A puzzle from 1796. “This curious inscription is humbly dedicated to the penetrating geniuses of Oxford, Cambridge, Eton, and the learned Society of Antiquaries.” Can you decipher it?
Author: Greg Ross
Unquote
“If there is ever another war in Europe, it will come out of some damned silly thing in the Balkans.” — Otto von Bismarck, 1898
“Crossing the Thames in a Butcher’s Tray”
July 5, 1766. At eight o’clock in the evening, a man who had laid a wager to cross the Thames in a butcher’s tray, set out in the same from Somerset Stairs, and reached the Surrey shore with great ease, using nothing but his hands. He had on a cork jacket, in case of any accident. It was said 1400l. was depending on this affair; and upwards of seventy boats full of spectators were present.
— Annual Register, 1766
Relax
On March 23, 1989, a 1,000-foot asteroid missed the Earth by 400,000 miles.
If it had passed 6 hours earlier it would have struck us, creating the largest explosion in recorded history.
Math Notes
42 = 24
Sorry, Wrong Fugitive
In December 1974, Australian police arrested a man they believed was Lord Lucan, a British peer who had fled a murder investigation in London.
They were mistaken. It wasn’t Lord Lucan — it was British MP John Stonehouse, who had faked his suicide a month earlier.
Backstabbed
If you’re the trusting sort, you might be pleased to carry this recommendation from Cardinal Richelieu to the French ambassador at Rome.
You wouldn’t last long, though. Rather than scan each line straight across, the ambassador would fold the page in half and read the truth about you in the left column.
(From Charles Bombaugh, Gleanings From the Harvest-Fields of Literature, 1860)
Happy Landings
On March 23, 1944, RAF tail gunner Nick Alkemade was over Berlin when a Luftwaffe attack set his bomber ablaze.
His parachute was in the flaming cabin, so he resigned himself to a quick death and jumped without it.
Alkemade fell head down for 18,000 feet, trying to relax and thinking of death. But after the impact he found himself looking up at the stars through a canopy of pines. The trees and snow had apparently slowed his fall, and he escaped with only a sprained leg.
The Gestapo refused to believe his story until they found his burned parachute at the crash site.
Highway Robbery
A stranger called at a shoe store and bought a pair of boots costing six dollars, in payment for which he tendered a twenty-dollar bill. The shoemaker could not change the note and accordingly sent his boy across the street to a tailor’s shop and procured small bills for it, from which he gave the customer his change of fourteen dollars. The stranger then disappeared, when it was discovered that the twenty-dollar note was counterfeit, and of course the shoemaker had to make it good to the tailor. Now the question is, how much did the shoemaker lose?
— H.E. Licks, Recreations in Mathematics, 1917
In a Word
infandous
adj. too horrible to mention