Author: Greg Ross
Indisposed
FDR’s sense of humor was a winner with the press. One day, when he was laid up in bed with a cold, the Post pulled a classic typographical error. The page one headline read: FDR IN BED WITH COED. Hardly had that early edition reached the White House than a Post reporter picked up the phone to hear: ‘This is Frank Roosevelt. I’d like 100 copies of that first edition of the Post. I want to send it to all my friends.’ Alas, the circulation department had scurried out to recover all the papers from the corner stands and destroy them. FDR never got his 100 copies.
— Kenneth W. Thompson, The Roosevelt Presidency, 1982
The Miracle Stair
This spiral staircase, in the Loretto Chapel in Santa Fe, has no newel, or central pole — its treads are upheld by stringers, notched structural supports as in a conventional stair, but here the stringers make two complete turns as the helical stair rises 20 feet to the choir loft. All of this is held together by wooden pegs rather than glue or nails.
It was built sometime between 1877 and 1881, but the creator’s identity is not recorded. “It’s a magnificent work of art that humbles me as a master carpenter,” wrote Tim Carter in the Washington Post in 2010. “To create a staircase like this using modern tools would be a feat. It’s mind-boggling to think about constructing such a marvel with crude hand tools, no electricity and minimal resources.”
To Be Precise
On what date did Vincent van Gogh paint his 1889 masterpiece The Starry Night? Earlier studies had placed the creation in mid-June of that year, based on a letter the artist had written to his brother Theo around June 18. But Kyung Hee University doctoral candidate Elijah Jeong-hyun Kim noted that an observer in that period should have seen a waning gibbous moon, not the crescent seen in the painting.
Intrigued, he began to compare astronomical simulations, weather records, and van Gogh’s other writings. A better estimate of the scene’s creation, he says, is dawn on July 22, 1889. On that date the crescent moon, Venus, and the Hyades star cluster in the constellation Taurus would have been visible from van Gogh’s window in southern France, and the recorded hot weather would have inspired the cicadas the artist mentions in a letter.
Kim’s article appears in the journal Scientific Reports. “Our conversation with Van Gogh’s other skies is still ongoing,” he told Popular Science. “We plan to tell those stories one by one.”
(Texas State University “forensic astronomer” Donald W. Olson has done similar work, estimating for example that the scene below depicts Le Havre harbor as seen from Claude Monet’s hotel room at 7:35 a.m. on Nov. 13, 1872.) (Thanks, Sharon.)
Enlightenment
“I pay the schoolmaster, but ’tis the schoolboys that educate my son.” — Emerson, journal, May 25, 1849
Smile
When 22-year-old student Christian LeBlanc fed a basket of bananas to a group of elephants on the Thai island of Koh Phangan in 2015, one of them seized his GoPro camera by its mount, and when the self-timer triggered the shutter he got “the worlds first ever Elfie.”
“Elephants are incredibly intelligent and it definitely makes you wonder if it was a conscious action,” he wrote. So who gets the credit? For now, in the judgment of Wikimedia, “This file is in the public domain because, as the work of a non-human animal, it has no human author in whom copyright is vested.”
Counterparts
A brilliant device from the Japanese television variety show Kasou Taishou. Another:
False Prospect
Because he had to earn a living painting portraits, Thomas Gainsborough could not spend as much time sketching outdoors as he would have liked. So he arranged pieces of moss, rock, vegetables, and mirror into tabletop “landscapes” that he could paint at night by candlelight.
Joshua Reynolds recalled him collecting “broken stones, dried herbs, and pieces of looking glass, which he magnified and improved into rocks, trees, and water.” Another visitor wrote, “I … have more than once sat by him of an evening and seen him make models … for landscape scenery on a little old-fashioned folding oak table. … He would place cork or coal for his foregrounds; make middle grounds of sand and clay, bushes of moss and lichens, and set up distant woods of broccoli.”
A Late Addition
Holst’s The Planets premiered in 1918, 12 years before Pluto was discovered.
So in 2000 Colin Matthews wrote an eighth movement, “Pluto, the Renewer,” to complete the cycle.
(I’m not sure of its status since 2006, when the International Astronomical Union reclassified Pluto a dwarf planet.)
Criticism
The library of St John’s College, Oxford, used to hold a copy of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene that bore a student’s penciled comment on the last page:
“First I thought Troilus And Criseyde was the most boring poem in English. Then I thought Beowulf was. Then I thought Paradise Lost was. Now I know that The Faerie Queen is the dullest thing out. Blast it.”
It had been written by Philip Larkin, who had studied English there in the 1940s.