Narrow Meaning

https://archive.org/details/strand-1899-v-18/page/238/mode/2up?view=theater

Reader J. William Hook submitted this curiosity to the Strand in August 1899. Holding the page level with the eyes foreshortens the characters and reveals a love poem:

Art thou not dear unto my heart?
Oh, I search that heart and see
And from my bosom tear the part
That beats not true to thee.

But to my bosom thou art dear,
More dear than words can tell,
And if a fault be cherished there,
‘Tis loving thee too well.

There seems to have been a little vogue for this kind of thing — C. Field submitted a similar image three months later.

| Oddities · Poems

Small Talk

(Until William Herschel’s advances in telescopes, stars seemed to have “rays” or “tails.”)

At a dinner given by Mr Aubert in the year 1786, William Herschel was seated next to Mr Cavendish, who was reputed to be the most taciturn of men. Some time passed without his uttering a word, then he suddenly turned to his neighbour and said: ‘I am told that you see the stars round, Dr Herschel’. ‘Round as a button’, was the reply. A long silence ensued till, towards the end of the dinner, Cavendish again opened his lips to say in a doubtful voice: ‘Round as a button?’ ‘Exactly, round as a button’, repeated Herschel, and so the conversation ended.

— Constange A. Lubbock, The Herschel Chronicle, 1933

| Science & Math · Society

The Octoplex

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Orthogonal_polyhedron_with_no_vertex_visible_from_center.svg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

An art gallery with n walls will always be safe with n/3 guards — the guards will always be able arrange themselves to observe the whole gallery.

That’s Chvátal’s art gallery theorem, discovered in 1973 by mathematician Václav Chvátal. Interestingly, it’s true only of two-dimensional floor plans — a three-dimensional gallery may not be safe even if you post a guard at every corner.

Take a 20 × 20 × 20 cube and remove a 12 × 6 channel from the front and back faces; a 6 × 3 channel from the left and right faces; and a 6 × 6 channel from the top and bottom faces, as shown. The result is the Octoplex, eight 4 × 7 × 7 theaters connected to each other and to a central lobby by passages 1 unit wide.

Remarkably, even if we mount a camera at every one of this figure’s 56 corners, there will remain a small region in the central lobby that no camera can see.

(T.S. Michael, “Guards, Galleries, Fortresses, and the Octoplex,” College Mathematics Journal 42:3 [May 2011], 191-200.)

| Science & Math

Practice

For the past eighty years I have started each day in the same manner. It is not a mechanical routine but something essential to my daily life. I go to the piano, and I play two preludes and fugues of Bach. I cannot think of doing otherwise. It is a sort of benediction on the house. But that is not its only meaning for me. It is a rediscovery of the world of which I have the joy of being a part. It fills me with awareness of the wonder of life, with a feeling of the incredible marvel of being a human being.

— Pablo Casals, Joys and Sorrows, 1970

| Art · Quotations

In a Word

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:President_Franklin_D._Roosevelt_(left)_confers_with_Secretary_of_State_Cordell_Hull,_who_served_as_Secretary_from_1933_to_1944._(30629079207).jpg

renitence
n. unwillingness, resistance to persuasion

subdolous
adj. cunning, crafty, sly

autoschediasm
n. something done on the spur of the moment or without preparation

legerity
n. physical or mental quickness

FDR’s secretary of state, Cordell Hull, was famously unforthcoming, concealing his plans and emotions with the skill of a poker player.

When Hull was a legislator in Tennessee, one of his friends bet that he could get a direct answer out of him. He stopped him in the capitol and asked him the time.

Hull took out his timepiece, looked at it, and said, “What does your watch say?”

| History · Language

International Relations

From Martin Geldart’s Guide to Modern Greek, 1883:

Here we are (arrived) at the station.

What luggage have you, sir?

I have two trunks, a travelling-bag, and a hat-box, for the luggage van.

These I wish to register.

My other luggage I will take with me.

That is to say — a foot-wrapper, a stick, three or four parcels, a gun, a lap-dog, two Turkish pipes, and a live tortoise.

As for the rest, let them pass; but for the dog a separate ticket must be taken, and he must go in the van.

As for the tortoise, you must leave that behind: we don’t convey vermin!

Vermin! So you reckon a tortoise among the vermin?

Certainly, sir; it’s an insect.

An insect! My good fellow, where did you go to school (study)?

I refer you to the Zoological Garden(s), and there you will learn, if you have any brains in your head, that the tortoise is a four-footed reptile, and that insects are all six-footed.

There’s a shilling for you, the price of admission to the Zoological Gardens, except on Mondays, when it is only sixpence.

