Recently I came across a letter sent to me some years ago by a cousin and addressed in the curious manner here shown. The tune is taken from part of an old round called ‘Big Ben.’ In spite of the quaint address the letter was promptly delivered. — Mrs. Andrew Wall, Edinburgh
— Strand, February 1911
A discovery made yesterday near the towns of Colliers, W. Va., clears up a mystery of thirty-two years’ standing.
The skeletons of four human beings were found in an abandoned coal mine a mile east of the place. The men were supposed to have been killed many years ago.
David Snyder was exploring the old mine, which had not been worked since the early ’60s, when he discovered the human bones. One of the skeletons was sitting upright against a ledge.
Beside the skeleton was found a flask containing notes that explained the mysterious disappearance of John Ewing, Ben Ayers, Tom Ackelson and Joe Obney, who were known here thirty-two years ago. The notes were written with a pencil, but were well preserved. It read as follows:
Nov. 2, 1863. — Should this ever reach the outside world, let it be known that we are prisoners here, owing to the caving-in of the mine. We are deserters, and were in hiding here when the mine caved in. Food and water are all gone. We are doomed, as no one outside is aware of our whereabouts. This is the eighth day of our imprisonment.
Nov. 4. — John Ewing and Tom Ackelson have just killed Ben Ayres, and are eating him. I have already eaten my bootlegs. The water in the mine is terrible. Our oil is getting scarce, and the air is becoming foul. I only know the day of the month by my watch.
Nov. 6. — Ewing has just killed Ackelson, cut off one of his feet and is eating it, and dancing around and flourishing his dirk-knife like a maniac.
Nov. 7. — I am now alone with the dead. I had to kill Ewing in self-defense. I have just eaten my other bootleg. Am sleepy. Good-bye. I inclose this note in this flask to preserve it, if possible, so that if ever found our sad fate will be known.
Joseph Obney
Several of the old residents hereabouts remember these men. It is believed that they had been killed in battle. As no relatives of the dead men could be found their bodies were buried by the town poormaster.
— Eagle River [Wis.] Review, March 12, 1896
(The story is doubtful — Obney seems to have had three legs — but it was widely retailed: I find 103 instances in American papers in February and March 1896.) (Thanks, Deryck.)
Until 1934, Peñón de Vélez de la Gomera was a Spanish island off the coast of North Africa.
But then a thunderstorm washed enough sand into the channel to create an isthmus to the Moroccan shore.
So now the island is a Spanish exclave on a peninsula, and the two nations share the world’s shortest border.
The last duel in France took place in 1967. During an argument in the National Assembly, Gaston Defferre shouted “Taisez-vous, abruti!” (“Shut up, stupid!”) at René Ribière. Ribière demanded an apology and, receiving none, insisted on satisfaction by duel. He lost the contest, with two minor wounds.
A variation on the grandfather paradox … is the Hitler paradox. In this one you travel back in time to murder Hitler before he starts the Second World War, thus saving millions of lives. But if you murder Hitler in, say, 1938, then the Second World War will never come about and you will have no reason to travel back in time to murder Hitler!
— J.H. Brennan, Time Travel: A New Perspective, 1997
(The fourth is due to Mick Tully, the fifth to David Armstrong.)
In 1963, French geologist Michel Siffre descended into a glaciated cavern under the French-Italian Maritime Alps and spent more than two months without sun to “investigate time, that most inapprehensible and irreversible thing.” He could telephone scientists on the surface, who recorded the time of each call, but they never told him the time or date. From his diary:
Forty-second awakening. … I really seem to have no least idea of the passage of time. This morning, as an example, after telephoning to the surface and talking for a while, I wondered afterward how long the telephone conversation had lasted, and could not even hazard a guess. … Fifty-second awakening. … I am losing all notion of time. … When, for instance, I telephone the surface and indicate what time I think it is, thinking that only an hour has elapsed between my waking up and eating breakfast, it may well be that four or five hours have elapsed. And here is something hard to explain: the main thing, I believe, is the idea of time that I have at the very moment of telephoning. If I called an hour earlier, I would still have stated the same figure. … I am having great difficulty to recall what I have done today. It costs me a real intellectual effort to recall such things.
The outsiders could see that his waking and sleeping remained near a cycle of 24.5 hours, but Siffre’s conscious understanding of time was greatly affected. Misunderstanding the length of his day, he began to husband his rations, thinking he had weeks more to endure. At his 57th awakening, the final day of the experiment, he thought it was August 20; in fact it was September 14. “I underestimated by almost half the length of my working or waking hours; a ‘day’ that I estimated at seven hours actually lasted on the average fourteen hours and forty minutes.” NASA has pursued these inquiries to consider the implications for space travelers.
(From Jane Brox, Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light, 2010.)
A bizarre detail from Thomas Southcliffe Ashton and Joseph Sykes’ 1964 book The Coal Industry of the Eighteenth Century:
British miners often had to work in near-total darkness, as any flame might ignite methane gas.
So, in the more explosion-prone mines, “colliers sometimes tried to carry on their work by the feeble light of phosophorous and putrescent fish.”
In 2006, Canadian blogger Kyle MacDonald traded this red paper clip for a fish-shaped pen. Then, in successive transactions, he bartered his way up to a hand-sculpted doorknob; a Coleman camp stove; a Honda generator; an empty keg with an IOU for beer; a snowmobile; a two-person trip to Yahk, British Columbia; a box truck; a recording contract; a year’s rent in Phoenix, Arizona; an afternoon with Alice Cooper; a motorized KISS snow globe; a role in the film Donna on Demand; and a two-story farmhouse in Kipling, Saskatchewan.
“A lot of people have been asking how I’ve stirred up so much publicity around the project,” he told the BBC, “and my simple answer is: ‘I have no idea.'”
An angel appears to a conference of philosophers and offers to provide the truthful answer to a single question. Cannily they ask:
“What is the ordered pair whose first member is the question that would be the best one for us to ask you, and whose second member is the answer to that question?”
Truthfully the angel answers:
“It is the ordered pair whose first member is the question you just asked me, and whose second member is this answer I am giving you.”
Philosopher Ned Markosian writes, “At the time the philosophers asked [the question above], it seemed like that question was the ideal one for their peculiar situation. But as it turned out, [that question] was obviously not at all the right thing to ask. … The puzzle, then, is this: What went wrong?”
(Ned Markosian, “The Paradox of the Question,” Analysis 57:2 [1997], 95-97.)
