“WIPEOUT!”

Cynthia Knight composed this in 1983 — a poem typed entirely on the upper row of a typewriter:

O WOE
(we quote you, poor poet)
We tiptoe up, quiet. You peer out. You opt to write
quite proper poetry
to pour out your pretty repertoire.
We try to woo you to write. You pop out; retire to pout.
Torpor? Terror? Ire? Or worry? We pity you, poor poet.
Put out, you rip your poetry up. Too trite?
We try to pique you.
Were your pep to tire, or your power to rot
We prop you up to retype it.
Or were our top priority to trip you
or were etiquette, piety, or propriety to require you to wire up your typewriter to rewrite it …
O! You write witty quip, pert retort. You titter. You write pure, utter tripe too, I purr.
You err
retype your error
weep
wipe your wet typewriter (your property)
We TOWER o’er you, wee tot — were you TWO?
YOU WORE YOUR TOY TYPEWRITER OUT!
We quit.

(“The Poet’s Corner,” Word Ways 16:2 [May 1983], 87-88.)

| Language

Dymaxion Sleep

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dymaxion.svg

In 1943 Buckminster Fuller announced that he’d been getting by on two hours of sleep a day. Each person has a primary and a secondary store of energy, he said; the first is restored quickly and the second takes longer. The trick, then, is to relax as soon as you’ve used up the primary store. Fuller trained himself to take a nap at the first sign of fatigue, which he found happened about every six hours. Taking a half-hour nap at those times left him in “the most vigorous and alert condition I have ever enjoyed,” he said.

“For two years Fuller thus averaged two hours of sleep in 24,” Time reported, adding, “Life-insurance doctors who examined him found him sound as a nut.” Fuller said he’d had to abandon the plan because it conflicted with his coworkers’ schedules. “But he wishes the nation’s ‘key thinkers’ could adopt his schedule; he is convinced it would shorten the war.”

| Science & Math

Mixed Doubles

In a letter to Maud Standen dated Dec. 18, 1877, Lewis Carroll included a puzzle:

[M]y ‘Anagrammatic Sonnet’ will be new to you. Each line has 4 feet, and each foot is an anagram, i. e., the letters of it can be re-arranged so as to make one word. Thus there are 24 anagrams, which will occupy your leisure moments for some time, I hope. Remember, I don’t limit myself to substantives, as some do. I should consider ‘we dishwished’ a fair anagram.

As to the war, try elm. I tried.
The wig cast in, I went to ride.
‘Ring? Yes.’ We rang. ‘Let’s rap.’ We don’t.
‘O shew her wit!’ As yet she won’t.
Saw eel in Rome. Dry one: he’s wet.
I am dry. O forge! Th’rogue! Why a net?

For example, the first foot in the first line, “As to,” can be rearranged to spell OATS. Carroll left no solution, but he did add a parting riddle to which we have the answer:

“To these you may add ‘abcdefgi,’ which makes a compound word — as good a word as ‘summer-house.'” What is it?

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

In a Word

tesserarian
adj. pertaining to play

aspernate
v. to scorn

absit
n. a student’s temporary leave of absence

denegate
v. to deny or refuse

In 1873, when the University of Michigan challenged Cornell to the new game of football, Cornell president Andrew D. White declined. He said, “I will not permit thirty men to travel four hundred miles to agitate a bag of wind.”

| Entertainment · Language

“History Talks Too Little About Animals”

“Jottings” from the notebooks of Bulgarian novelist Elias Canetti, published as The Human Province (1978):

  • The days are distinct, but the night has only one name.
  • A war always proceeds as if humanity had never hit upon the notion of justice.
  • The lowest man: he whose wishes have all come true.
  • The dead are nourished by judgments, the living by love.
  • If you have seen a person sleeping, you can never hate him again.
  • I really only know what a tiger is since Blake’s poem.
  • A nice trick: throwing something into the world without being pulled in by it.
  • The future, which changes every instant.
  • I’m fed up with seeing through people; it’s so easy, and it gets you nowhere.
  • In love, assurances are practically an announcement of their opposite.
  • In eternity, everything is at the beginning, a fragrant morning.
  • Praying as a rehearsal of wishes.
  • Why aren’t more people good out of spite?
  • The best person ought not to have a name.
  • To keep thoughts apart by force. They all too easily become matted, like hair.
  • Each war contains all earlier wars.
  • One may have known three or four thousand people, one speaks about only six or seven.
  • You notice some things only because they’re not connected to anything.
  • Everyone ought to watch himself eating.
  • Nothing is more boring than to be worshiped. How can God stand it?

