How should a tolerant person regard intolerance? If she tolerates it, then (it would seem) implicitly she accepts it. If she rejects it, then she is herself intolerant.
“The difficulty with toleration is that it seems to be at once necessary and impossible,” writes Bernard Williams. “Toleration, we may say, is required only for the intolerable. That is its basic problem.”
“England’s not a bad country — it’s just a mean, cold, ugly, divided, tired, clapped-out, post-imperial, post-industrial slag heap covered in polystyrene hamburger cartons.” — Margaret Drabble
“Belgium is a country invented by the British to annoy the French.” — Charles de Gaulle
“In India, ‘cold weather’ is merely a conventional phrase and has come into use through the necessity of having some way to distinguish between weather which will melt a brass doorknob and weather which only makes it mushy.” — Mark Twain
“The Americans … have invented so wide a range of pithy and hackneyed phrases that they can carry on an amusing and animated conversation without giving a moment’s reflection to what they are saying and so leave their minds free to consider the more important matters of big business and fornication.” — Somerset Maugham
“In any world menu, Canada must be considered the vichyssoise of nations — it’s cold, half-French, and difficult to stir.” — Stuart Keate
https://youtube.com/watch?v=cW_EB0yBS5c%3Frel%3D0
Swimming in the Nile at age 10, Hadji Ali discovered he could ingest large amounts of water and bring it up again without ill effect. He parlayed this talent into a career as a “regurgitation act” in music halls and carnivals around the world, playing even to Tsar Nicholas II at the Winter Palace in 1914.
The performance above, from Laurel and Hardy’s 1931 Spanish-language film Politiquerias, includes Ali’s famous closing stunt, in which he ingests both water and kerosene and then upchucks them variously onto an open flame.
All of this was received with surprising tolerance by the era’s audiences — Judy Garland named Ali her favorite vaudevillian — but at least one club cut short an engagement when they found it was “killing their supper shows.”
Dr. S.V. Clevenger, in the Alienist and Neurologist for July 1890, describes an infant prodigy, Oscar Moore. Two little colored children were reciting the multiplication table at their home, in a little cabin in Texas, as they had repeatedly done before, and one of them asserted that four times twelve was fifty-eight, whereupon a thirteen months old baby, Oscar Moore, who had never spoken before, corrected the error by exclaiming, ‘Four times twelve are forty-eight!’ There was consternation in that humble home until the family became reconciled to the freak. Oscar was born in Waco, Texas, in 1885; his father is an emancipated slave, his mother is a mulatto. He was born blind; the other senses are unusually acute; his memory is the most remarkable peculiarity. He is intelligent and manifests great inquisitiveness; his memory is not parrot-like. When less than two years of age he would recite all he heard his sister read while conning her lessons. He sings and counts in different languages, has mastered an appalling array of statistics, and is greatly attracted by music. The writer concludes that Oscar is not mentally defective, but may possess extraordinary mental powers.
— Science, June 26, 1891
In 1958, acoustician William MacLean of the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn answered a perennial question: How many guests can attend a cocktail party before it becomes too noisy for conversation? He declared that the answer, for a given room, is
where
N0 = the critical number of guests above which each speaker will try overcome the background noise by raising his voice
K = the average number of guests in each conversational group
a = the average sound absorption coefficient of the room
V = the room’s volume
h = a properly weighted mean free path of a ray of sound
d0 = the conventional minimum distance between speakers
Sm = the minimum signal-to-noise ratio for the listeners
When the critical guest N0 arrives, each speaker is forced to increase his acoustic power in small increments (“I really don’t know what she sees in him.” — “Beg your pardon?” — “I say, I REALLY DON’T KNOW WHY SHE GOES OUT WITH HIM”) until each group is forced to huddle uncomfortably close in order to continue the conversation.
“We see therefore that, once the critical number of guests is exceeded, the party suddenly becomes a loud one,” MacLean concluded, somewhat sadly. “The power of each talker rises exponentially to a practical maximum, after which each reduces his or her talking distance below the conventional distance and then maintains, servo fashion, just the proximity, tête à tête, required to attain a workable signal-to-noise ratio. Thanks to this phenomenon the party, although a loud one, can still be confined within one apartment.”
(William R. MacLean, “On the Acoustics of Cocktail Parties,” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, January 1959, 79-80.)
