Career Service

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Little_John_Clem.jpg

John Clem was only 10 years old when he ran away to win the Civil War. (“It was necessary that the Union should be preserved,” he later wrote, “and my help was obviously needed.”) Rejected by Michigan’s 22nd infantry regiment, he tagged along anyway as a drummer boy and rode into Chickamauga seated on a caisson and carrying a musket sawed off to match his size. When a Confederate colonel rode up and yelled “Surrender, you damned little Yankee!” Clem shot him, winning instant fame as “the drummer boy of Chickamauga.”

He went on to fight at Perrysville, Murfreesboro, Kennesaw Mountain, Peach Tree Creek, and Atlanta. After the war Ulysses Grant, now president, appointed him second lieutenant; when he retired as a brigadier general in 1915 he was the only Civil War veteran still on duty. “There is no more popular officer in the army,” wrote the New York Times. “Colonel Clem is the son-in-law of a Confederate veteran, and this fact he often cites in conversation with friends as proof of the fact that he is the most ‘united American’ extant.” He died in San Antonio in 1937.

| History

One of a Kind

http://www.sxc.hu/photo/942424

You’re about to roll five regular dice. Which is more likely, rolling no sixes or rolling exactly one six?

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

“Clothes”

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:William_Hogarth_017.jpg

In Shakespeare’s plays
Nobody knows
For days and days,
Till the very end,
His closest friend
If he’s changed his clothes.

Prospero has
But to put on his hat
And he’s what he was,
A duke, like that!

They gladly aver,
Who knew him before,
“You are what you were
When you wear what you wore.”

— Henry G. Fischer

| Literature · Poems

Reverse Psychology

From the Flemish painter Cornelius Gijsbrechts, a painting of the back of a painting (1670):

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Trompe_l%27oeil._Bagsiden_af_et_indrammet_maleri.jpg

“The Reverse of a Framed Painting was not intended to be hung on the wall, but to be placed against it,” writes Olaf Koerster. “The viewer would be deceived into trying to turn the picture around, only to see the reverse of an unframed painting: Gijsbrechts had created the paradoxical painting with two backs.”

| Art

Sweet and Low

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Unbalanced_scales.svg

At age 10, Nob Yoshigahara won the grand prize in a newspaper competition with this puzzle:

Given a sack of sugar, an unbalanced scale, and two 5-pound weights, measure exactly 10 pounds of sugar.

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

“A Llyric of the Llama”

http://books.google.com/books?id=kJbNAAAAMAAJ

Behold how from her lair the youthful llama
Llopes forth and llightly scans the llandscape o’er.
With llusty heart she llooks upon llife’s drama,
Relying on her llate-llearnt worldly llore.

But llo! Some llad, armed with a yoke infama
Soon llures her into llowly llabor’s cause;
Her wool is llopped to weave into pajama,
And llanguidly she llearns her Gees and Haws.

My children, heed this llesson from all llanguishing young lllamas,
If you would lllive with lllatitude, avoid each llluring lllay;
And do not lllightly lllleave, I beg, your llllonesome, lllloving mammas,
And llllast of allll, don’t spelllll your name in such a silllllly way.

— Burges Johnson, Everybody’s Magazine, August 1907

| Language · Poems

Speed and Style

http://www.google.com/patents/US5181670

Douglas Eaton’s “storage apparatus for storing a necktie,” patented in 1993, winds your neckwear into a tidy cylinder when you’re not using it and dispenses it again at interview time. “The wrapping of the necktie about the tie rods and the storing of the necktie in the case prevents the necktie from substantially creasing during a storage period of time.”

| Technology