“A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.” — William James
Managing the Managers
Sostratos, architect of the famous light-house on the Island of Pharos, Alexandria, once numbered among the seven wonders of the world, engraved deeply on one of the stones the words, ‘Sostratos of Gnidos, son of Dexiphanos, to the Gods protecting those on the sea.’ Knowing very well that Ptolemy, his employer, would not be satisfied with this inscription, he covered it with a thin coating of plaster on which he inscribed the name of Ptolemy. In time the plaster disappeared, and with it the name of the king, so that in the end the architect had all the credit for the work.
— The Illustrated American, June 18, 1892
Double Feature
Hollywood has always abbreviated long titles — Gone With the Wind became known as GWTW, and For Whom the Bell Tolls as FWTBT.
One Jane Russell picture was tentatively titled Tall in the Saddle until an RKO publicist pointed out this trend.
The title was dropped.
When in Rome
What number comes next in this series?
0, 0, 0, 0, 4, 9, 5, 1, 1, 0, 55, 55, 1, 0, 1
Donkeyshines
In Don Quixote, when Sancho Panza’s ass is stolen, Quixote sympathizes and the two ride on … Sancho somehow “sitting side-ways on his ass.” In the next chapter he laments its loss again: “It may be well to saddle Rocinante again, that he may supply the loss of my Dapple.”
Sancho also leaves his wallet at an inn and loses his cloak and the food it contains. Yet later he discovers the food on the ass … and puts gold in his wallet.
Strangely, these errors appear in the novel’s second edition but not the first. No one knows how this happened; possibly it’s a compositor’s error, or perhaps Cervantes added a page without weaving it into the narrative.
See Cast Away.
Nothing Doing
In 1979, Robert Barbour applied for a vanity license plate at the California Department of Motor Vehicles. He listed his preferences as SAILING, BOATING, and NO PLATE, meaning he didn’t want a vanity plate if his first two choices were taken.
Inevitably, the DMV sent Barbour plates reading NO PLATE. But that wasn’t the worst of it: In the months that followed he received 2,500 notices of unpaid parking violations from around the state. When a police officer anywhere in California cited a vehicle without plates and wrote NO PLATE on the ticket, the record was matched to Barbour.
Two years later, when the DMV wised up and asked officers to stop doing this, they began writing MISSING instead … and Andrew Burg of Marina del Rey started getting the tickets.
The same thing has befallen motorists sporting the tags VOID, UNKNOWN, NOTAG, and even XXXXXXX. It makes you wonder how the police could write up a tagless car.
Rigor Mortis
When Victor Noir died in a Paris duel in 1870, sculptor Jules Dalou reproduced the fallen journalist in bronze — a bronze that seems unusually hard in the trousers, if you see what I mean.
That feature has made the statue a sort of fertility shrine for Parisian women. It’s said that kissing Noir’s lips, leaving flowers in his hat, or rubbing his, um, press credentials will bring a husband, enhance one’s sex life, or ensure fertility.
Whether that’s true is open to question, of course — but when the cemetery installed a fence around the statue in 2004, local women reportedly protested until it was removed again.
Imagine!
Imagine the theatre of the future. … [T]he masses will no doubt go to the theatre much as they do now. Only instead of seeing a company of actors and actresses, more or less mediocre, engaged in the degrading task of repeating time after time the same words, the same gestures, the same actions, they will see the performance of a complete ‘star’ company, as once enacted at its very best, reproduced as often as it may be wanted, the perfected kinetoscope exhibiting the spectacle of the stage, the talking machine and the phonograph (doubtless differentiated) rendering perfectly the voices of the actors and the music of the orchestra. There will be no need for the employment of inferior actors in the small parts. As the production of any play will only demand that it be worked up to the point of perfection and then performed once, there will be no difficulty in securing the most perfect rendering that it is capable of.
— T. Baron Russell, A Hundred Years Hence, 1906
All in the Family
A gentleman was chiding his son for staying out late at night, and said: ‘Why, when I was your age, my father would not allow me to go out of the house after dark.’–‘Then you had a deuce of a father, you had,’ said the young profligate. Whereupon the father very rashly vociferated: ‘I had a confounded sight better one than you have, you young rascal!’
— Paul Emilius Lowe, ed., After-Dinner Stories, 1916
Mr. N. was on bad terms with his wife, and his eldest son was by no means a favourite; for when he paid a visit to his father, the old gentleman turned to a friend, and said, ‘Now you shall see me kill two birds with one stone. William, go and tell your mother, from me, you are a son of a b—-h.’
— The Nic-Nac; or, Oracle of Knowledge, 1823
Road Work
I set out to run a 26.5-mile marathon hoping to average less than 9 minutes per mile. As I run, my friends measure my time along various mile-long segments of the course. On each mile that they measure — indeed, on each mile that it’s possible to measure, starting anywhere along the course — my time is exactly 9 minutes. Yet my average for the whole marathon is less than 9 minutes per mile.
How is this possible?
