You arrive in purgatory to find it’s just a typewriter on a desk. As you take your seat, you notice that the C key is glowing faintly.
A demon says, “All you have to do is type the integers, in order: ONE, TWO, and so on. The first time you strike the C key, you’ll be released into paradise.”
That doesn’t sound too bad. Assuming it takes 10 seconds on average to type each number (and that you spell each correctly, in English), how much time will pass before you first type the letter C?
“All the arguments which are brought to represent poverty as no evil, shew it to be evidently a great evil. You never find people labouring to convince you that you may live very happily upon a plentiful fortune.” — Samuel Johnson
On April 2, scores of students from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute swooped down on banks and stores in Troy, N.Y., demanded that bills from $5 to $100 be changed for pennies. By April 4, tellers and storekeepers became suspicious, but it was too late. The students had cornered the penny market, having collected 250,000 coppers. Sales had to be made in round sums or not at all. Next day, same students re-invaded Troy, gave merchants 75¢ and 25 pennies for every $1 purchase, announced they were ‘TaxCENTinels.’ Their aim is to make U.S. citizens tax-conscious by showing that hidden taxes amount to 25% of merchandise prices.
— Life, April 18, 1938
quadrigamist
n. one who has four wives
pentapopemptic
n. one who has been divorced five times
Balloons are nifty, but they’re hard to steer, and conventional motor-driven propellers are too heavy. So in 1887, Frenchman Charles Wulff proposed tying eagles to the car to form living propellers.
The birds would wear shoulder straps to keep them in place. The man in the car shouts his destination into a speaking tube, and the conductor uses a hand wheel and rollers to point the birds in the appropriate direction “quite independently of their own will.” A net can be lowered to stop them from flapping.
What could go wrong?
Some day you will move me almost to the verge of irritation by your chuckleheaded Goddamned fashion of shutting your Goddamned gas off without giving any notice to your Goddamned parishioners. Several times you have come within an ace of smothering half of this household in their beds & blowing up the other half by this idiotic, not to say criminal, custom of yours. And it has happened again to-day. Haven’t you a telephone?
— Letter from Mark Twain to the Hartford City Gas Light Company, Feb. 12, 1891
Fritz Kreisler had already gained immortality as a violin virtuoso when in 1935 he revealed that he was also a composer — for 30 years he had been performing his own compositions in concert but attributing them to Vivaldi, Couperin, Porpora, and Pugnani.
In the uproar that followed, Kreisler argued that as a young man he’d had no reputation; audiences would not have paid to hear the compositions of an unknown violinist. That was just the point, opined the Philadelphia Record: Fans had bought the pieces, and indeed other violinists had performed them, thinking them the work of established composers.
The Portland Oregonian agreed: “What if Fritz Kreisler had died without making confession that over a period of thirty years he had been composing music and signing to it the names of half-forgotten composers of former times? What if he had left no list of his works?”
Which raises an interesting question: How many such hoaxes have succeeded? How many of our great works of art are undiscovered forgeries?
You have two one-hour fuses: If you light one, it will be consumed in exactly one hour.
Unfortunately, they’re badly made — some sections of each fuse burn faster than others. You know only that each full fuse will burn in one hour.
Using only these two fuses (and matches to light them), how can you tell when 45 minutes have passed?
On being told the house doctor was coming, Max Baer said, “No, dummy, I need a people doctor.”
Hart Crane, jumping overboard: “Goodbye, everybody!”
Edison emerged from a coma to say, intriguingly, “It is very beautiful over there.”
James Joyce, fittingly: “Does nobody understand?”
Mahler: “Mozart!”
William Saroyan: “Everybody has got to die, but I have always believed an exception would be made in my case. Now what?”
Ernest Shackleton, to his doctor: “You are always wanting me to give up something. What do you want me to give up now?”
From Henry Dudeney:
A ball 13 inches in diameter has a 5-inch hole drilled through the center. How deep is the hole?
