“In literature, as in love, we are astonished at what is chosen by others.” — André Maurois
Intriguing Epitaphs
Grave marker in Folsom, N.M.:
In honored memory of Sarah J. Rooke
Telephone Operator
Who perished in the flood waters
of the Dry Cimarron at Folsom
New Mexico, August 27, 1908
while at her switchboard warning
others of the danger. With heroic
devotion she glorified her calling
by sacrificing her own life that
others might live.
Old South Cemetery, Montague, Mass.:
In Memory of Mr. Elijah Bardwell
who died Janry 26th 1786 in ye 27th
Year of his Age having but a few days
surviv’d ye fatal Night when he was
flung from his Horse & drawn by ye Stirrup
26 rods along ye path as appear’d by ye place
where his hat was found & where he had
Spent ye whole following severe cold night
treading ye Snow in a Small Circle.
Emily Spear, died 1901, age 64, Glendale Cemetery, Cardington, Ohio:
My husband
promised me
that my
body should
be cremated
but other
influences
prevailed.
Lizzie Angell, died 1932, age 83, Forest Hill Cemetery, East Derry, N.H.:
I don’t know how to die.
Jennie E. Wilson, died 1882, age 29, College Hill Cemetery, Lebanon, Ill.:
She was more to me
Than I expected.
Borrowed Blessing
“Webster’s” means nothing. The word entered the public domain when the copyright lapsed on Noah Webster’s original dictionary in the 19th century. The name still conveys authority, though, so it’s become a marketing ploy among dictionary publishers, who display it even on books that have no connection to Webster’s original work. You can, too, if you like.
Misc
- No bishop appears in Through the Looking-Glass.
- Can a law compel us to obey the law?
- 98415 = 98-4 × 15
- Why does the ghost haunt Hamlet rather than Claudius?
- “Put me down as an anti-climb Max.” — Max Beerbohm, declining to hike to the top of a Swiss Alp
Sudden Death
Twenty-five basketball teams compete in a knockout tournament — each team is eliminated after its first loss. How many games must be played to establish a winner?
Easy Money
In 1728 the city of Paris defaulted on a large number of municipal bonds. As a way to offer some restitution, the city decided to sponsor a series of lotteries among the disappointed bondholders. There would be only a few winners, but each investor could at least hope to recoup some of his lost money.
That’s very noble, but the city fathers had overlooked two things. First, because the government had sweetened the pot, the value of the lottery prize vastly exceeded the combined cost of the tickets. And second, among the bondholders were Voltaire and Charles Marie de La Condamine, who realized this.
The two organized a syndicate to buy up all of their fellow bondholders’ tickets, essentially guaranteeing themselves a huge profit each month. They did this systematically for half a year before the government caught on; when confronted, they pointed out that they were doing nothing illegal. In all, the syndicate realized 6 to 7 million francs, of which Voltaire kept half a million — enough to leave him independently wealthy for the rest of his life.
An Early Wonder
Lewis Carroll’s father was rector at St. Peter’s Church in Croft-on-Tees. On a tour of the church in 1992, Joel Birenbaum noticed a stone carving of a cat’s head on the chancel’s east wall, a few feet above the floor. When he dropped to his knees and looked at it from a child’s perspective, the cat’s mouth assumed a broad grin.
His discovery appeared on the front page of the Chicago Tribune on July 13, 1992.
Fated
1. P-K4 P-K4 2. B-B4 P-R4 3. Q-B3 P-R4 4. QxP mate:
That’s a pretty colorless chess game, but Mike Keith points out that the game score makes an alphametic:
P-K4 + P-K4 + B-B4 + P-R4 + Q-B3 + P-R4 + QxP = IWIN
Replace each letter and symbol (-, x) with a digit, leaving the numbers as they are, to produce a valid equation.
The Before-Effect
Let the peal of a gong be heard in the last half of a minute, a second peal in the preceding 1/4 minute, a third peal in the 1/8 minute before that, etc. ad infinitum. … Of particular interest is the following puzzling case. Let us assume that each peal is so very loud that, upon hearing it, anyone is struck deaf — totally and permanently. At the end of the minute we shall be completely deaf (any one peal being sufficient), but we shall not have heard a single peal! For at most we could have heard only one of the peals (any single peal striking one deaf instantly), and which peal could we have heard? There simply was no first peal.
— Jose Benardete, Infinity: An Essay in Metaphysics, 1964
Pen Slips
- In “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” Keats writes of Cortez discovering the Pacific Ocean. Balboa did.
- In Ivanhoe, Malvoisin’s first name changes from Philip to Richard.
- In War and Peace, Vera is 17 in 1805 and 24 in 1809.
- In Eugene O’Neill’s Where the Cross Is Made, the stage directions call for a one-armed man to sit at a table “resting his elbows, his chin in his hands.”
- In the Aeneid, Chorinaeus and Numa die and then reappear with no explanation.
In Little Dorrit, Chapter 33, Tattycoram appears with “an iron box some two feet square” in her arms. Writes Ebenezer Brewer in his Reader’s Handbook of Famous Names in Fiction, “She must have been a pretty strong girl, with very long arms.”