There was a young man from Honshu
Who tried limericks in haiku,
But
— Doug Holyman, in Word Ways, May 2007
Spring Poetry
From a letter by Henry U. Swinnerton of Cherry Valley, N.Y., to Science, March 10, 1893:
Towards sunset, late in April, 1886, on a warm, thawing day, the snow rapidly disappearing, two men, Capt. John E. Hetherington and Mr. Marcus Sternberg, as they rode down the long hill towards this village from the east, saw what appeared to be innumerable spherical bodies floating in the air like soap-bubbles. Both men saw and wondered at the appearance for some moments before either spoke. Capt. H. then said, ‘I wonder whether I am dreaming?’ The other rubbed his eyes and echoed the sentiment. ‘Well,’ said the captain, ‘I wonder if you see what I see; what do you see?’ They questioned each other, and both agreed as to their impressions. An orchard lay along the lower and northwesterly side of the road, and all in among the apple-trees were thick, gently descending multitudes of these bubbles, pretty uniform in size, say, 8 or 9 inches in diameter, apparently; none less than six; no small ones being observed.
The two observers state that they carefully fixed their attention on particular bubbles, in order to compare notes, and saw them seem to rest on the bough of a tree, or the top board of the fence, and then gently roll off and disappear or go out of sight. The sun was sinking and dropped below the opposite hills as they reached the foot of the long descent and entered the village, and the appearance came to an end. But up to this time the air seemed to be filled with these transparent floating spheres. The position of the observers with regard to the light seems to have made some difference as to seeing well this or that large aggregation or swarm that one or the other pointed out. The bubbles were highly colored, iridescent, gave the same sort of reflections as soap-bubbles, and apparently vanished individually in much the same way. All these points I have ascertained by repeated conversations.
Swinnerton vouches for the “unimpeachable character” of the witnesses. “The only theory I have been able to form to account for such a phenomenon is, that if a certain kind of dust floated off in the air, each particle composed of some sort of saponaceous envelope, enclosing a highly expansible centre or core, like ammonia, particles of this character expanded by the warm air, and at the same time moistened, might, under very nice conditions, produce such an effect.”
Sudden Stop
One last odd weapon, this from Popular Science, September 1917: Enid S. Wales of Detroit proposed a shell that would spread coils of barbed wire before an onrushing enemy, stopping their progress and exposing them to attack by infantry and machine guns.
Four hollow caps containing coils of barbed wire would be fitted to a trench mortar shell, one end of each coil secured to the body of the shell. “When the projectile explodes, the caps containing the barbed wire shoot out like bullets in all directions distributing the wire in great tangled masses.”
I don’t know if the idea was ever put into practice.
“How to Roast a Pound of Butter”
We find this culinary folly of the last century in the third edition of The Art of Cookery, by a Lady, 1748. ‘Lay it (the butter) in salt and water two or three hours; then spit it, and rub it all over with crumbs of bread, with a little grated nutmeg; lay it to the fire, and as it roasts, baste it with the yolks of two eggs, and then with crumbs of bread, all the time it is roasting: but have ready a pint of oysters stewed in their own liquor, and lay it in the dish under the butter; when the bread has soaked up all the butter, brown the outside, and lay it on your oysters. Your fire must be very slow.’
— John Timbs, Things Not Generally Known, Familiarly Explained, 1859
The Hook Hoax
Desperate to fill a hole on the front page of Truth one Friday afternoon in 1954, Australian journalist Phillip Knightley invented a story about a sex criminal known as the Hook who haunted the Sydney train network raising women’s skirts with a length of wire fashioned from an old coat hanger. “The wire ran over his right shoulder and down his coat sleeve where it stopped in a hook just short of the cuff. The Hook, while pretending to read a newspaper, would sidle alongside an attractive and unsuspecting girl as they stood in a crowded train, drop his shoulder to extend the hook which he would then slip under the girl’s skirt and surreptitiously raise it to look at her stocking tops.”
Knightley quoted an anonymous officer saying that suburban police had been inundated with complaints; an anonymous victim spoke of her resolution to avoid the trains until the pervert was caught; and a staff artist drew his impression of the Hook at work. Knightley’s editor approved the story, and it ran with the headline HOOK SEX PERVERT STRIKES AGAIN.
On Monday morning Knightley’s phone rang.
“Sergeant Williamson here. Did you write that stuff about the Hook?”
“Yes.”
“Right. Well, I just want to thank you and let you know that we go the bastard this morning.”
“Got him?”
