“Corner House,” by Hungarian painter István Orosz (b. 1951).
“Illusion,” wrote Oscar Wilde, “is the first of all pleasures.”
But the Rent’s Great
Author: Greg Ross
“A Shaved Bear”
At Bristol I saw a shaved monkey shown for a fairy, and a shaved bear, in a check waistcoat and trowsers, sitting in a great chair as an Ethiopian savage. This was the most cruel fraud I ever saw. The unnatural position of the beast, and the damnable brutality of the woman-keeper who sat upon his knee, put her arm round his neck, called him husband and sweet-heart, and kissed him, made it the most disgusting spectacle I ever witnessed.
— Robert Southey, Southey’s Common-Place Book, 1851
The Marozi
In 1931, farmer Michael Trent shot two strange creatures in the Aberdare Mountains of central Kenya. They appeared to be small lions, but they bore spots.
Were they a natural hybrid of leopard and lion? A new species? A subsequent expedition found nothing, and no one’s seen one since.
Henry Darger
When he died in 1973, Chicago janitor Henry Darger left his own monument: a 10-volume novel entitled The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion.
Discovered by his landlords, the fantasy manuscript, illustrated with hundreds of drawings and watercolor paintings, totaled 15,145 single-spaced typed pages. It may be the longest novel ever written.
The Mutilated Chessboard
Take an ordinary chessboard and cut off two diagonally opposite corners. Now: Is it possible to tile the remaining 62 squares with 31 dominoes?
This calls for inspiration rather than trial and error. Most people see the solution immediately or not at all.
Don’t Be Cruel
Elvis Presley had an eighth-degree black belt in karate.
In a Word
unasinous
adj. equally stupid
“Vegetable Fungus”
At the beginning of the present century Sir Joseph Banks, of London, had a cask of wine which was too sweet for immediate use, and it was placed in the cellar to become mellowed by age. At the end of three years he directed his butler to ascertain the condition of the wine, when, on attempting to open the cellar door, he could not effect it in consequence of some powerful resistance. The door was cut down, and the cellar was found completely filled with a firm fungus vegetable production — so firm that it was necessary to use an ax for its removal. This had grown from and had been nourished by the decomposed particles of the wine. The cask was empty and touched the ceiling, where it was supported by the surface of the fungus.
— Frank H. Stauffer, The Queer, the Quaint and the Quizzical, 1882
Euler’s Identity
You know these numbers:
On the surface they appear unrelated. e is the base of natural logarithms, i is imaginary, π concerns circles. But, amazingly:
Harvard mathematician Benjamin Peirce told a class, “It is absolutely paradoxical; we cannot understand it, and we don’t know what it means, but we have proved it, and therefore we know it must be the truth.”
Renaissance Surrealism
There’s no mistaking a portrait by Giuseppe Arcimboldo — the Milanese painter represented his subjects as masses of flowers, vegetables, fruits, and fish. These personifications of the four seasons were composed between 1563 and 1573.
