Roll Call

Unusual names of real people, collected by author John Train:

  • A.A.A. D’Artagnan Umslopagaas Dynamite Macaulay
  • Arizona Zipper
  • Atomic Zagnut Adams
  • Badman Trouble
  • Bumpus McPhumpus Angeledes
  • Cardiac Arrest da Silva
  • Cashmere Tango Obedience
  • Charles Everybodytalksabout, Jr.
  • C. Sharp Minor
  • Demetrius Toodles
  • Dennis Elbow
  • E. Pluribus Eubanks
  • Fortunate Tarte
  • Henry Will Burst
  • Pepsi Cola Atom-Bomb Washington
  • Marmalade P. Vestibule
  • Rebecca Hammering Bang
  • Roosevelt Cabbagestalk
  • Sara Struggles Nicely
  • Serious Misconduct
  • Trailing Arbutus Vines
  • Warren Peace
  • Zip A-Dee-Doo Daub

Twins: Anarchy and Utopia; A.C. and D.C.; Bigamy and Larceny; Pete and Repeat

Further odd names, collected from various sources.

| Language

Remote Romance

The American Medical Weekly carried an eye-opening story in 1874 — a woman impregnated by a bullet:

On the 12th day of May, 1863, the battle of R. was fought. […] Our men were fighting nobly, but pressed by superior numbers, had gradually fallen back to within one hundred and fifty yards of the house. My position being near my regiment, suddenly I beheld a noble, gallant young friend staggering closer, and then fall to the earth. In the same moment a piercing scream from the house reached my ear! I was soon by the side of the young man, and, upon examination, found a compound fracture, with extensive comminution of the left tibia; the ball having ricochetted from these parts, and, in its onward flight, passed through the scrotum, carrying away the left testicle. Scarcely had I finished dressing the wounds of this poor fellow, when the estimable matron came running to me in the greatest distress, begging me to go to one of her daughters, who, she informed me, had been badly wounded a few minutes before. Hastening to the house, I found that the eldest of the young ladies had indeed received a most serious wound. A minnie ball had penetrated the left abdominal parietes, about midway between the umbilicus and anterior spinal process of the ilium, and was lost in the abdominal cavity, leaving a ragged wound behind. Believing there was little or no hope of her recovery, I had only time to prescribe an anodyne, when our army fell back, leaving both field and village in the hands of the enemy. […] About six months after her recovery, the movements of our army brought me again to the village of R., and I was again sent for to see the young lady. She appeared in excellent health and spirits, but her abdomen had become enormously enlarged, so much so as to resemble pregnancy at the seventh or eighth month. Indeed, had I not known the family and the facts of the abdominal wound, I should have so pronounced the case. Under the above circumstances, I failed to give a positive diagnosis, determining to keep the case under surveillance. […] Just two hundred and seventy-eight days from the date of the receipt of the wound by the minnie ball, I delivered this same young lady of a fine boy, weighing eight pounds. […] About three weeks from the date of this remarkable birth, I was called to see the child, the grandmother insisting there was ‘something wrong about the genitals.’ Examination revealed an enlarged, swollen, sensitive scrotum, containing on the right side a hard, roughened substance, evidently foreign. I decided upon operating for its removal at once, and in so doing, extracted from the scrotum a minnie ball, mashed and battered as if it had met in its flight some hard, unyielding substance.

A later issue revealed that this had been a joke:

DR. L.G. CAPERS, of Vicksburg, Miss., disclaims responsibility for the truth of that remarkable case of impregnation by a minnie ball, as reported in No. 19 of this Journal. He tells the story as it was told to him. He does not say it is untrue, but is disposed to appositely remember the truth of the old adage, that ‘accidents may happen in the best regulated families.’ The joke is, that the Doctor reported the case without any signature, but as the editor is indisposed to be made the victim of canards, and recognized the writing sent, he was unwilling to deprive the author of the contemplated fun, and allowed him to enjoy even more of this than was anticipated. The readers have enjoyed the story much, but not enough ‘to cut capers’ after reading it.

Capers is Legrand G. Capers, a physician who’d served as a surgeon in the Confederate army — and evidently a practical joker.

