Endangered Species

Kevin Purbhoo invented this vivid puzzle while a student at Northern Secondary School in Toronto:

On a remote Norwegian mountain top, there is a huge checkerboard, 1000 squares wide and 1000 squares long, surrounded by steep cliffs to the north, south, east, and west. Each square is marked with an arrow pointing in one of the eight compass directions, so (with the possible exception of some squares on the edges) each square has an arrow pointing to one of its eight nearest neighbors. The arrows on squares sharing an edge differ by at most 45 degrees. A lemming is placed randomly on one of the squares, and it jumps from square to square following the arrows. Prove that the poor creature will eventually plunge from a cliff to its death.

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

Doubt

A remarkable number of apparently intelligent people are baffled by the fact that a different group of apparently intelligent people profess to a knowledge of God when common sense tells them — the first group of apparently intelligent people — that knowledge is only a possibility in matters that can be demonstrated to be true or false, such as that the Bristol train leaves from Paddington. And yet these same apparently intelligent people, who in extreme cases will not even admit that the Bristol train left from Paddington yesterday — which might be a malicious report or a collective trick of memory — nor that it will leave from there tomorrow — for nothing is certain — and will only agree that it did so today if they were actually there when it left — and even then only on the understanding that all the observable phenomena associated with the train leaving Paddington could equally well be accounted for by Paddington leaving the train — these same people will, nevertheless, and without any sense of inconsistency, claim to know that life is better than death, that love is better than hate, and that the light shining through the east window of their bloody gymnasium is more beautiful than a rotting corpse!

— Tom Stoppard, Jumpers, 1972

| Religion · Society

Rivers

https://books.google.com/books?id=mE6BFXd6ppsC&pg=PA426

Occasionally, by coincidence, the gaps between words on a page of printed text will become aligned, producing “rivers” of white space that descend across multiple lines. These occur most commonly when the font is monospaced and justification is full. Because they’re distracting, these artifacts are generally discouraged; typographers sometimes view a printed page upside down in order to spot them.

In ordinary text long rivers are unlikely, but in 1988 Mark Isaak found the 12-line example above on page 277 of the Harvard Classics edition of Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle (squint to see it).

Fritzi Striebel offered a small collection of unusual rivers at the end of this article in the May 1986 issue of Word Ways.

| Literature · Technology

A Day’s Work

Memorable passages from the pulp detective stories of Robert Leslie Bellem (1902-1968):

  • “There were tears brimming on her azure peepers, and tremulous grief twisted her kisser.” (“Forgery’s Foil”)
  • “She wrapped her arms around my neck; glued her crimson kisser to my lips. She fed me an osculation that sent seven thousand volts of electricity past my tonsils.” (“Design for Dying”)
  • “And then, from the doorway, a gun barked: ‘Chow-chow!’ and I went drifting to dreamland.” (“Design for Dying”)
  • “The rod sneezed: ‘Chow! Ka-Chow!’ and pushed two pills through Reggie’s left thigh.” (“Murder Has Four Letters”)
  • “Against a backdrop of darkness the heater sneezed: Ka-Chowp! Chowp! Chowp! and sent three sparking ribbons of orange flame burning into the pillow.” (“Come Die for Me”)
  • “From the window behind her, a roscoe poked under the drawn blind. It went: ‘Blooey — Blooey — Blooey!’” (“Murder on the Sound Stage”)
  • “From the window that opened onto the roof-top sun deck a roscoe sneezed: Ka-Chow! Chowpf! and a red-hot hornet creased its stinger across my dome; bashed me to dreamland.” (“Lake of the Left-Hand Moon”)
  • “From the front doorway of the wigwam a roscoe stuttered: Ka-chow! Chow! Chow! and a red-hot slug maced me across the back of the cranium, knocked me into the middle of nowhere.” (“Killer’s Keepsake”)
  • “A while ago you mentioned my hardboiled rep. You said I’m considered a dangerous hombre to monkey with. Okay, you’re right. Now will you come along willingly or do I bunt you over the crumpet till your sneezer leaks buttermilk?” (“Murder Has Four Letters”)
  • “A thunderous bellow flashed from Dave Donaldson’s service .38, full at the prop man’s elly-bay. Welch gasped like a leaky flue, hugged his punctured tripes, and slowly doubled over, fell flat on his smeller. A bullet can give a man a terrific case of indigestion, frequently ending in a trip to the boneyard.” (“Diamonds of Death”)
  • “‘Dan Turner squalling,’ I yeeped. ‘Flag your diapers to Sylvia Hempstead’s igloo. There’s been a croaking.'” (“Come Die for Me”)

“From the doorway a roscoe said ‘Kachow!’ and a slug creased the side of my noggin. Neon lights exploded inside my think-tank. … She was as dead as a stuffed mongoose. … I wasn’t badly hurt. But I don’t like to be shot at. I don’t like dames to be rubbed out when I’m flinging woo at them.”

| Literature

Roll Call

Unusual personal names collected by the Society for the Verification and Enjoyment of Fascinating Names of Actual Persons, listed by curator Allan Fotheringham in 1991:

