In 1822, when Europeans were still searching for an explanation for the annual disappearance of some bird species, a white stork appeared bearing a central African arrow in its neck. This helped to show that some birds migrate long distances for the winter.
The stuffed stork can be seen today at the University of Rostock, where it bears the magnificent name Rostocker Pfeilstorch (“arrow stork from Rostock”).
During the last glacial period, at around 50,000 B.C., a 5-cubic-meter boulder became wedged into a crevasse in Scandinavia, just southwest of the village of Lysebotn in western Norway.
The boulder is accessible to tourists, but be careful: There are no fences, and the abyss below is 984 meters deep.
During daylight hours on the Western Front, soldiers in World War I regularly inspected the no-man’s-land that lay between the trenches. To do this they used either telescopes slid between the sandbag defenses or periscopes, which could be raised above the parapet to give a view of the field via a pair of reflecting mirrors. Normally there was nothing to see, but Brigadier Philip Mortimer of the 3rd Meerut Divisional Train had a start one day while peering through a telescope:
I actually saw as clear as daylight, the reflection in the top mirror of his periscope, a German officer’s head as he searched our trenches through his periscope, a most uncanny sight — the grey peaked cap and face as he looked down into the bottom mirror could be clearly seen.
“It was decided to ‘strafe’ the periscope with a Maxim which after being trained on it carefully was let off to the tune of about 15 rounds. The periscope immediately disappeared.”
(From Richard van Emden, Meeting the Enemy, 2013.)
Rules of the ill-understood East Anglian pub sport known as dwile flonking:
A “jobanowl,” or referee, is chosen (preferably a “dull-witted person”), and the two teams toss a sugar beet to decide who flonks first. The jobanowl begins play by shouting, “Here y’go t’gither!”
The flonker stands in the center with the “driveller,” a three-foot hazel pole topped with a dwile, or cloth. While the opposing team joins hands and dances in a circle around the flonker (“girting”), the flonker spins in the opposite direction and, at a chosen moment, flonks the dwile at them. He scores 3 points for a “wanton” (a direct hit on a girter’s head), 2 for a “morther” (a hit to the body), and 1 for a “ripper” (a hit to the leg). 1 point is deducted from either team for each person who remains sober at the end of the game.
If the dwile hits no one (known as a “swadge”), the girters (well, the opponents, who have now ceased girting) pass the dwile from hand to hand chanting “pot pot pot” while the flonker drinks from an ale-filled chamber pot.
The game ends when each team has had a chance at flonking the dwile (an interval known as a “snurd”). During play the jobanowl can choose to change the direction of the girters and can order any player to drink who is judged not to be taking the game seriously enough.
The Lewes Arms sponsors an annual match between its regulars and the thespians of the Lewes Operatic Society. “The rules of the game are impenetrable and the result is always contested.”
When inventor Guy Otis Brewster offered his Brewster Body Shield to the soldiers of World War I, he demonstrated its efficacy by standing before a Lewis machine gun firing bullets at full velocity, about 2,700 feet per second.
All that energy heated the breastplate, but Brewster said he felt “only about one tenth the shock which he experienced when struck by a sledge-hammer.”
Unfortunately the armor weighed 40 pounds, which made it cumbersome in the field.
(Bashford Dean, Helmets and Body Armor in Modern Warfare, 1920.)
Proverbs of Latin America:
(From Guy Zona, Eyes That See Do Not Grow Old, 1996.)
In particular it is what might be called ‘comparative originality’ that is so awful. If a man were to look over the fence on one side of his garden and observe that the neighbor on his left had laid his garden path round a central lawn; and were to look over the fence on the other side of his garden and observe that the neighbor on his right had laid his path down the middle of the lawn, and were then to lay his own garden path diagonally from one corner to the other, that man’s soul would be lost. Originality is only to be praised when not prefaced by the look to right and left.
— Quentin Crisp, “The Genius of Mervyn Peake,” 1946
You have three identical bricks and a ruler. How can you determine the length of a brick’s interior diagonal without any calculation?
The trio section of Mozart’s Serenade for Wind Octet in C, K. 388 (audible here at 14:30), is a double mirror canon: The second oboe introduces a line and after two bars the first oboe joins it playing the same line “upside down”; then the first bassoon starts its own line and the second bassoon enters playing that upside down. Now all four parts are exploring the same theme, but they’re offset by two bars apiece and two of them are inverted.
Pianist Erik Smith called this “the visual image of two swans reflected in the still water,” “a perfect example of Mozart’s use of academic means, canon, inverted canon and mirror canon, to a purely musical and emotional end.”
A curious puzzle from Pi Mu Epsilon Journal, Fall 1968 [Volume 4, Issue 9]:
Where must a man stand so as to hear simultaneously the report of a rifle and the impact of the bullet on the target?