01/04/2024 UPDATE: Wow, a similar incident involving a knife wound has been verified. (Thanks, Sally.)

| Hoaxes

Twice True

Each of these sums is valid in two ways, once when the words at taken at their face value and again when each letter is interpreted as a particular digit:

   THREE    79322           ONE       483       ZERO   4206      TRECE  69858
    NINE     6562          FIVE      7293        SEI    827      CINCO  57354
     TEN      726           TEN       138      SETTE  82112       OCHO   4504
FOURTEEN 40837226        ELEVEN    363938       OTTO   6116       ----   ----
 FIFTEEN  4547226      NINETEEN  82831338       NOVE   9652     QUINCE 127358
 -------  -------     FORTYFIVE 745107293       ----   ----       ONCE   4358
FIFTYONE 45471062     --------- ---------     TRENTA 102913
                      NINETYONE 828310483

All are from the Journal of Recreational Mathematics, collected by Leonard Gordon in “Doubly-True Alphametics,” Word Ways 27:1 [February 1994], 10-12. More alphametics.

| Language · Science & Math

Humiliation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HumiliationValerianusHolbein.jpg

Captured at the Battle of Edessa, the Roman emperor Valerian spent the rest of his life as a footstool, used by the Sassanian emperor Shapur I to mount his horse.

The story may be only propaganda, but it inspired Hans Holbein the Younger to compose this sketch in 1521.

| Art · History

Small World

tinyurl.com/FEmodel

Physicist Bruce Sherwood has created a 3-D computer model of a flat earth so that conspiracy theorists can examine the implications of their own theory.

For example, if Antarctica is a mountain range surrounding a flat disk, what should we expect to see in the sky? “Walk inside the model and look up,” Sherwood told philosopher Lee McIntyre. “If you’re standing at the North Pole, then Polaris should be directly overhead. Fair enough. But if you’re standing at the ‘edge of the Earth’ — and Polaris is only a few thousand miles overhead — shouldn’t you at best see it at an angle? But if you’re actually in Antarctica, you won’t be able to see it at all. Their model is inconsistent with physical observation. And they can see that for themselves.”

(Bruce Sherwood, “A Flat Earth?”, via Lee McIntyre, et al., How to Talk to a Science Denier, 2021.)

| Science & Math

Practical Philosophy

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Portret_van_Immanuel_Kant_Emanuel_Kant_(titel_op_object),_RP-P-2015-26-1764.jpg

Immanuel Kant held up his stockings using suspenders of his own devising. From his friend Ehregott Wasianski:

On this occasion, whilst illustrating Kant’s notions of the animal economy, it may be as well to add one other particular, which is, that for fear of obstructing the circulation of the blood, he never would wear garters; yet, as he found it difficult to keep up his stockings without them, he had invented for himself a most elaborate substitute, which I shall describe. In a little pocket, somewhat smaller than a watch-pocket, but occupying pretty nearly the same situation as a watch-pocket on each thigh, there was placed a small box, something like a watch-case, but smaller; into this box was introduced a watch-spring in a wheel, round about which wheel was wound an elastic cord, for regulating the force of which there was a separate contrivance. To the two ends of this cord were attached hooks, which hooks were carried through a small aperture in the pockets, and so passing down the inner and the outer side of the thigh, caught hold of two loops which were fixed on the off side and the near side of each stocking.

“As might be expected, so complex an apparatus was liable, like the Ptolemaic system of the heavens, to occasional derangements; however, by good luck, I was able to apply an easy remedy to these disorders which sometimes threatened to disturb the comfort, and even the serenity, of the great man.”

(Ehregott Andreas Wasianski, Immanuel Kant in seinen letzten Lebensjahren, 1804, via Thomas De Quincey, “The Last Days of Immanuel Kant,” 1827.)

| History · Literature · Technology

Two for One

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lupita_Tovar_and_Carlos_Villar%C3%ADas_in_Dracula_(1931_spanish_film).jpg

Tod Browning’s iconic 1931 production of Dracula actually resulted in two films. Bela Lugosi shot his scenes during the day, and at night a Spanish-speaking cast performed a separate version, creating a parallel film for the foreign market.