If you have time on Mondays, go twice, that you may be more thoroughly enlightened.

Oh, that alters the question, sir! And, now I come to think of it, the landlord over the way has a book with those kind of creatures in it. I daresay you’re right (lit. Let be then). All the same, four-foot and six-foot have another meaning in my business.

All the better! Mind your own business then, and leave the four-footed reptiles to me.

| Language

A Smile More Brightened

In September 1931 the Weekend Review pointed out the “regrettable omission of any reference to tooth-brushing in the description of Adam and Eve retiring for the night” in Book IV of Paradise Lost. It challenged its readers to improve Milton’s text; polymath Edward Marsh inserted these lines:

[… and eas’d the putting off
These troublesome disguises which wee wear,]
Yet pretermitted not the strait Command,
Eternal, indispensable, to off-cleanse
From their white elephantin Teeth the stains
Left by those tastie Pulps that late they chewd
At supper. First from a salubrious Fount
Our general Mother, stooping, the pure Lymph
Insorb’d, which, mingl’d with tart juices prest
From pungent Herbs, on sprigs of Myrtle smeard,
(Then were not Brushes) scrub’d gumms more impearl’d
Than when young Telephus with Lydia strove
In mutual bite of Shoulder and ruddy Lip.
This done (by Adam too no less) the pair
[Straight side by side were laid …]

Marsh called this “the cleverest thing I ever did.” “The mordacious Telephus and Lydia are ‘of course,’ as the gossip-writers would say, from Horace, Odes, I, xiii. Martin Armstrong, who had set the competition, gave me the first prize, and was good enough to express the hope that future editors of Milton would put my lines in the appropriate place.”

(From Marsh’s 1939 memoir A Number of People.)

| Humor · Literature · Poems

The Other Half

Who’s Who invites its contributors to list their recreations. Some responses are unusual:

Charles Causley: “Playing the piano with expression.”

John Faulkner: “Intricacies and wildernesses.”

John Fowles: “Mainly Sabine.”

Bevis Hillier: “Awarding marks out of ten for suburban front gardens.”

James Kirkup: “Standing in shafts of sunlight.” (In old age he changed this to “Standing in shafts of moonlight.”)

Edward Lucie-Smith: “Walking the dog; malice.”

Frederic Raphael: “Painting things white.”

Constant Hendrick de Waal: “Remaining (so far as possible) unaware of current events.”

Keith Waterhouse: “Lunch.”

Roy Worskett: “Looking and listening in disbelief.”

In 1897 George Bernard Shaw listed his recreations as “cycling and showing off.” In 1980 Sir Harold Hobson listed “Bridge; recollecting in regretful tranquillity the magical things and people I may never see again — the Grand Véfour, Lasserre, Beaumanière; Proust’s Grand Hotel at Balbec (Cabourg); Sunday afternoon teas at the Ritz; the theatrical bookshop in St Germain-des-Prés; the Prado; Edwige Feuillère, Madeleine Renauld, Jean-Louis Barrault, François Perier; collecting from ephemera of the Belle Epoque the cartoons of Steinlen; and always and inexhaustibly talking to my wife.”

(Via John Julius Norwich, More Christmas Crackers, 1990.)

02/05/2025 UPDATE: John Cleese lists his as “gluttony and sloth.” (Thanks, Bryan.)

| Humor · Society

The Engine

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Engine_(Gulliver).png

Gulliver’s Travels describes a device by which “the most ignorant person, at a reasonable charge, and with a little bodily labour, might write books in philosophy, poetry, politics, laws, mathematics, and theology, without the least assistance from genius or study”:

He then led me to the frame, about the sides whereof all his pupils stood in ranks. It was twenty feet square, placed in the middle of the room. The superfices was composed of several bits of wood, about the bigness of a die, but some larger than others. They were all linked together by slender wires. These bits of wood were covered, on every square, with paper pasted on them; and on these papers were written all the words of their language, in their several moods, tenses, and declensions; but without any order. The professor then desired me ‘to observe; for he was going to set his engine at work.’ The pupils, at his command, took each of them hold of an iron handle, whereof there were forty fixed round the edges of the frame; and giving them a sudden turn, the whole disposition of the words was entirely changed. He then commanded six-and-thirty of the lads, to read the several lines softly, as they appeared upon the frame; and where they found three or four words together that might make part of a sentence, they dictated to the four remaining boys, who were scribes. This work was repeated three or four times, and at every turn, the engine was so contrived, that the words shifted into new places, as the square bits of wood moved upside down.

As it permutes sets of words, it’s arguably a forerunner of the modern computer.

| Literature · Technology