In 1904, adventure novelist H. Rider Haggard awoke from a dream with the conviction that his daughter’s dog was dying. He dismissed the impression as a nightmare, but the events that followed seemed to give it a grim significance. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll describe Haggard’s strange experience, which briefly made headlines around the world.
We’ll also consider Alexa’s expectations and puzzle over a college’s name change.
Letters to the Sydney Morning Herald during the planning of the Sydney Opera House:
“Faced with the nightmare illustrated in your columns, some 25th century Bluebeard’s lair, its ominous vanes pointed skywards apparently only for the purpose of discharging guided missiles or some latter-day nuclear Evil Eye, words fail.”
— W.H. Peters, Sydney, Jan. 31, 1957
“To me, the winning design suggests some gargantuan monster which may have wandered over the land millions of years ago. It certainly is right out of place beside the dignity of the Harbour Bridge.”
— M. Rathbone, Kensington, Jan. 31, 1957
“This whale of a monument to the clever ugliness of ‘modern’ art will be a constant eyesore. Its over-finished roof with many curved surfaces all covered with white tiles will be a glaring monstrosity. Could not the suffering which it will cause be more equitably distributed by constructing the fins in such a way that they will act as giant megaphones and thus keep residents on the north supplied with the dying screams of melodramatic sopranos?”
— J.R.L. Johnstone Beecroft, Feb. 1, 1957
“With all respects to so-called modern art, I feel that the design is completely unbefitting our foreshores. Perhaps the judges had in mind the installation of a Big Dipper on the peak of the roof to help the opera company balance its budget.”
— Jack Zuber, Kingsgrove, Feb. 1, 1957
In 2003 Danish architect Jørn Utzon received the Pritzker Architecture Prize, architecture’s highest honour. The citation read, “There is no doubt that the Sydney Opera House is his masterpiece. It is one of the great iconic buildings of the 20th century, an image of great beauty that has become known throughout the world — a symbol for not only a city, but a whole country and continent.”
Played by Japanese priests in the 16th century, taikyoku shogi may be the largest variant of chess ever devised. Each player deploys 402 pieces of 209 types on a board of 1,296 squares to try to capture his opponent’s king(s) and prince(s).
It’s not clear precisely how it was played, but Wikipedia takes more than 10,000 words to describe one likely set of rules.
(Thanks, Alejandro.)
Arrange the digits 0-9 into a 10-digit number such that the leftmost n digits comprise a number divisible by n. For example, if the number is ABCDEFGHIJ, the number ABC must be divisible by 3, ABCDE must be divisible by 5, and so on.
This puzzle, by T.E. Maw of the Luton Public Library, appeared in the Strand in April 1911:
“Take fifteen matches and place them as shown in the diagram, then take away three, change the position of one, and the result will be the word showing what matches are made of.”
The San Francisco earthquake of 1906 is remembered for its destructive intensity and terrible death toll. But the scale of the disaster can mask some remarkable personal stories. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll describe the experiences of some of the survivors, which ranged from the horrific to the surreal.
We’ll also consider a multilingual pun and puzzle over a deadly reptile.
In the 1960s, linguist Robert M.W. Dixon met Albert Bennett, one of the last native speakers of Mbabaram, a vanishing Australian Aboriginal language of north Queensland. “You know what we call ‘dog’?” Bennett said to him. “We call it dog.”
“My heart sank,” Dixon wrote. “He’d pronounced it just like the English word, except that the final g was forcefully released.” He worried that Bennett’s decades of using English had tainted his understanding of Mbabaram.
But Bennett’s assertion was accurate: The Mbabaram word for dog is dúg, which is pronounced nearly identically to the English word, “a one in a million accidental similarity of form and meaning in two unrelated languages,” Dixon wrote.
“It was because this was such an interesting coincidence, that Albert Bennett had thought of it as the first word to give me.”
(Robert M.W. Dixon, Searching for Aboriginal Languages: Memoirs of a Field Worker, 1984.)
After numerous accidents where the Illinois Central Railroad crossed Highway 7 near Grenada, Mississippi, in the 1930s, inventor Alonzo Billups came up with a one-of-a-kind solution. When a train approached the crossing, motorists were confronted with a lighted skull and crossbones, the glowing words “Stop-DEATH-Stop,” flashing neon arrows indicating the train’s direction, and an air raid siren.
The video here is a simulation; the actual gantry was removed due to a scarcity of neon in the war years. But two photographs survive.
Leonard Gordon noted this interesting pattern in the May 1995 issue of Word Ways. The English names of the first eight positive integers (ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR, FIVE, SIX, SEVEN, EIGHT) contain altogether 32 letters. The smallest rectangular grid into which they can all be packed, word-search fashion, is 5×5. Because some of the cells serve double duty, the 32 letters “fit” into 25 cells; the ratio of these values is 1.28. This ratio remains remarkably consistent as the list of numbers is extended — here are grids for the first 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12 numbers:
E I G H T O N E E R H T E I G H T F E L E V E N S S E V E N O W T F O U R W S E V E N I N F X W O I F S O I E F I V E E R H T X I S O E I G H T W O N I N E O U G O I T N V O G X N E N I N S E V E N F O U R X I S S E V E N R H W U X V E E U H E V L E W T T H R E E T H R E E T H R E E E N R T N E V E L E 8 words 9 words 10 words 11 words 12 words 32 letters 36 letters 39 letters 45 letters 51 letters 25 cells 28 cells 30 cells 35 cells 40 cells (1.28) (1.29) (1.30) (1.29) (1.28)
Alas, the last one isn’t optimal, Gordon notes. The names ONE through TWELVE will fit into a more compact grid:
T W E L V E F N E X S L O F I V E E U S G N V V R T H R E E O W T E N N
… and that raises the ratio to 1.42 letters per cell.
(Leonard Gordon, “Packing the Cardinals,” Word Ways 28:2 [May 1995], 116.)
In 1850, England received a distinguished guest: A baby hippopotamus arrived at the London Zoo. Obaysch was an instant celebrity, attracting throngs of visitors while confounding his inexperienced keepers. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll describe his long tenure at the zoo, more than 4,000 miles from his Egyptian home.
We’ll also remark on a disappearing signature and puzzle over a hazardous hand sign.