“We shot all night long till next morning because we used exactly the same sets,” actor Lupita Tovar told NPR. “As a matter of fact, we had the same marks the English cast got, we stepped in the same place.”

The Spanish version has a somewhat different plot, with Renfield visiting Castle Dracula at the start. It opened in Havana in March 1931 and in Los Angeles two months later, but its box-office performance was disappointing and it was largely forgotten until a copy was discovered in a New Jersey warehouse in the 1970s. Since then it’s won a new life on DVD.

(Thanks, Abi.)

| Entertainment

Bad News

https://books.google.com/books?id=bfBaAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA2

In Three Men in a Boat (1889), the narrator reads a medical textbook and is stricken with the certainty that he has every condition described there:

I came to typhoid fever — read the symptoms — discovered that I had typhoid fever, must have had it for months without knowing it — wondered what else I had got; turned up St. Vitus’s Dance — found, as I expected, that I had that too … I plodded conscientiously through the twenty-six letters, and the only malady I could conclude I had not got was housemaid’s knee.

This is a recognized phenomenon. In 1908, Boston neurologist George Lincoln Walton reported:

Medical instructors are continually consulted by students who fear that they have the diseases they are studying. The knowledge that pneumonia produces pain in a certain spot leads to a concentration of attention upon that region which causes any sensation there to give alarm. The mere knowledge of the location of the appendix transforms the most harmless sensations in that region into symptoms of serious menace.

In 2004 University of Toronto psychiatrist Brian Hodges noted that “medical students’ disease” is said to afflict 70 to 80 percent of students, often invading their dreams. Walton wrote, “The sensible student learns to quiet these fears, but the victim of ‘hypos’ returns again and again for examination, and perhaps finally reaches the point of imparting, instead of obtaining, information, like the patient in a recent anecdote from the Youth’s Companion:”

It seems that a man who was constantly changing physicians at last called in a young doctor who was just beginning his practice.

‘I lose my breath when I climb a hill or a steep flight of stairs,’ said the patient. ‘If I hurry, I often get a sharp pain in my side. Those are the symptoms of a serious heart trouble.’

‘Not necessarily, sir,’ began the physician, but he was interrupted.

‘I beg your pardon!’ said the patient irritably. ‘It isn’t for a young physician like you to disagree with an old and experienced invalid like me, sir!’

| Oddities

Tally Sticks

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Medieval_tally_sticks.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

Until 1826, the British Royal Treasury recognized notched sticks as proof of payment. In a practice that had begun in medieval times, a debt would be recorded on a “tally stick,” and then the stick would be split lengthwise, with the shorter portion, the “foil,” given to the debtor and the longer portion, the “stock,” held by the creditor. Because the two halves of the stick could be matched together, this gave both parties a record of the deal, and the valuable stock could then be traded on a secondary market.

Accumulated tally sticks might have given us a valuable record of British monetary transactions, but unfortunately most of them have been lost. In 1834, after the advent of paper ledgers, it was decided to burn 600 years of accumulated tally sticks in a coal-fired stove in the House of Lords. A chimney fire resulted, destroying most of the Palace of Westminster.

| History · Society

In a Word

passeggiata
n. a leisurely walk

In the ancient world, distances were sometimes measured by pacing. Specialists known as bematists were employed for this purpose in both Egypt and Greece, and their accuracy could be startling: In his Naturalis Historia, Pliny the Elder notes that two bematists employed by Alexander the Great had measured the distance from Hecatompylos to Alexandria Areion on the Silk Road at 851 kilometers. The actual distance is 855 kilometers, a deviation of just 0.4 percent. In general, according to Pliny’s records, Alexander’s bematists showed a median deviation of just 2.8 percent from the true distances; a separate account by Strabo shows a median deviation of only 1.9 percent.

This accuracy suggests that the bematists may have been using an early odometer, such as one described by Heron of Alexandria, though the records don’t mention this.

12/30/2023 UPDATE: Reader Charlotte Fare has made a data visualization. (Thanks, Charlotte.)

| History · Language · Science & Math