“Yeah. Arrested him at Punchbowl station. Caught him in the act. You might want to write about it.”
“Thinking about it, as I still do from time to time, I came up with several explanations,” Knightley wrote in his 1997 memoir A Hack’s Progress. Possibly a copycat had read the story, emulated the Hook, and got caught. Possibly a Hook had really existed who coincidentally matched Knightley’s story. Or possibly the Sydney police had nominated a minor sex offender as the Hook in order to polish its record. “I decided that the last explanation was the most likely and, filled with guilt, I swore that would be the first and last time I would ever make up a story,” Knightley wrote. “This turned out to be a vow that was not easy to keep, because I soon fell in with the Fleet Street Royal press corps, which made up stories all the time.”
Black and White
Things to Come
This is remarkable: In 1862, U.S. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton received a letter proposing the use of chlorine gas against the Confederate army, an idea 50 years ahead of its time. The inventor was John W. Doughty of New York City:
Sir
The above is a representation of a projectile which I have devised to be used as a means for routing an entrenched enemy. Believing it to be new and valuable, I send the War Department a brief description: Chlorine is a gas so irritating in its effects upon the respiratory organs, that a small quantity diffused in the atmosphere, produces incessant & uncontrollably violent coughing.It is 2 1/2 times heavier than the atmosphere, and when subjected to a pressure of 60 pounds to the inch, it is condensed into a liquid, its volume being reduced many hundred times. A shell holding two or three quarts, would therefore contain many cubic feet of the gas.
If the shell should explode over the heads of the enemy, the gas would, by its great specific gravity, rapidly fall to the ground: the men could not dodge it, and their first intimation of its presence would be by its inhalation, which would most effectually disqualify every man for service that was within the circle of its influence; rendering the disarming and capturing of them as certain as though both their legs were broken.
The War Department, which was flooded with well-meant but impractical suggestions, let this one go, and chlorine gas would not appear on the battlefield until Ypres in 1915.
“Experiment alone can determine whether this shell has any practical merit,” Doughty had written. “Possibly, I overrate its value; but it must not be forgotten, that while it does the work of an ordinary shell, it also carries with it a force against whose effect the most skillful military engineering can not possibly make any adequate provision.”
“As to the moral question involved in its introduction, I have, after watching the progress of events during the last eight months with reference to it, arrived at the somewhat paradoxical conclusion, that its introduction would very much lessen the sanguinary character of the battlefield, and at the same time render conflicts more decisive in their results.”
In a Word
pilcrow
n. the paragraph sign
Professional Monster
Issei Sagawa took an unlikely path to fame — after killing and cannibalizing a Dutch woman in Paris in 1981, he wrote a fictionalized account of the crime, In the Mist, that sold 200,000 copies in his native Japan:
There is a loud sound and her body falls from the chair onto the floor. It is like she is watching me. I see her cheeks, her eyes, her nose and mouth, the blood pouring from her head. I try to talk to her, but she no longer answers. There is blood all over the floor. I try to wipe it up, but I realize I cannot stop the flow of blood from her head. It is very quiet here. There is only the silence of death.
Since his release from a Japanese psychiatric hospital in 1985, Sagawa has parlayed his reputation into a ghoulish industry. He has produced four novels, written a weekly column for a Japanese tabloid, appeared on the cover of a gourmet magazine, and is a regular subject of television documentaries. His crime inspired the Rolling Stones’ song “Too Much Blood.”
“The public has made me the godfather of cannibalism, and I am happy about that,” he said. “I will always look at the world through the eyes of a cannibal.”
Pest Control
Besieged by cotton worms in 1870, Louisiana planter Auguste Le Blanc invented the 19-century equivalent of a bug zapper. The worms transform into noctural moths in order to reproduce, so Le Blanc suspended an eight-foot ring of gasoline burners from the roof of a horse-drawn cart that he drove through his fields at night, following lanes that he had laid out for this purpose.
The roof may serve not only to protect the burners from rain, but also as a means of destroying the moths, for I sometimes coat the underside of the roof with a paint, preferably white paint, made without any ‘drying’ in it, that is to say, made with oil alone, so as to present a sticky surface. When the machine is in use, the moths, attracted and blinded by the light, will either be destroyed by the flame, or else will come in contact with and adhere to the sticky coating of paint.
I don’t know how well it worked, but he deserves credit for his ingenuity. “A machine of eight burners will protect from forty-five to fifty acres of cotton, while the cheapness of the fluid employed for burning purposes renders the expense trifling in comparison with the benefits derived.”