I read about an Eskimo hunter who asked the local missionary priest, ‘If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?’ ‘No,’ said the priest, ‘not if you did not know.’ ‘Then why,’ asked the Eskimo earnestly, ‘did you tell me?’
— Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, 1974
Well! It seems you have gotten so wrapped up in piano practice that you have forgotten about KILLER BEES!
Don’t look to me for help; I’m hiding in the cellar. Happily Virginia L. Butler has got you covered — in 1996 she invented a 6×3 bag of flexible, transparent, and sting-resistant plastic, complete with a mesh-covered aperture through which you can jeer at your frustrated attackers.
“In use, one can quickly unfold the present invention when the sound of a swarm is initially heard and enter the protective chamber before the bees actually approach. Even if one or two bees enter the enclosure during the process, the number of stings and proportionate danger will be greatly reduced.”
Conveniently, the bag can be folded and carried in a lightweight pouch that “fits easily into a backpack, purse, picnic basket, or pocket.” You can keep it near the piano.
Anthony Burgess wrote his Enderby novels under the pen name Joseph Kell. So he was amused when in 1963 the Yorkshire Post asked him to review one of them.
Sensing a practical joke by one of the editors, he submitted a scathing review. “This is in many ways a dirty book,” he wrote. “It may well make some people sick, and those of my readers with tender stomachs are advised to let it alone.”
Alas, the assignment wasn’t a joke. The newspaper published Burgess’ review — and when it discovered his double identity, “I was attacked by the editor of the Yorkshire Post on Yorkshire Television and promptly, and perhaps justly, dismissed.”
See Conflict of Interest.
Suppose you borrowed $10 from Tom and $10 from Bob. On your way to repaying them you are robbed of everything but the $10 you had hidden in your shirt pocket. By no fault of your own, you now face the following paradoxical dilemma:
(1) You are obligated to repay Tom and Bob.
(2) If you pay Tom you cannot repay Bob.
(3) If you repay Bob you cannot repay Tom.
(4) You cannot honor all your obligations: in the circumstances this is impossible for you. (By (1)-(3).)
(5) You are (morally) required to honor all your obligations.
(6) You are not (morally) required to do something you cannot possibly do (ultra posse nemo obligatur).
— Nicholas Rescher, Paradoxes, 2001
Europe overlaps North America.
Reykjavík, Iceland (21°56’W), lies slightly west of Shannon Island (18°30’W) in eastern Greenland.
String together the numbers 1 through 19 in reverse order:
19181716151413121110987654321
Fittingly, the resulting number is evenly divisible by 19.
Art critic Philip Gilbert Hamerton’s wife found herself sitting next to Alfred, Lord Tennyson one day at a Paris lunch. He told her this story — she records it in her 1896 memoir:
I had occasion to go to Paris with a friend who was supposed to speak French creditably, and who fancied himself a master of it. On the morning following our arrival in the French capital, being somewhat knocked up by the journey, we had a late breakfast at a small side-table of the dining-room, of which we were soon the only occupants, under the watchful and, as I thought, suspicious eyes of a waiter, whose attention had probably been attracted by the conspicuous difference between our stature and garb from that of his little dandified countrymen.
Having caught a slight cold on the passage, I felt more inclined to stay by the fire with a newspaper than to go out, and did so, whilst my friend, who had some business in the town, left me for some time. As I drew my chair up to the hearth I heard the waiter answering with alacrity to some recommendation of my friend’s, ‘Oh, monsieur peut être tranquille, j’y veillerai.’ I thought it was some order about our dinner, and resumed my political studies.
Was it my cold which made me dull and inattentive? It is quite possible, for my eyes kept wandering from my paper, and, strange to say, always met those of the French waiter riveted upon me. At first I felt annoyed: what could be so strange about my person? Then I was irritated, for though that queer little man was making some pretence at dusting or replacing chairs, still his eyes never left me for a moment, and at last, being somewhat drowsy, I had the sensation that one experiences in a nightmare, and thought I had better resort to my room and make up for a shortened night.
No sooner, however, had I got up from my chair than the waiter was entreating me to remain, offering to heap coals on the fire, to bring me another paper or a pillow if I was tired, and ‘Did I wish to write a letter? he would fetch instantly what was required; or should I like something hot for my cold?’ His voice had the strange coaxing tone that we use to pacify children, and made me stare; but I answered angrily that I only wanted a nap, and to be let alone, and I made for the door in spite of his objurgations.
Then he ran in front of me, and barring the door with arms outstretched, besought me to await my friend. This unaccountable behavior had rendered me furious, and now I was determined to force my way out, despite the mad resistance and loud gibberish of the waiter, and I began to use my fists.
It was in the midst of this tremendous row that my astonished friend re-appeared in the dining-room, and was greeted with this exclamation from my adversary: ‘Ah, monsieur, vous voyez, j’ai tenu ma parole: je ne l’ai pas laissé sortir le fou; mais ça n’a pas été sans peine, il était temps que vous arriviez.’
It turned out that my friend, anxious for my comfort and noticing that the fire was getting low, had said in his easy French before leaving, ‘Garçon, surtout ne laissez pas sortir le fou’ (feu) — meaning ‘Don’t let the fire go out,’ and the intelligent foreigner had immediately guessed from my appearance that I was le fou.’
Tennyson offered this as one of a number of anecdotes about him that were current at the time; when she asked whether it were true, he smiled and said, “I think it is capital; you will have to guess.”
In 1810, a mysterious creature began killing sheep in northern England. Between May and September it defied the entire county of Cumberland, killing up to eight sheep a night despite being hunted nearly continuously. The “girt dog” never attacked the same flock on successive nights; it ignored poisoned meat left for it and led frustrated farmers on fruitless chases of 20 miles and more, occasionally turning to savage the forelegs of the pursuing dogs but never uttering a sound.
Finally, in September, the creature was run to ground near the Ehen River and shot. In four months it had killed more than 300 sheep. The carcass, which weighed 112 pounds, was stuffed and set up in a museum in Keswick, though it’s since been lost. Its description — a tawny dog with a tiger’s stripes — curiously matches that of the thylacine (above), a wolflike marsupial native to Tasmania. Possibly an exotic predator had escaped from a traveling menagerie and found itself peculiarly adapted to Cumberland farmland. We’ll never know.
A little girl asked George Ade, “Does M-I-R-A-G-E spell marriage?”
He said, “Yes.”
A most interesting problem …, some years ago, engaged the attention of the courts of Georgia. A man named Simpson, standing in South Carolina, fired a pistol with felonious intent at a person who was in a boat, on water embraced within the territorial limits of Georgia. The bullets went wide of the person at whom they were aimed and splashed in the water. It was held by the courts that the defendant was guilty of an assault with intent to murder in Georgia, ‘because,’ said the judge, ‘the balls did strike the water of the river in close proximity to him (the prosecuting witness) within this State, and it is therefore certain that they took effect in Georgia.’
For the purposes of the case the judge held further that the defendant, when he fired the shots, was constructively in the State of Georgia. This holding was upon a theory of the law that where one puts in force an agency for the commission of crime, he, in legal contemplation, accompanies the same to the places where it becomes effectual.
— “Historic Legal Puzzles,” The Green Bag: A Useless but Entertaining Magazine for Lawyers, August 1899