‘Oh, the moon!’; but it is the earth. The earth isn’t ever supposed to be a crescent, I suppose.

— Astronaut Michael Collins, Carrying the Fire, 1975

| Science & Math

In a Word

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

stridulous
adj. emitting a particularly harsh or shrill sound

tumultuary
adj. restless; agitated; unquiet

emportment
n. a fit of passion; anger, fury

bangstry
n. masterful violence

Of the numerous war scenes in operas of all ages, it is worth noting one in particular for its extraordinary tempo marking. The opera Sofonisba (1762) by Tommaso Traetta (or Trajetta) opens with a battle scene in which two oboes, two horns (pitched in C and D respectively), and a string band are instructed to play ‘Allegrissimo e strepitosissimo,’ literally, ‘very joyfully and with much animation and gaiety and extremely noisily and boisterously.’

— Robert Dearling, The Guinness Book of Music Facts & Feats, 1976

| Art · Language

One Way

The French constrained writing group Oulipo refers to the “Canada Dry principle” — the color, name, and bottle design of that ginger ale would lead you to think it’s alcoholic, but it’s simply not. Similarly, “falindromes” are expressions that appear to be palindromes but aren’t:

O, gin, need a dingo?
So cats taste staccato tacos?
Ray, eat a ripe pirate tea. YAR!!
Mime Eminem.
A-hah! A banana ban. Haha!
“I, a CD-ROM?!” ribbed a bearded Mordcai.
A brazen zebra.
Pandas tired diet? A sad nap.
I am mad at a Canada dam, Mai!

These are from an extinct 2008 blog created by Amir Blumenfeld; there was also a short-lived Twitter account (“Able sidlers race cars, Idris Elba!”).

A working palindrome, by Stephen Fry:

Rettebs iflahd noces, eh? Ttu, but the second half is better.

| Language

Short Work

Samuel Johnson used to boast that his memory was so prodigious that he could recite an entire chapter of Niels Horrebow’s 1758 Natural History of Iceland. When challenged he would declaim:

Chap. LXXII. Concerning Snakes

There are no snakes to be met with throughout the whole island.

That’s it. Editor George Birkbeck Hill adds, “Chapter XLII is still shorter:–

Concerning Owls.

There are no owls of any kind in the whole island.

| Literature

Podcast Episode 198: The Man Who Wouldn’t Die

https://pixabay.com/en/coffin-dracula-black-casket-150647/

In 1932 a quartet of Bronx gangsters set out to murder a friend of theirs in order to collect his life insurance. But Michael Malloy proved to be almost comically difficult to kill. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll review what one observer called “the most clumsily executed insurance scam in New York City history.”

We’ll also burrow into hoarding and puzzle over the value of silence.

See full show notes …

| Crime · Death · History · Oddities · Podcast

The Size of It

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Robert-lowell-by-elsa-dorfman.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

During World War II the poet Robert Lowell refused to register for the draft and spent a few days in the West Street Jail next to mobster Louis “Lepke” Buchalter.

Lepke told him, “I’m in for killing. What are you in for?”

Lowell said, “I’m in for refusing to kill.”

| Literature · Society

Busy

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Max_Woosnam_1920.jpg

Accomplishments of Max Woosnam, the “greatest British sportsman”:

  • Won gold and silver medals in tennis (on the same day) at the 1920 Olympics
  • Won the doubles title at Wimbledon
  • Compiled a maximum break of 147 in snooker
  • Made a century (100 or more runs in a single innings) at Lord’s Cricket Ground
  • Captained the British Davis Cup team
  • Captained Manchester City Football Club to runner-up for the Football League Championship of 1920–21
  • Captained the England national football team

At Cambridge he represented the university at football, cricket, lawn tennis, real tennis, and golf. He was chosen to captain the British football team at the Olympics but had to decline, as he’d already committed to the tennis team. And he once beat Charlie Chaplin at table tennis with a butter knife.

He’s not well remembered today because he never gave an interview and considered it “vulgar” to play professionally. “He achieved so much more than so many modern sportsmen without ever receiving or asking for a fraction of the praise or attention,” his daughter Penny recalls. “It would have been all too easy for him to make more of a name for himself, to seek out a place in the newspapers, but that just wasn’t him, just wasn’t what he was all about.”

| Entertainment

Dilemma

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Queen_Charlotte_by_Benjamin_West,_PRA.jpg

Bishop Porteus, whom in all conversations about him George III called the Queen’s Bishop, was asked by her Majesty, at a period when all ladies were employed (when they had nothing better to do) in knotting, whether she might knot on a Sunday. He answered, ‘You may not;’ leaving her Majesty to decide whether, as knot and not were in sound alike, she was, or was not, at liberty so to employ herself on that day.

— Horace Twiss, The Public and Private Life of Lord Chancellor Eldon, 1844

| Language

Priorities

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Philip_Henry_Gosse_%26_Edmund_Gosse_(1857).jpg

On Sept. 21, 1849, naturalist and explorer Philip Henry Gosse wrote in his diary:

E. delivered of a son. Received green swallow from Jamaica.

The son grew up to be poet, author, and critic Edmund Gosse, who wrote:

“This entry has caused amusement, as showing that he was as much interested in the bird as in the boy. But this does not follow; what the wording exemplifies is my Father’s extreme punctilio.

“The green swallow arrived later in the day than the son, and the earlier visitor was therefore recorded first; my Father was scrupulous in every species of arrangement.”

| Literature · Science & Math