Henry Dudeney says this puzzle is “supposed to be Chinese, many hundreds of years old, and never fails to interest.” White to play and mate, moving each of the three pieces exactly once.
Author: Greg Ross
Unquote
“Perfection is finally attained, not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away.” — Antoine de Saint Exupéry
“A Christmas Pie of Ye Olden Time”
James, Earl of Lonsdale, sent a Christmas pie to King George III, which contained 9 geese, 2 tame ducks, 2 turkeys, 4 fowls, 6 pigeons, 6 wild ducks, 3 teals, 2 starlings, 12 partridges, 15 woodcocks, 2 Guinea fowls, 3 snipes, 6 plovers, 3 water-hens, 1 wild goose, 1 curlew, 46 yellow-hammers, 15 sparrows, 15 chaffinches, 2 larks, 4 thrushes, 12 fieldfares, 6 blackbirds, 20 rabbits, 1 leg of veal, half a ham, 3 bushels flour, and 2 stones of butter. It weighed 22 stones, was carried to London in a two horse wagon, and if it was not as dainty as the celebrated pie containing four-and-twenty blackbirds, which, when the pie was opened, began to sing, it was, at all events, a ‘dish to set before the king.’
— Bizarre Notes & Queries, January 1886
Don’t Call Us
American philologist Revilo P. Oliver had a palindromic name — it reads the same backward and forward. In his family, he said, the name “has been the burden of the eldest or only son for six generations.”
And it cost him — at least one journal rejected his articles as fraudulent.
Economy
On the way to one of his many duels, Georges Clemenceau requested a one-way railway ticket.
“Isn’t that a little pessimistic?” asked his second.
“Not at all,” Clemenceau said. “I always use my opponent’s return ticket for the trip back.”
“Crows Lost in a Fog”
“The Hartford Times tells a curious story of a flock of crows in that vicinity who recently lost their way in a fog. They lost their bearings at a point directly above the South Green, in Hartford. For a good while they hovered there, coming low down, circling and diving aimlessly about, like a blindfolded person in ‘blind man’s buff,’ and keeping up a hoarse cawing and general racket beyond description. It was plain enough that of the entire company each individual crow was not only puzzled and bothered, but highly indignant, and inclined to utter ‘cuss words’ in his frantic attempts to be heard above the general din, and tell the others which way to go. Once or twice the whole flock swept down to a distance of not more than one hundred feet above the street. Finally, after going around for many times, they saied away in a southerly direction, evidently having got some clue to the way out of the fog, or desperately resolved to go somewhere till they could see daylight.”
— Frank H. Stauffer, The Queer, the Quaint and the Quizzical, 1882
A Confederacy of Squares
When asked his age, mathematician Augustus De Morgan used to offer a clue: “I was x years of age in the year x2.” (He was 43 in 1849.)
That quirk puts De Morgan in a pretty exclusive club. Other members include Charles Atlas (who was 44 in 1936) and Jake Gyllenhaal (who will be 45 in 2025). Next up: Babies born in 2070 will be 46 in 2116.
Strange Crossing
On Oct. 17, 1917, the sailing schooner Zabrina was found hard aground on the Cherbourg Peninsula in northwestern France. She had sailed from the English port of Falmouth two days earlier and should have made fast passage across the English Channel. No trace of her four-man crew was ever found.
In a Word
saulie
n. a hired mourner at a funeral
Stretch
In the Philosophical Transactions for 1712, W. Cheselden, a celebrated anatomist, describes the dimensions of some human bones of an extraordinary size, which were dug up near St. Alban’s, in Hertfordshire. The circumference of the skull lengthwise was twenty-six inches, and its breadth twenty-three inches. The greatest diameter of each os innominatum was twelve inches. The left os femoris was twenty-four inches long, and the right one was twenty-three inches in length. Each tibia was twenty-four inches long. If all the parts bore a due proportion, this man must have been eight feet high. The bones were found near an urn, inscribed ‘Marcus Antoninus,’ on the site of a Roman camp.
— Edward J. Wood, Giants and Dwarfs, 1868