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A dictionary of thieves’ slang, from Life in Sing Sing, by “Number 1500,” 1904:

Are you next?: Do you understand? Be wise
Crushing the jungle: Escaping from prison
Cracking the jug: Forcing an entrance into a bank
Busting the tag on a rattler: Breaking the seal on a freight car
Busting the bulls at the big show: Fighting with the police at the circus
Banging supers at the red wagon: Stealing watches at the ticket wagon
Hoisting a slab of stones: Stealing a tray of diamonds
He got whipped back to the Irish club house: He was remanded to the police station
Hitting the pipe at a hop-joint: Smoking opium in an opium joint
He busted the collar’s smeller: He broke the officer’s nose
The stall got his slats kicked in: The thief had his ribs broken
The gun slammed a rod to his nut: The thief put a pistol to his head
He pigged with the darb: He absconded with the money
The yeg men blew the gopher: The safe crackers forced open the doors of the safe with explosives

I went to the coast with a mob of paper-layers, but graft was on the fritzer. I blew out and rung in with a couple of penny-weighters. A Tommy and his papa. Everything was rosy, the cush was coming strong and I was patting this ginny on the hump, but I was a sooner. The Tommy got a swelled head and we split for all. I did the grand to Chicago and filled in with a yeg mob. We got a country jug on our first touch, but the box wasn’t heavy enough for five. They had a plant further on. But we had to wait till one of the mob went for some soup; as I had plenty of the darb I blew away and beat it back to Chic, and framed in with a couple of guns who were working east on the rattlers. We got the stuff all right. Well, I’m off to the joint to smoke up, so-so.

“I went to California with others to pass worthless checks. There wasn’t any money in it, so I left them and went with two expert thieves who make it a practice to rob jewelers, a woman and her lover. Everything looked bright. I was obtaining money easily and I was congratulating myself on my good fortune, but I was too hasty. This woman got independent and we parted for good. I purchased a first-class ticket to Chicago and met a gang of safe burglars whom I joined. Our first theft was the burglary of a safe in a suburban bank. The amount of money obtained was insufficient to repay five men for their trouble. They had in view another place to rob, but we had to wait while one of the men went for some nitroglycerine. As I had plenty of money, I parted from them and returned to Chicago. There I met two pickpockets who were going east on the cars with the intention of plying their trade. We stole a lot of money. And now I’m off to the opium den to smoke some opium. Good-by.”

| Language

The President’s Mystery

Franklin Roosevelt was a voracious reader of crime novels. “Hundreds are published every year, but even in the good ones, there is a sameness,” he complained over lunch to Liberty Magazine editor Fulton Oursler one day in 1935. “Someone finds the corpse, and then the detective tracks down the murderer.”

Oursler asked him whether he had any better ideas. He did: “How can a man disappear with five million dollars of his own money in negotiable form and not be traced?” Roosevelt said he had carried that question in his mind for years but had not solved it himself.

The editor knew a marketable idea when he heard one, and he recruited six of the period’s top mystery writers to work on a chain novel that appeared serially in the magazine beginning that November. (The writers were Rupert Hughes, Samuel Hopkins Adams, Anthony Abbott, Rita Weiman, S.S. Van Dine, and John Erskine.)

A year later the story was made into a film, above, with the memorable credit “Story Conceived by Franklin D. Roosevelt.” FDR remains the only president to earn a film-writing credit while in office.

| Entertainment · Literature

Freeze!

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Here’s a lost art: The tableau vivant, or “living picture,” was a form of popular entertainment in which the actors took up poses but did not speak or move. (This one presents the original cast of Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Sleeping Beauty.)

In our era of ubiquitous video it’s hard to remember how important this was — it formed a sort of living bridge between painting and the stage, representing dramatic moments in three dimensions that could be studied and admired as part of the real world. Sometimes stories were told through a series of connected tableaux, a technique that would lead eventually to modern storyboards and comic strips.

