pilcrow
n. the paragraph sign
Author: Greg Ross
Professional Monster
Issei Sagawa took an unlikely path to fame — after killing and cannibalizing a Dutch woman in Paris in 1981, he wrote a fictionalized account of the crime, In the Mist, that sold 200,000 copies in his native Japan:
There is a loud sound and her body falls from the chair onto the floor. It is like she is watching me. I see her cheeks, her eyes, her nose and mouth, the blood pouring from her head. I try to talk to her, but she no longer answers. There is blood all over the floor. I try to wipe it up, but I realize I cannot stop the flow of blood from her head. It is very quiet here. There is only the silence of death.
Since his release from a Japanese psychiatric hospital in 1985, Sagawa has parlayed his reputation into a ghoulish industry. He has produced four novels, written a weekly column for a Japanese tabloid, appeared on the cover of a gourmet magazine, and is a regular subject of television documentaries. His crime inspired the Rolling Stones’ song “Too Much Blood.”
“The public has made me the godfather of cannibalism, and I am happy about that,” he said. “I will always look at the world through the eyes of a cannibal.”
Pest Control
Besieged by cotton worms in 1870, Louisiana planter Auguste Le Blanc invented the 19-century equivalent of a bug zapper. The worms transform into noctural moths in order to reproduce, so Le Blanc suspended an eight-foot ring of gasoline burners from the roof of a horse-drawn cart that he drove through his fields at night, following lanes that he had laid out for this purpose.
The roof may serve not only to protect the burners from rain, but also as a means of destroying the moths, for I sometimes coat the underside of the roof with a paint, preferably white paint, made without any ‘drying’ in it, that is to say, made with oil alone, so as to present a sticky surface. When the machine is in use, the moths, attracted and blinded by the light, will either be destroyed by the flame, or else will come in contact with and adhere to the sticky coating of paint.
I don’t know how well it worked, but he deserves credit for his ingenuity. “A machine of eight burners will protect from forty-five to fifty acres of cotton, while the cheapness of the fluid employed for burning purposes renders the expense trifling in comparison with the benefits derived.”
Cold Water
There is also another matter to be mentioned for which both present and future ages have good reason to bless the name of Jonas Hanway. He was the first person who had the courage to hold an umbrella over his head in walking along the streets of London. ‘The eighteenth century,’ writes Chambers, ‘was half elapsed before the umbrella had even begun to be used in England. General Wolfe, writing from Paris in 1752, remarks: “The people here use umbrellas in hot weather to defend them from the sun, and something of the same kind to save them from the snow and the rain. I wonder that a practice so useful is not introduced in England.” Just about that time, however, a gentleman did exercise the moral courage to use an umbrella in the streets of London. He was the noted Jonas Hanway, then newly returned form Persia, and in delicate health, by which, of course, his using such a convenience was justified both to himself and to the public. “A parapluie,” we are told, defended Mr. Hanway’s face and wig. For a time no other than dainty beings, then called “Macaronies,” ventured to carry an umbrella; and any one doing so was sure to be hailed by the mob as a “mincing Frenchman.” One John Macdonald, a footman, who has favored the public with his memoirs, found as late as 1770 that, on appearing with a fine silk umbrella which he had brought from Spain, he was saluted with the cry of “Frenchman, why don’t you get a coach?”‘
— “Jonas Hanway, the Philanthropist,” Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly, April 1884
Roll Call
In 1938, University of North Carolina folklorist Arthur Palmer Hudson published a collection of unusual African-American names, most gathered through personal interviews but others “unimpeachably attested” by state bureaus of vital statistics:
- Comer Mercantile Company
- Castor Oil
- Morphine
- Dr. Root Beer
- Oleomargarine
- Artificial Flowers
- Elevator
- Dill Pickle
- League of Nations
- Toledo Ohio
- Positive Wasserman (after a hospital wrist tag)
- Jesus Hoover Christ (“the family was a beneficiary of the Red Cross when Hoover was director”)
- Jesse James Outlaw
- James All Virtuous
- Sandy Alexander Soap Fish and Tobacco Box
- Susan Anna Banana Green Doosenberry Watson
- Rosa Belle Locust Hill North Carolina Beauty Spot Evans
- Frank Harrison President of the United States Eats His Lasses Candy and Swings on Every Gate Williams
- Pneumonia and Neuralgia (twins)
- Flat Foot Floogie
- State Normal and Industrial College (“Snic”)
- No Parking
- Lake Erie Banks
- Cleopatra Blue
In the 1850s, a Stanly County, N.C., slave was named Sunday May Ninth “to guarantee the bearer’s remembrance of his birthday.” “This name proved useful to the ex-slave in establishing his status with reference to a monetary claim.”
