A Portable Dip

https://www.google.com/patents/US3969776

Robert Gildea’s “water lounge,” patented in 1975, brings a pool to your patio:

Swimming pools are not only cumbersome and expensive but require open space where they are located. The ever increasing problem of accidents around such devices is also of concern. While the public has long sought a more convenient and less expensive device for cooling the body in the summer time, no such devices have been introduced. A device much smaller than the traditional swimming pool having the same general beneficial characteristics without the detrimental ones has long been sought.

The answer is to turn the lounge into a basin that can be filled from a hose. An umbrella “prevents the water from rapidly rising in temperature, which makes the water lounge more refreshing.”

| Technology

The Willow Cathedral

http://books.google.com/books?id=BOVZAAAAYAAJ

For a 1793 treatise on the principles of Gothic architecture, Scottish architect Sir James Hall built an example using natural materials:

The wicker structure, as shewn in the frontispiece, was formed according to the plan of the cloister of Westminster Abbey, by a set of posts of ash about three inches in diameter thrust into the ground, with a set of willow rods of about an inch in diameter applied to them, the whole being conducted as already fully described. The construction answers perfectly well in practice, and affords a firm support for the thatch.

“The summit of the roof within is about eight feet high,” he added, “so that a person can walk under it with ease.”

| Art

Memento

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mather_Brown_-_Battle_of_the_Nile.jpg

In 1798 Horatio Nelson’s navy defeated a French fleet off the coast of Egypt. Captain Benjamin Hallowell, who helped to destroy the French flagship L’Orient, sent Nelson a macabre gift:

My Lord,

Herewith I send you a Coffin made of part of L’Orient’s Main mast, that when you are tired of this Life you may be buried in one of your own Trophies — but may that period be far distant, is the sincere wish of your obedient and much obliged servant,

Ben Hallowell

Nelson was indeed buried in it after his death in the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805.

| Death · History

The Lakes of Wada

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lakes_of_Wada.jpg

Find a square island and establish a blue lake on it, bringing blue water within a certain distance of every point on the island’s remaining dry land. Then create a red lake, bringing red water even closer to every point on the remaining land, and a green lake bringing green water still closer.

If you continue this indefinitely, irrigating the island more and more aggressively from each lake in turn, you’ll reach the perplexing state where the three lakes have the same boundary. Japanese mathematician Kunizo Yoneyama offered this example in 1917.

| Science & Math

No Good Deed

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:USS_Sculpin_(SS-191).jpg

In 1939, the U.S. Navy submarine Sculpin helped to rescue the crew of her sister ship Squalus, which had flooded and sunk off the coast of Maine.

After the rescue the Sculpin went on to serve in World War II, where she was sunk in 1943 by a Japanese destroyer. Twenty-one of her crew were captive aboard a Japanese aircraft carrier when the carrier itself was sunk by torpedoes from an American sub.

The attacking sub was the salvaged and repaired Squalus — the same ship that Sculpin had saved four years earlier.

| History · Oddities

“Ain’t Nature Commonplace!”

Now orange-blossoms filigree
The orange tree; but it would be
Remarkable if you should see
Them on some other kind of tree.

A hydroplane pervades the lake
And leaves a wake; but it would make
Observers cry, “For goodness’ sake!”
If it should fail to leave a wake.

The sky is azure overhead;
But spare to call me from my bed
To note its hue, until instead
Of azure, it is brown or red.

Oh, why must poets hail the name
Of Nature with such glad acclaim,
When Nature, whether wild or tame,
Is always pretty much the same!

