Face Lift

http://www.google.com/patents?id=L6VNAAAAEBAJ&pg=PA1&dq=2619084&source=gbs_selected_pages&cad=0_1#v=onepage&q&f=false

Why use creams to reduce wrinkles? Instead you can stretch your face, using Adolph Brown’s “method of minimizing facial senescence,” patented in 1952:

Anchor is hooked into the skin just beyond the hairline. … The partner hook is moved in the direction away from the face until sufficient tension forces are developed to withdraw desired amounts of skin from the face, and while this tension is maintained, the partner hook is anchored by pressing to grip the scalp.

The “rubber-like connector” between the hooks keeps the whole arrangement fairly flexible — if you don’t sneeze.

Track Meet

From Henry Dudeney:

A better class of puzzle is the well-known one of the Railway. If New York and San Francisco are just seven days’ journey apart, and if trains start from both ends every day at noon, how many trains coming in an opposite direction will a train leaving New York meet before it arrives at its destination at San Francisco?

Click for Answer

Time-Machine Journalism

Being the paper of record brings with it some odd responsibilities. On March 10, 1975, the New York Times inadvertently published the wrong dateline in its Late City editions, officially dating the day’s news “March 10, 1075.”

Modern readers would understand that this was a simple typo, of course, but the editors grew concerned that future historians might be confused to discover a Times issue from the Middle Ages. So the following day’s issue contained a historic correction:

In yesterday’s issue, The New York Times did not report on riots in Milan and the subsequent murder of the lay religious reformer Erlembald. These events took place in 1075, the year given in the dateline under the nameplate on Page 1. The Times regrets both incidents.

A Leap in the Dark

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Galaxy_history_revealed_by_the_Hubble_Space_Telescope_(GOODS-ERS2).jpg

Paradoxically, a shadow can go even faster than light! We can [cast a shadow] first at one star and then toward another star. We can take two stars more or less the same distance from Earth, such as Acrux in the Southern Cross and Bellatrix in Orion (both are 360 light-years away from us). We point the flashlight at Acrux and then we make the beam slide slowly toward Bellatrix. Three hundred sixty years later, the shadow … (which will at this point have become huge and very fast) will reach Acrux, and just a few seconds later it will be at Bellatrix, after having crossed one quarter of the vault of the sky far faster than the speed of light. Can shadows do things that are physically impossible?

— Roberto Casati, Shadows, 2000

Dot Bomb

Hijinks is the only common English word with three dotted letters in a row. Among proper nouns, Beijing and Fiji are better known than Australia’s Lake Mijijie, but all three lose out to the Katujjijiit Development Corporation, a property development concern in the Canadian territory of Nunavut.

Can we beat this? A reader tells me that pääjääjiiri is Finnish for “main ice mitre,” and possessiveness contains 18 consecutive dots in Morse code.

But the all-time winner must remain H.L. Mencken, who in 1938 ridiculed the New Deal by filling six columns of the Baltimore Evening Sun with 1 million dots — to represent “the Federal Government’s immense corps of job-holders.”

“A Strange Cavern”

The residents of East Union, Ohio, several miles east of Wooster, are considerably worked up over the discovery of a cave near the village. J.M. Davis, Will S. Grady and Alexander Hunter, while out hunting, chased a rabbit into a burrow on a hill near the line of the Cleveland, Akron & Columbus railway. Determined to secure the game, they procured a mattock and shovel and proceeded to dig it out. After excavating the earth to a depth of about four feet they uncovered a curiously shaped stone, upon which were the evident marks of human workmanship. … The stone itself closed the opening into a subterranean chamber, which, with the aid of a ladder and lantern, was found to be in the form of a cubical cistern (perfectly dry), ten feet high, ten feet wide and ten feet long, carved in solid sandstone, with exquisite precision, and containing a few arrow-heads, stone pestle and mortar, the remains of a fire, and in the northwest corner, sitting in an upright position, a human skeleton, in a good state of preservation, with circlets of copper about its neck, wrist, and ankle bones. Its eyeless sockets were turned toward the entrance, and looked sad and ghastly. Upon making the discovery Coroner Huntsberger was summoned, but, viewing the skeleton, refused to hold an inquest. Crowds of people are visiting the cave daily since the discovery.

The American Antiquarian and Oriental Journal, May 1891

See Home for Good.

Tandem

tripp bowen tandem bicycle

“Armless Wonder” Charles B. Tripp and “Legless Wonder” Eli Bowen share a bicycle, from a publicity shoot in the late 19th century.

Each man spent more than 50 years in the circus world — Tripp could write, paint, cut paper, and do carpentry with his feet, and Bowen trained himself to tumble and do stunts on a long pole. But apart from this photo, there’s no clear evidence that the two worked as a team.