A phonetic puzzle by Woody Rowe:
Across
1. What mosquitoes do.
2. What snakes do.
3. What dogs do.
4. What teeth do.
Down:
1. Insects
2. Optical organs
3. Annoy
4. Comfort
The solution:
Get it? Remarkably, the same idea works in French:
Across
1. Que font les moustiques
2. Que font les chiens
3. Que font les serpents
4. Que font les dents
Down
1. aime
2. au
3. air
4. dé
Calling Halloween “the devil’s holiday,” in 1986 Ralph P. Forbes of London, Ark., filed suit to prevent the public schools from letting kids wear costumes to school.
He filed the suit on behalf of himself, all Christian children, and Jesus Christ. The defendants included the Arkansas Department of Education, “high priests of secular humanism,” and Satan.
U.S. District Judge George Howard Jr. continued the case, whereupon attorney John Wesley Hall Jr. offered to represent Satan pro bono. He pointed out that the Dark One doesn’t transact business, own property, or commit torts in Arkansas, and asked the judge to drop him as a defendant.
The Chicago Tribune reported drily that “efforts to reach Satan for comment were unsuccessful.”
The Schachfreund, edited by M. Alapin, gives the following amusing Chess Skit. A well-known chess master allowed weak opponents to make as many moves as they pleased during five minutes, as odds, before the beginning of a game, with the provision that they confined their moves to their own half of the board. At the end of the five minutes the game commenced, the odds-giver having the first move. During the five minutes one of them had played: [1. a4 2. Na3 3. h4 4. Nf3 5. d4 6. Nd2 7. Rh3 8. Nac4 9. Raa3 10. Ne4 11. Qd2 12. Rhf3 13. g3 14. Bh3 15. Qf4 16. Rae3], whereupon the odds-giver resigned without having made a single move, as he could not avoid mate in two.
— The British Chess Magazine, January 1899
cark
v. to worry
kedogenous
adj. produced by worry
Some of your hurts you have cured
And the sharpest you still have survived,
But what torments of grief you endured
From evils which never arrived!
— Emerson
6205 = 382 + 692
3869 = 622 + 052
5965 = 772 + 062
7706 = 592 + 652
Horace Greeley had atrocious handwriting. According to William Shepard Walsh’s Handy-Book of Literary Curiosities (1892), Greeley once sent the following note to the Iowa Press Association:
“I have waited till longer waiting would be discourteous, only to find that I cannot attend your Press meeting next June as I would like to do. I find so many cares and duties pressing on me that, with the weight of years, I feel obliged to decline any invitation that takes me away a day’s journey from home.”
After some study, the Iowans deciphered this as:
“I have wondered all along whether any squirt had denied the scandal about the President meeting Jane in the woods on Saturday. I have hominy, carrots, and R.R. ties more than I could move with eight steers. If eels are blighted, dig them early. Any insinuation that brick ovens are dangerous to hams gives me the horrors.”
Their reply is not recorded.
In the little town of Villisca, Iowa, 35-year-old Joe Moore, his wife, his four children, and two visiting daughters of a neighbor went to bed on June 9, 1912.
The following morning, all eight were dead.
“The parties were all killed with an axe which was found in the house, the axe belonging to Mr. Moore,” reported Iowa attorney general Horace Havner. “The window shades were all drawn and the doors covered with clothing so that no light could get out from the house. The mirrors in the house were also all covered. Not one of the parties received any injury below the neck but the heads of the victims were all beaten to a pulp, the head of Mr. Moore being mangled worse than the rest, although they were all beaten beyond the possibility of recognition.”
Ten years of investigations, grand juries, trials, and arguments produced no convictions. The case remains unsolved.
See Hinterkaifeck.
Thomas Browne on sex: “I could be content that we might procreate like trees, without conjunction, or that there were any way to perpetuate the world without this trivial and vulgar way of coition. It is the foolishest act a wise man commits in all his life, nor is there anything that will more deject his cooled imagination when he shall consider what an unworthy piece of folly he hath committed.” (1642)
Shaw on marriage: “When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part.” (1913)
Suppose that in one night all the dimensions of the universe became a thousand times larger. The world will remain similar to itself, if we give the word similitude the meaning it has in the third book of Euclid. Only, what was formerly a meter long will now measure a kilometer, and what was a millimeter long will become a meter. The bed in which I went to sleep and my body itself will have grown in the same proportion. When I wake in the morning what will be my feeling in face of such an astonishing transformation? Well, I shall not notice anything at all. The most exact measures will be incapable of revealing anything of this tremendous change, since the yard-measures I shall use will have varied in exactly the same proportions as the objects I shall attempt to measure.
— Henri Poincaré, Science and Method, 1908