  • Procter R. Hug
  • Polly Wanda Crocker
  • Sexious Boonjug
  • Philander Philpott Pettibone
  • Zilpher Spittle
  • Petrus J.G. Prink
  • Burke Uzzle
  • Pansy Reamsbottom
  • Dunwoody Zook
  • Bastion Hello
  • Fang W. Wang
  • Montague Tyrwhitt-Drake
  • Nimrod Spong
  • Dulcie Pillage
  • Jake Moak
  • Sir Tufton Beamish
  • Sir Basil Smallpiece
  • Sir Malby Crofton
  • St. Bodfan Grufydd
  • Hon. Sir Reginald Aylmer Ranfurly Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax
  • Sir Ranulph Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes
  • Selmer Hafso
  • Addylou Ebfisty Plunt
  • Oscar U. Zerk
  • Titus Cranny
  • Noble Puffer
  • J. Flipper Derricoate
  • Ovid Parody
  • J. Boxter Funderback
  • Middlebrook Polly
  • Lester Ouchmoody
  • Spencer Hum
  • A. Smerling Lecher

SVEFNAP founder Clyde Gilmour dreamed of assembling a golf foursome of Luke Feck, Bosh Stack, Fice Mork, and M. Tugrul Uke. “Gilmour imagined himself doing the introductions: ‘Feck, this is Stack. Stack … Mork. Mork … Uke. Uke … Feck …”

| Oddities

The Constitution State

What do you call a person from Connecticut? Today we’d call them a Connecticuter or a Connecticutian (or, colloquially, a Nutmegger), but in a 1987 address etymologist Allen Walker Read announced that he’d also found these options:

  • Connecticotian, used in 1702 by Cotton Mather
  • Connecticutensian, used in 1781 by historian Samuel Peters
  • Connectican, used in 1942 in a letter to the Baltimore Evening Sun
  • Connecticutan, used in 1946 by book reviewer John Cournos
  • Connecticutite, used in 1968 by an anonymous reviewer in Playboy

He also found several jocular forms:

  • Connecticutie, a pretty girl of Connecticut (used in 1938 by Frank Sullivan of Mrs. Heywood Broun and in 1947 by a journalist about Clare Boothe Luce)
  • Connecticanuck, a Connecticut person of French background
  • Connectikook, an oddball or eccentric from Connecticut
  • Connecticutup, a prankster from Connecticut

“Especially in language, exuberance accounts for much that happens.”

(Allen Walker Read, “Exuberance, a Motivation for Language,” (Word Ways 21:2 [May 1988], 71-74. He gives his documentation in “What Connecticut People Can Call Themselves,” Connecticut Onomastic Review No. 2, 1981, 3­-23. In 1992 he took up the same question regarding “Americans.”)

| Language

A Poem

Sydney Smith wrote a recipe for salad dressing:

Two boiled potatoes, strained through a kitchen sieve,
Softness and smoothness to the salad give;
Of mordant mustard take a single spoon —
Distrust the condiment that bites too soon;
Yet deem it not, thou man of taste, a fault,
To add a double quantity of salt.
Four times the spoon with oil of Lucca crown,
And twice with vinegar procured from town;
True taste requires it, and your poet begs
The pounded yellow of two well-boiled eggs.
Let onions’ atoms lurk within the bowl,
And, scarce suspected, animate the whole;
And lastly in the flavoured compound toss
A magic spoonful of anchovy sauce.
Oh, great and glorious! oh, herbaceous meat!
‘Twould tempt the dying anchorite to eat.
Back to the world he’d turn his weary soul,
And plunge his fingers in the salad bowl.

In the late 19th century, such rhymes helped cooks to master recipes. When this one was reproduced in an 1871 cookbook, many committed it to memory.

| History · Literature · Poems

Inventory

Titles of paintings by Salvador Dalí:

  • Debris of an Automobile Giving Birth to a Blind Horse Biting a Telephone
  • Bed and Two Bedside Tables Ferociously Attacking a Cello
  • Premature Ossification of a Railroad Station
  • Rock and Infuriated Horse Sleeping Under the Sea
  • Fifty Abstract Paintings Which as Seen From Two Yards Change Into Three Lenins Masquerading as Chinese and as Seen From Six Yards Appear as the Head of a Royal Bengal Tiger
  • Necrophiliac Fountain Flowing From a Grand Piano
  • Dalí at the Age of Six When He Thought He Was a Girl Lifting the Skin of the Water to See the Dog Sleeping in the Shade of the Sea
  • Skull With Its Lyric Appendage Leaning on a Bedside Table Which Should Have the Exact Temperature of a Cardinal’s Nest
  • Bread on the Head of the Prodigal Son
  • Barber Saddened by the Persistence of Good Weather (The Anguished Barber)
  • The Man With the Head of Blue Hortensias
  • A Soft Watch Put in the Appropriate Place to Cause a Young Ephebe to Die and Be Resuscitated by Excess of Satisfaction
  • Two Pieces of Bread Expressing the Sentiment of Love
  • Mysterious Mouth Appearing in the Back of My Nurse
  • Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening
  • Invisible Afghan With the Apparition on the Beach of the Face of Garcia Lorca in the Form of a Fruit Dish With Three Figs
  • Giant Flying Mocca Cup With an Inexplicable Five Metre Appendage
  • Dalí’s Hand Drawing Back the Golden Fleece in the Form of a Cloud to Show Gala, Completely Nude, the Dawn, Very, Very Far Away Behind the Sun
  • Atmospheric Skull Sodomizing a Grand Piano
  • My Wife, Nude, Contemplating Her Own Flesh Becoming Stairs, Three Vertebrae of a Column, Sky and Architecture

He wrote, “It is not necessary for the public to know whether I am joking or whether I am serious, just as it is not necessary for me to know it myself.”

| Art