Plea

https://pixabay.com/photos/eiffel-tower-under-construction-1166143/

In 1887, as the Eiffel Tower began to take shape, a “Committee of Three Hundred” led by architect Charles Garnier published a protest in Le Temps:

Honored compatriot, we come, writers, painters, sculptors, architects, passionate lovers of the beauty of Paris — a beauty until now unspoiled — to protest with all our might, with all our outrage, in the name of slighted French taste, in the name of threatened French art and history, against the erection, in the heart of our capital, of the useless and monstrous Eiffel Tower.

Are we going to allow all this beauty and tradition to be profaned? Is Paris now to be associated with the grotesque and mercantile imagination of a machine builder, to be defaced and disgraced? Even the commercial Americans would not want this Eiffel Tower which is, without any doubt, a dishonor to Paris. We all know this, everyone says it, everyone is deeply troubled by it. We, the Committee, are but a faint echo of universal sentiment, which is so legitimately outraged. When foreign visitors come to our universal exposition, they will cry out in astonishment, ‘What!? Is this the atrocity that the French present to us as the representative of their vaunted national taste?’ And they will be right to laugh at us, because the Paris of the sublime Gothic, the Paris of Jean Goujon, of Germain Pilon, Puget, Rude, Barye, etc. will have become the Paris of Monsieur Eiffel.

Listen to our plea! Imagine now a ridiculous tall tower dominating Paris like a gigantic black factory smokestack, crushing with its barbaric mass Notre Dame, Sainte Chapelle, the Tour Saint-Jacques, the Louvre, the dome of Les Invalides, the Arc de Triomphe, all our humiliated monuments, all our dwarfed architecture, which will be annihilated by Eiffel’s hideous fantasy. For twenty years, over the city of Paris still vibrant with the genius of so many centuries, we shall see, spreading out like a blot of ink, the shadow of this disgusting column of bolted tin.

Guy de Maupassant called the tower “this high and skinny pyramid of iron ladders, this giant ungainly skeleton upon a base that looks built to carry a colossal monument of Cyclops, but which just peters out into a ridiculous thin shape like a factory chimney.” It was said that he ate his lunch in the tower’s restaurant each day because it was the one spot in Paris from which the rising structure wasn’t visible.

| History

Unquote

“The difference between America and England is that Americans think 100 years is a long time, while the English think 100 miles is a long way.” –Earle Hitchner

| Quotations

Podcast Episode 343: Operation Cowboy

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lipicanec_PRMO.jpg

In April 1945, a group of American soldiers learned that hundreds of Lipizzaner horses were being held on a farm in western Czechoslovakia — and set out to rescue them before the Red Army could reach them. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll tell the story of Operation Cowboy, one of the strangest episodes of World War II.

We’ll also learn about an NBA brawl and puzzle over a technology’s link to cancer deaths.

See full show notes …

| History · Podcast

Memorial

https://www.flickr.com/photos/socialcriteria/34748537233/
Images: Flickr, Wikimedia Commons

The gravestone of urban planner Ildefons Cerdà has a unique design: It commemorates the Eixample, the distinctive “extension” of Barcelona that Cerdà designed in the 19th century.

| Art · Death

Amplitude

This passage, from E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web, is often cited as a masterpiece of rhythm — the length of the phrases diminishes with the motion of the swing:

Mr. Zuckerman had the best swing in the county. It was a single long piece of heavy rope tied over the north doorway. At the bottom end of the rope was a fat knot to sit on. It was arranged so that you could swing without being pushed. You climbed a ladder into the hayloft. Then, holding the rope, you stood at the edge and looked down, and were scared and dizzy. Then you straddled the knot, so that it served as a seat. Then you got up all your nerve, took a deep breath, and jumped. For a second you seemed to be falling to the barn floor far below, but then suddenly the rope would begin to catch you, and you would sail through the barn door going a mile a minute, with the wind whistling in your eyes and ears and hair. Then you would zoom upward into the sky, and look up at the clouds, and the rope would twist and you would twist and turn with the rope. Then you would drop down, down, down out of the sky and come sailing back into the barn almost into the hayloft, then sail out again (not quite so far this time), then in again (not quite so high), then out again, then in again, then out, then in; and then you’d jump off and fall down let somebody else try it.

“All that I hope to say in books, all that I ever hope to say, is that I love the world,” White wrote. Though Eudora Welty called Charlotte’s Web “just about perfect,” White never revealed his reason for creating it. “I haven’t told why I wrote the book, but I haven’t told you why I sneeze, either,” he wrote to his editor. “A book is a sneeze.”

| Language · Literature

Match Point

A problem from the Leningrad Mathematical Olympiad: A and B take turns removing matches from a pile. The pile starts with 500 matches, A goes first, and the player who takes the last match wins. The catch is that the quantity that each player withdraws on a given turn must be a power of 2. Does either player have a winning strategy?

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

Riddles

From John Winter Jones’ Riddles, Charades, and Conundrums, 1822:

What is that which a coach always goes with, cannot go without, and yet is of no use to the coach?

Noise.

***

From Routledge’s Every Boy’s Annual, 1864:

Why is O the noisiest of the vowels?

Because all the rest are inaudible (in audible).

***

From Mark Bryant’s Riddles: Ancient & Modern, 1983:

What is big at the bottom, little at the top, and has ears?

A mountain (it has mountaineers!).

| Puzzles

The Nightingale Monument

https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/mo2i8k/the_tomb_of_lady_elizabeth_nightingale_who_died/

Elizabeth Nightingale died of shock at a violent stroke of lightning following the premature birth of her daughter in 1731. In his will, her son ordered the erection of this monument, which was created by Louis Francois Roubiliac and stands in Westminster Abbey. Elizabeth is supported by her husband, who tries in horror to ward off the stroke of death. Washington Irving called it “among the most renowned achievements of modern art.”

The Abbey’s website says, “The idea for this image may have come from a dream that Elizabeth’s brother in law (the Earl of Huntingdon) had experienced when a skeleton had appeared at the foot of his bed, which then crept up under the bedclothes between husband and wife. … It is said that one night a robber broke into the Church but was so horrified at seeing the figure of Death in the moonlight that he dropped his crowbar and fled in terror. The crowbar was displayed for many years beside the monument but it no longer remains.”

| Art · Death

Relative

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Albert_Einstein_photo_1920.jpg

During an eclipse in 1919, Sir Arthur Eddington confirmed Albert Einstein’s prediction of the gravitational bending of light rays, upholding the general theory of relativity. That Christmas, Einstein wrote to his friend Heinrich Zangger in Zurich:

“With fame I become more and more stupid, which, of course, is a very common phenomenon. There is far too great a disproportion between what one is and what others think one is, or at least what they say they think one is. But one has to take it all with good humor.”

(From Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffmann, eds., Albert Einstein, the Human Side: New Glimpses From His Archives, 1979.)

| Quotations · Science & Math · Society