In his early days as a news reporter, James Thurber’s editor told him to “write dramatic, buttonholing leads to your stories.”
So, typing up a murder case, Thurber wrote:
“Dead. That’s what the man was when they found him with a knife in his back at 4 p.m. in front of Riley’s Saloon at the corner of 52nd and 12th Streets.”
The same thing can happen at the end of a news career.
Binary Arts devised this wonderful three-dimensional illusion for the third Gathering for Gardner in 1998.
You can download a dragon of your own here.
On the first of December, 1787, some fishermen fishing in the river Thames, near Poplar, with much difficulty drew into their boat a shark, yet alive, but apparently very sickly; it was taken on shore, and, being opened, in its belly were found a silver watch, a metal chain, and a cornelian seal, together with several pieces of gold-lace, supposed to have belonged to some young gentleman, who was unfortunate enough to have fallen overboard; but that the body and other parts had either been digested, or otherwise voided; but the watch and gold-lace not being able to pass through it, the fish had thereby become sickly, and would in all probability very soon have died. The watch had the name of ‘Henry Watson, London, No. 1369,’ and the works were very much impaired. On these circumstances being made public, Mr. Henry Watson, watchmaker, in Soreditch, recollected that about two years ago he sold the watch to Mr. Ephraim Thompson, of Whitechapel, as a present to his son, on going out his first voyage, on board the ship Polly, Capt. Vane, bound to Coast and Bay: about three leagues off Falmouth, by a sudden heel of the vessel, during a squall, Master Thompson fell overboard, and was no more seen.–The news of his being drowned soon after came to knowledge of his friends, who little thought of hearing any more concerning him.
— The Kaleidoscope, Jan. 22, 1822
See The Shark Arm Affair.
Charles Dickens slept with his head pointing north. “He maintained that he could not sleep with it in any other position,” noted journalist Eliza Lynn Linton.
Ben Jonson was buried upright in Westminster Abbey — it’s not clear whether this was his request or required by circumstance.
And in 1800 Maj. Peter Labelliere was buried on Box Hill head down, declaring that as “the world was turned topsy-turvy, it was fit that he should be so buried that he might be right at last.”
“It is human nature to hate those whom you have injured.” — Tacitus
Robert Peary’s attempts to reach the North Pole raised a curious question for Jewish scholars: How should Jewish law, which normally assumes a 24-hour day, be interpreted in the land of the midnight sun?
Writing in New Era in 1905, J.D. Eisenstein asked, “Which is the seventh day, or Sabbath? and when is Yom Kippur to be observed around the North Pole, where the day and night are of about six months’ duration?”
If one reckoned by daylight, “As to Yom Kippur, it would be obviously impossible to prolong the fast till the closing prayer of Neilah. Besides, one would have to wait for the following Yom Kippur, 354 to 384 years, figuring a year for a day, according to the Jewish calendar.”
According to Eisenstein, one rabbi advised that observing Jews should not settle in high latitudes at all, to avoid the question. The problem has not been entirely settled even today — indeed, it’s been compounded, as Jewish astronauts can now orbit the earth and may one day colonize other worlds.
For any convex polyhedron,
vertices – edges + faces = 2
In 1988, readers of the Mathematical Intelligencer judged this the world’s second most beautiful theorem — behind Euler’s identity.
A French versifier, equally deficient in poetic fire and worldly pelf, and whose nether garments were rather out of order, had commenced a series of epics on scriptural subjects. One was on the subject of Lot, and commenced,
L’amour a vaincu Loth.
On reading this aloud, his friend feigning to understand it thus,
L’amour a vingt culottes,
with a significant glance at his breeches, asked him why he did not borrow a pair. Can your critical French readers explain any difference in the sound of the two lines?
— The Kaleidoscope, Jan. 22, 1822
By the levee of the Missouri River in Fort Benton, Mont., stands a bronze statue of a vigilant sheepdog. It commemorates Shep, a dog who appeared at the town’s Great Northern Railway Station one day in August 1936 while workers were loading a casket onto a train. The dog watched the train depart, then turned and trotted off down the tracks.
Thereafter, for five and a half years, Shep would appear on the platform to meet four trains a day, scanning the passengers who alighted and then retiring under the platform. His master still had not returned when in January 1942 he slipped on the rails and disappeared under an engine.
A cynic might wonder how much of this story is tied up in Montana tourism. But plausible it certainly is: Essentially the same thing had happened 12 years earlier in Japan.