“Square tables: the self-assurance they give you, as though one were alone in an alliance of four.”

| Literature · Quotations

Misc

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Carl_D%C3%B8rnberger_-_By_the_Easel_-_Ved_staffeliet_-_Nasjonalmuseet_-_NG.M.04348.jpg

  • Émile Zola described a work of art as “a corner of nature seen through a temperament.”
  • Early printings of Webster’s New International Dictionary defined RAFTMAN as “a raftman.”
  • Horace’s motto was Nihil admirari, “Be surprised at nothing.”
  • In the 1960s the Bureau of Land Management renamed Whorehouse Meadow, Oregon, to Naughty Girl Meadow on its maps. In 1981, after a public outcry, it changed it back.
  • “Never read a pop-up book about giraffes.” — Sean Lock

Robert Runcie, Archbishop of Canterbury, cooperated as Humphrey Carpenter prepared his biography, believing that the book wouldn’t be published until after his passing. Eventually he was forced to write,

My dear Humphrey

I have done my best to die before this book is published. It now seems possible that I may not succeed. Since you know that I am not enthusiastic about it you are generous to give me space for a postscript.

| Art · Language · Literature · Quotations · Trivia

Register

Excerpts from the index of Together, Norman Douglas’ 1923 account of his travels in Calabria:

Anna, the old nurse, her passion for idiots and corpses, 39-40, for wolf-stories, 210; gets it hot, 91; shakes chocolate from a tree, 209; not old at all, 210
Ants, unreliable workmen, 120
Beds, local, their discomforts, 3; double, their uses, 218
Brunnenmacher (father) mountaineer, presumably hirsute, 25; (son) mountaineer, indubitably hirsute, 25; his smile and his blasphemies, 25, 26; takes author in hand, 28, 124
Cement, an abomination, 75, 128, 225
Cocoa, an abomination, 10
Cows, explode from over-eating, 204
Dachshund, lady-dog, sets a bad example, 4
Elephant-trap, a disused, 113
Erratic blocks, 176, 185, 186, 230
Falling in love, with a mountain, 30
Grand-aunts, the delight of childhood, 41, 47, 92, 214
Grandfather, maternal, a feudal monster, always spick-and-span, 196; excavates in imagination the Akropolis of Athens, 197; tells Prince Consort how to handle Queen Victoria, 198; sometimes mistaken for an angel, 199; dominates his harem, 200; vicious to the last, 201
Hare, how to shoot, 123; how not to cook, 203
Moralists, their limitations, 84
Ovid, blunders in botany, 83
Poets, should avoid towns, 82; generally born naked, 165; talk nonsense about pomegranates, 202
Theocritus, seldom caught napping, 83
Weisses Kreuz, hotel, its manager worth making love to, 203

Douglas had a penchant for droll indexes. His index for Some Limericks (1928) contains the entry “Spain, project for fertilizing arid tracts of, its ruler disinclined for tête-à-tête diversions”.

| Humor · Literature

Death Do Us Part

From the will of John G—-e, who died at Lambeth around 1772:

Whereas it was my misfortune to be made very uneasy by Elisabeth G—-e, my wife, for many years, from our marriage, by her turbulent behavior; for she was not content with despising my admonitions, but she contrived every method to make me unhappy; she was so perverse in her nature, that she would not be reclaimed, but seemed only to be born to be a plague to me; the strength of Sampson, the knowledge of Homer, the prudence of Augustus, the cunning of Pyrrhus, the patience of Job, the subtilty of Hannibal, and the watchfulness of Hermogenes, could not have been sufficient to subdue her; for no skill or force in the world would make her good; and as we have lived separate and apart from each other eight years, and she having perverted her son to leave and totally abandon me, therefore I give her one shilling only.

From the Annual Register.

| Death · Society

Nonary

Take a whole number, reverse the order of its digits, and subtract one from the other. The difference will always be evenly divisible by 9.

Does this remain true if we just scramble the digits of the first number, rather than reversing them?

Click for Answer
| Puzzles · Science & Math

Round and Round

https://archive.org/details/MathematicsCanBeFun-Eng-YakovPerelman/page/n11/mode/2up

‘I had quite a bit of fun playing hide-and-seek with a squirrel,’ he said. ‘You know that little round glade with a lone birch in the centre? It was on this tree that a squirrel was hiding from me. As I emerged from a thicket, I saw its snout and two bright little eyes peeping from behind the trunk. I wanted to see the little animal, so I started circling round along the edge of the glade, mindful of keeping the distance in order not to scare it. I did four rounds, but the little cheat kept backing away from me, eyeing me suspiciously from behind the tree. Try as I did, I just could not see its back.’

‘But you have just said yourself that you circled round the tree four times,’ one of the listeners interjected.

‘Round the tree, yes, but not round the squirrel.’

‘But the squirrel was on the tree, wasn’t it?’

‘So it was.’

‘Well, that means you circled round the squirrel too.’

‘Call that circling round the squirrel when I didn’t see its back?’

‘What has its back to do with the whole thing? The squirrel was on the tree in the centre of the glade and you circled round the tree. In other words, you circled round the squirrel.’

‘Oh no, I didn’t. Let us assume that I’m circling round you and you keep turning, showing me just your face. Call that circling round you?’

‘Of course, what else can you call it?’

‘You mean I’m circling round you though I’m never behind you and never see your back?’

‘Forget the back! You’re circling round me and that’s what counts. What has the back to do with it?’

— Yakov Perelman, Mathematics Can Be Fun, 1927

| Oddities