— Arthur Guiterman

| Poems

Unquote

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Apollo_11_AS11-40-5961HR.jpg

“That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.” — Neil Armstrong, 1969

“Better if he had said something natural like, ‘Jesus, here we are.'” — Edmund Hillary, 1974

| Quotations

Planning Ahead

Excerpts from the diary of 16-year-old Pauline Parker of Christchurch, New Zealand, 1954:

February 13th: Why could not mother die? Dozens of people, thousands of people are dying every day. So why not mother, and father too? Life is hard.
April 25th: Deborah [her 15-year-old friend Juliet Hulme] and I are sticking to one thing. We sink or swim together.
April 28th: Anger against mother boiled up inside me. It is she who is one of the main obstacles in my path. Suddenly a means of ridding myself of the obstacle occurred to me. If she were to die …
April 29th: I did not tell Deborah of my plans for removing mother. The last fate I wish to meet is one in a Borstal. I am trying to think of some way. I want it to appear either a natural or an accidental death.
June 6: We are both stark, staring mad.
June 19th: We practically finished our books today and our main “ike” for the day was to moider mother. This notion is not a new one, but this time it is a definite plan which we intend to carry out. We have worked it out carefully and are both thrilled by the idea. Naturally we feel a trifle nervous, but the pleasure of anticipation is great.
June 20th: We discussed our plans for moidering mother and made them a little clearer. Peculiarly enough, I have no qualms of conscience (or is it peculiar we are so mad?).
June 21st: I rose early and helped mother vigorously this morning. Deborah rang and we decided to use a brick in a stocking rather than a sand-bag. We discussed the moider fully. I feel keyed up as if I was planning a surprise party. Mother has fallen in with everything beautifully and the happy event is to take place tomorrow afternoon. So next time I write in the diary mother will be dead. How odd, yet how pleasing.

On the afternoon of June 22, Parker and Hulme ran into a Christchurch tea shop, crying that Parker’s mother had tripped on a plank and hit her head on a brick. “Mummy’s been hurt terribly,” Parker said. “I think she’s dead.” Police found the body of 45-year-old Honora Mary Parker on a secluded path in nearby Victoria Park. An autopsy found “forty-five discernible injuries, twenty-four being lacerated wounds on the face and head.” Parker quickly confessed under questioning:

Q: Who assaulted your mother?
A: I did.
Q: Why?
A: If you don’t mind I won’t answer that question.
Q: When did you make up your mind to kill your mother?
A: A few days ago …
Q: What did your mother say when you struck her?
A: I would rather not answer that.
Q: How often did you hit her?
A: I don’t know, but a great many times I imagine.

It transpired that Hulme’s father had planned to take Juliet to South Africa, and both girls knew that Mrs. Parker would refuse to let Pauline go with her. “These girls are not incurably insane,” the prosecutor told the jury. “They are incurably bad.” They were sentenced to five years in separate prisons.

| Crime

Higher Learning

Unusual dissertation titles from the University Microforms International dissertation database:

  • “Electrical Measurements on Cuticles of the American Cockroach”
  • “Determinants of Flossing Behavior in the College Age Population”
  • “Classification of Drinking Styles Using the Topographical Components of Beer Drinking”
  • “”More Fun Than Anything” (about cyclopropenium salts)
  • “Creep of Portland Cement Paste”
  • “Garage Sales as Practice: Ideologies of Women, Work and Community in Daily Life (Volumes I and II)”
  • “Finger Painting and Personality Diagnosis”
  • “Communication Use in the Motorcycle Gang”
  • “‘Santa Claus’: A Mime-Opera Based on The Morality by e.e. cummings”
  • “Ritual Drama in American Popular Culture: The Case of Professional Wrestling”
  • “Things That Are Good and Things That Are Chocolate: A Cultural Model of Weight Control as Morality”
  • “Acute Indigestion of Solipeds”
  • “The Making of a Hippie Self”
  • “Jock and Jill: Aspects of Women’s Sports History in America, 1870-1940”
  • “An Adaptive Surfing Apparatus”
  • “The Function of the Couch in Stimulating Altered States of Consciousness in Hypnosis and in Psychoanalysis”
  • “I Am You, You Are Me: A Philosophical Explanation of the Possibility That We Are All the Same Person”
  • “You Can’t Just Plug It In: Integrating the Computer Into the Curriculum”

One dissertation’s acknowledgment page read: “Yes, Mother, I am finally done; and no, Mom, I don’t know what good a doctor’s degree is either if I can’t fix you when you’re ill.”

(From a UMI press release, quoted in The Whole Library Handbook 2, 1995.)

| Oddities