Hudson seems to have been enchanted by unusual names generally — among the UNC alumni he found a white student named Shively Dewilder Accus Baccus Dulcido.
(Arthur Palmer Hudson, “Some Curious Negro Names,” Southern Folklore Quarterly 2:4, December 1938, pp. 179-193.)
Ends and Means
Prove that if each point in the plane is colored red, yellow, or blue, a unit segment must exist whose endpoints are the same color.
A Latin Spoonerism
Arthur Schopenhauer was so ill-tempered that he once assaulted an elderly seamstress for talking outside his door.
A court ordered him to pay her 15 thalers every quarter for the rest of her life.
When she finally passed away 20 years later, he wrote in his account book Obit anus, abit onus — Latin for “The old woman dies, the burden is lifted.”
Eh?
As the Battle of Trafalgar commenced, Horatio Nelson famously signalled the English fleet that “England expects that every man will do his duty.”
Actually that message arose only due to a last-minute conference on the flagship, as signal officer John Pasco recalled after the battle:
His Lordship came to me on the poop, and after ordering certain signals to be made, about a quarter to noon, he said, ‘Mr. Pasco, I wish to say to the fleet, ENGLAND CONFIDES THAT EVERY MAN WILL DO HIS DUTY,’ and he added, ‘You must be quick, for I have one more to make which is for close action.’ I replied, ‘If your Lordship will permit me to substitute the word expects for confides, the signal will soon be completed, because the word expects is in the vocabulary, and confides must be spelt.’ His Lordship replied, in haste, and with seeming satisfaction, ‘That will do, Pasco, make it directly.’
The days of such clear language are over — in an August 1939 letter to the London Times, A.P. Herbert wrote:
Alas, the strong silent Services have been corrupted, too. If Nelson had to repeat his famous signal today it would probably run thus:–
England anticipates that as regards the current emergency personnel will face up to the issue and exercise appropriately the functions allocated to their respective occupation-groups.
A Six-Legged Hiawatha
“Tribes of the Scale Wings,” an appallingly terrible poem by Edward Newman, 1857:
Let us take a stroll, my Laura,
Down Farm Lane and to the sedge pond,
Where thy father often fishes
For the pretty water beetles,
Grapii and branchiatus,
Hubneri and marginalis,
Agilis and punctulatus,
Ater, Sturmii and fusous,
Pretty Colymbetes fuscus,
That my Laura once caught flying.
Thence we’ll turn to rural Burnt Ash.
Haply we may meet with Stainton,
With his ardent class around him.
As we walk I’ll try and teach thee
Something more about the Scale Wings.
Lepidoptera, or Scale Wings,
Are the butterflies and night moths,
And we know them by the scaled wings,
And the mouth, so like a watch spring,
Coiled up underneath their faces …
[this goes on for nine pages]
… But their structure, so abnormal,
Serves to indicate the sequence
Of the Tipulæ or Craneflies,
Which we must ere long consider.
This discourse on Scale Wings ended,
I will pick these purple vetches,
Purple vetches, Vicia cracca,
And I’ll twine them in a chaplet,
And the Queen of Scale Wings crown thee.
Newman’s collection The Insect Hunters contains corresponding odes to the Diptera, Hymenoptera, Coleoptera, Stegoptera, Neuroptera, Hemiptera, and Orthoptera, including an affectionate nod to earwigs.
Grunt Work
During World War I, one of the worst jobs in the French army was that of wirecutter, the scout deputed to cut through the wire entanglements set up by the enemy, often unprotected in exposed positions. To improve his chances, the army introduced this one-man tank. From Popular Science Monthly, May 1917:
The device is made to resemble a cannon which it is hoped will be considered by the enemy to be broken and discarded. It is provided with slits and larger openings through which the scout may see and get air. The wheels, though apparently rusty and old, are smooth-running and noiseless, and the legs of the scout, moving cautiously at the rate of perhaps one-half inch per minute during critical times, resemble the drooping muzzle of the gun — or it is hoped that they will.
“It is also considered among the possibilities that the device will be of service when it is necessary for a bold and death-defying dash to be made through showers of shrapnel into the teeth of the foe. But this is problematical since the device is not made for rapidity of movement.”