The form also inspired a curious practice: Censorship laws in Britain and the United States forbade actresses to move onstage when they were unclothed, so exhibitors began to present nude women in tableaux vivants, imitating works of classical art. The presenters could claim that this was edifying, the audiences got their erotic entertainment, and the production was allowed to go on — so long as the women didn’t move.

| Art

The Chatsworth Violin

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

Visitors to Chatsworth House in Derbyshire are struck at the illusion of a violin hanging on a door in the State Music Room. The peg is real, but the violin is not — it’s a very convincing trompe l’oeil painting executed by the Dutch artist Jan van der Vaardt.

It’s thought to have been painted around 1723. In his Anecdotes of Painting (1762), Horace Walpole writes, “In old Devonshire-house in Piccadilly, he painted a violin against a door that deceived every body. When the house was burned, this piece was preserved, and is now at Chatsworth.”

| Art

Tilt

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As early as the 1st century B.C., the Chinese text Zhou Bi Suan Jing reflected the reasoning of the Pythagorean theorem, showing how to find the hypotenuse of the 3-4-5 triangle. Arrange four 3×4 rectangles around a unit square, as shown, producing a 7×7 square. The diagonals of the four rectangles produce a tilted square. Now, the area of the 7×7 square is 49, and the area of one right triangle with legs 3 and 4 is 6. So the area of the tilted square is 49 – (4 × 6), or 25. This shows that the hypotenuse of each of the right triangles is 5.

In Mathematics and the Aesthetic (2007), Nathalie Sinclair writes, “The Chinese diagram … is the same as one given by the twelfth-century Indian scholar Bhaskara, whose one-word injunction Behold! recorded his sense of awe.”

| Science & Math

Part Two

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

In 1907, two years after Jules Verne’s death, sculptor Albert Roze added a striking monument to Verne’s grave in the cemetery of La Madeleine in Amiens: a sculpture of the author smashing his tombstone, shedding his shroud, and hoisting himself toward the sky.

The work is called Toward Immortality and Eternal Youth, and the face is Verne’s own — Roze used the author’s death mask.

| Death · Literature

Precocious

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John Quincy Adams wrote this letter to his father at age 10, June 2, 1777:

DEAR SIR,–I love to receive letters very well; much better than I love to write them. I make but a poor figure at composition, my head is too fickle, my thoughts are running after birds eggs play and trifles, till I get vexed with myself. Mamma has a troublesome task to keep me steady, and I own I am ashamed of myself. I have but just entered the third volume of Smollett, tho’ I had designed to have got it half through by this time. I have determined this week to be more diligent, as Mr. Thaxter will be absent at Court, and I cannot pursue my other studies. I have Set myself a Stent and determine to read the 3rd volume Half out. If I can but keep my resolution, I will write again at the end of the week and give a better account of myself. I wish, Sir, you would give me some instructions, with regard to my time, and advise me how to proportion my Studies and my Play, in writing, and I will keep them by me, and endeavor to follow them. I am, dear Sir, with a present determination of growing better, yours.

P.S.–Sir, if you will be so good as to favor me with a Blank Book, I will transcribe the most remarkable occurances I meet with in my reading, which will serve to fix them upon my mind.

Five years later, at age 14, he was serving as private secretary to the American minister to Russia.

| History

The Giant of Castelnau

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Anthropologist Georges Vacher de Lapouge turned up a surprise in 1890: While excavating a Bronze Age cemetery at Castelnau, near Montpellier, France, he discovered three apparently human bones of gigantic size. On the left is the “giant’s” femur, or thigh bone; on the right is a tibia, or shin bone. Between them is a normal humerus, or upper arm bone, from the same cemetery. At the bottom is a fragment that may belong to either a femur or a humerus; if it’s the latter then it must have belonged to the same giant. If this is right, then the individual would have stood between 10 and 11 feet tall.

