An amorous wag once sought the bliss,
To steal a soft and balmy kiss,
When Sylvia stampt (and some say, swore)
That he should gain the prize no more;
He smiled, and said, if ’tis such pain,
Pray, miss, return it back again.
— The Jester’s Magazine, 1767
There’s something curious about the Congolese minister of foreign trade — he doesn’t exist.
When the prime minister asked for two nominees for the post, UNACEF party leader Kisimba Ngoy nominated himself and “Kasongo Ilunga,” apparently thinking he was bound to win against a phantom.
The plan backfired when the prime minister chose Ilunga. The enigmatic 36-year-old failed to appear at the opening of the new government, and he hasn’t claimed his office. Ngoy says that the invisible bureaucrat has resigned, but the prime minister insists that he must do so in person.
That leaves Congo without a trade minister — and Kisimba helplessly offering that dubious resignation letter. “He wrote it himself,” he insists. “He signed it. Could an imaginary man do that?”
A “multi-magic” square: Each row and column sums to 260; square each term and they sum to 11,180.
In Rouen, in 1509, in digging in the ditches near the Dominicans, they found a stone tomb, containing a skeleton whose skull held a bushel of corn, and whose shin bone reached up to the girdle of the tallest man there, being about four feet long; and, consequently, the body must have been seventeen or eighteen feet high. Upon the tomb was a plate of copper, whereon was engraved, ‘In this tomb lies the noble and puissant lord, the Chevalier Ricon De Vallemont, and his bones.’
— John Platts, Encyclopedia of Natural and Artificial Wonders and Curiosities, 1876
James Boyle patented this hands-free hat-tipping device in 1896.
“The hat is detachably secured to the working parts of the device that raise the hat, completely rotate it, and deposit it correctly on the head of the wearer every time said person bows his head and then assumes an erect posture.”
There’s no record of how the ladies received it.
curglaff
n. the shock felt on plunging into cold water
“Numero deus impare gaudet [the god delights in odd numbers].” — Virgil
“Why is it that we entertain the belief that for every purpose odd numbers are the most effectual?” — Pliny
“This is the third time; I hope good luck lies in odd numbers. … They say there is divinity in odd numbers, either in nativity, chance, or death.” — Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor
In the early morning hours of Dec. 3, 2003, assistant U.S. attorney Jonathan Luna drove north out of Baltimore. At about 1 a.m. he withdrew $200 from an ATM in Newark, Del., and at 3:20 a.m. he bought gas at a Pennsylvania service plaza. At 4:04 he exited the Pennsylvania Turnpike with a bloodstained toll ticket.
At 5:30 a.m. his car was discovered in a stream behind a Pennsylvania well drilling company. Luna’s body was under the engine. He had been stabbed 36 times with his own penknife and drowned.
Despite a federal reward of $100,000, no one has ever explained what happened that night.
Before his students arrived for a graduate course in logic, Raymond Smullyan wrote on the blackboard:
PLEASE DO NOT ERASE — BECAUSE IF YOU DO, THOSE WHO COME LATER WON’T KNOW THAT THEY SHOULDN’T ERASE.
“Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.” — Pascal