Lapouge published his discovery in La Nature that year. “I think it unnecessary to note that these bones are undeniably human, despite their enormous size,” he wrote. “The volumes of the bones were more than double the normal pieces to which they correspond.”

The specimens were examined by zoologists and paleontologists at the University of Montpellier and passed eventually to pathological anatomist Paul Kiener of the Montpellier School of Medicine; the London Globe noted that “Kieger, who, while admitting that the bones are those of a very tall race, nevertheless finds them abnormal in dimensions and apparently of morbid growth.”

“There has been an old tradition among the peasants of the vicinity that a cavern in the valley was, in olden times, occupied by a giant,” noted Popular Science News. “It would be curious if the discovery of M. Lapouge should show it to be founded on fact.”

Interestingly, the bones of further French giants were reported to have turned up near the same location a few years later. From the Princeton Union, Oct. 11, 1894: “In a prehistoric cemetery recently uncovered at Montpellier, France, while workmen were excavating a waterworks reservoir, human skulls were found measuring 28, 31 and 32 inches in circumference. The bones which were found with the skulls were also of gigantic proportions. These relics were sent to the Paris academy, and a learned ‘savant’ who lectured on the find says that they belonged to a race of men between ten and fifteen feet in height.”

But that seems to be the end of it. Was the whole thing a hoax?

| Oddities

Forgotten Pearls

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Lesser-known maxims from Poor Richard’s Almanac:

  • You may be too cunning for One, but not for All.
  • Who is rich? He that rejoices in his Portion.
  • By diligence and patience, the Mouse bit in two the Cable.
  • To be intimate with a foolish Friend, is like going to Bed to a Razor.
  • A false Friend and a Shadow attend only while the Sun shines.
  • He that goes far to marry, will either deceive or be deceived.
  • ‘Tis easy to see, hard to foresee.
  • Many Foxes grow grey, but few grow good.
  • Paintings and Fightings are best seen at a distance.
  • Fly pleasures, and they’ll follow you.
  • Gifts burst rocks.
  • Historians relate, not so much what is done, as what they would have believed.
  • Let thy vices die before thee.
  • Men differ daily, about things which are subject to sense, is it likely then they should agree about things invisible?
  • What signifies your Patience, if you can’t find it when you want it?

And “Let all Men know thee, but no man know thee thoroughly: Men freely ford that see the shallows.”

| Literature

Enduring Advice

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Image: Flickr

During the Great Depression, Babson College founder Roger Babson commissioned unemployed stonecutters to carve inspiring inscriptions on 25 boulders in Dogtown, an abandoned settlement in Gloucester, Massachusetts:

  • COURAGE
  • IDEAS
  • HELP MOTHER
  • KINDNESS
  • LOYALTY
  • IF WORK STOPS, VALUES DECAY
  • BE ON TIME
  • GET A JOB
  • INDUSTRY
  • INITIATIVE
  • INTEGRITY
  • KEEP OUT OF DEBT
  • SAVE
  • SPIRITUAL POWER
  • STUDY
  • TRUTH
  • WORK
  • BE CLEAN
  • BE TRUE
  • PROSPERITY FOLLOWS SERVICE
  • USE YOUR HEAD
  • IDEALS
  • INTELLIGENCE
  • NEVER TRY/NEVER WIN

Babson did some of the work himself. “Another thing I have been doing, which I hope will be carried on after my death, is the carving of mottoes on the boulders at Dogtown, Gloucester, Massachusetts,” he wrote in 1935. “My family says that I am defacing the boulders and disgracing the family with these inscriptions, but the work gives me a lot of satisfaction, fresh air, exercise and sunshine. I am really trying to write a simple book with words carved in stone instead of printed paper. Besides, when on Dogtown common, I revert to a boyhood which I once enjoyed when driving cows there many years ago.”

The boulders are extant today and can be visited on a hiking trail.

| Oddities