A most singular circumstance has recently occurred in Louisville. One Robert Sadler being arraigned on a writ of lunatico inquirendo, the following appeared in testimony: It was allegated that in the night time he would alarm his family and his neighbors with screams as if in severe pain, exclaiming that he felt the pain inflicted upon persons at a distance, by amputation or other causes. Mr. Sadler was said to be of good character and incapable of wilfully feigning what he did not feel, and therefore was supposed by his friends to be insane. In consequence of this belief a writ was issued to make the proper legal inquiry and to decide the question. The jury however could not agree to call him insane and he was discharged. It was proved that he uttered his cries and expressions of pain at the precise time that those with whose sufferings he claimed to be in sympathy, were actually undergoing the operations, which would cause similar pain; and this under circumstances which precluded the belief that he could have been aware, by external means, of the time or place at which such operations were to take place. The length of time during which he had displayed this morbid sensibility had been so prolonged, that if he had really been practicing a deception it could scarcely have failed to be discovered. In his conversation, and in all other particulars except the one we have described, Mr. Sadler gave no evidence of anything except the most perfect sanity. The case seems to be well authenticated, and if the truth of the details can be relied upon is altogether a very remarkable one.
— Scientific American, Dec. 16, 1868
When Germany occupied Denmark in 1940, physicist Piet Hein published an innocent-seeming poem:
Losing one glove
is certainly painful,
but nothing compared to the pain
of losing one,
throwing away the other,
and finding the first one again.
The German censors let it go, not understanding its meaning — that while enduring occupation was bad, ceasing to resist would be worse. “It said that what happens to you from outside is less important than how you take it,” he explained later. “The Danes knew what I meant.”
In later years Hein cultivated a talent for such tiny aphoristic poems, which he called “grooks”:
Problems worthy
of attack
prove their worth
by hitting back.
There is
one art,
no more,
no less:
to do
all things
with art-
lessness.
The road to wisdom? — Well, it’s plain
and simple to express:
Err
and err
and err again
but less
and less
and less.
Put up in a place
where it’s easy to see
the cryptic admonishment
T.T.T.
When you feel how depressingly
slowly you climb,
it’s well to remember that
Things Take Time.
In all he wrote more 7,000 grooks, which have become a part of Scandinavian culture. “I cannot really say where my activity as a scientist ends and where my activity as a man of letters begins,” he said. “Whether I am writing a poem or solving some technical problem, I think the same.”
From the ever-inventive Lee Sallows, a self-tiling tile set:
His article on such self-similar tilings appears in the December 2012 issue of Mathematics Magazine.
In 1891, while debating “the old, old question whether women’s dress is or is not sensible,” the members of a Brooklyn amateur dramatic company decided to try an experiment. First a woman tried on a man’s clothes:
My! how nice it feels to be able to run up and down stairs in these clothes. You don’t have to think about your clothes at all. Nor about your feet. It’s just splendid! I’d no idea — but my feet feel as if they had clogs on. Don’t you hear them thump? Don’t they look funny? Why, I couldn’t walk far with such weights as these dragging me down. And see my shirt. It won’t stay put. One thing is certain, you feel very free all about your body. … I did not know what to do with my hands or my legs while I was in the parlour. I was not sure of my legs one minute. I didn’t know whether they looked right when I walked; they seem exposed, you know. I wondered how I looked all the time, and when you get to wondering about any part of you, that part of you loses all its pluck. My legs got timid, and in the way. It was not any better when I sat down. Then my hands got big and stupid, and bothered me. The coat tails were in the way, and I couldn’t, for the life of me, think what I had ever seen a man do with his coat tails. The truth is, that I should not wonder if men’s clothes are better than ours, only you’ve got to get used to them. And I should want the coat to have skirts all around it, because you feel so very visible, don’t you know.
Then a man tried on a woman’s:
The queer thing about this whole rig is that you cannot get your mind off the corset. It is so stiff and tight and hot and binding that you forget the rest. I can stand up and lean back against it as if I were leaning against a swing or hammock. When I sit down, if I should lean too far forward I would fall on my face. You cannot keep your balance in the thing. If I try to pick up something from the floor beside me while sitting down, the corset catches me under the arm like a crutch. Sitting or standing, it holds me up like a ramrod — don’t I look so? My arms hang at the sides of it as if they were made afterwards and tacked on, like a doll’s arms. I could not eat a mouthful or take a glass of water with this corset on. Either I or the corset would burst. Just for fun I laid down in the thing, and I had to get Tom to help me up again or I’d have laid there yet. As for the rest of the costume, do you know, I don’t mind it. These things don’t fit, of course; the skirt is too short and the dress won’t button around my stomach; but it seems a fellow could get along with all of it except the corset. It’s queer to feel your legs for the first time. They seem to be let loose inside a sort of box. When I walk I feel the skirt hit against my heels, and when I stand up I feel my legs hot against one another. Their covering is so thin that it amounts to nothing, and so you feel those appendages as you never do in male attire. You don’t know how absurd it is not to be able to see yourself. The bust of this corset and dress stick out under my eyes, and I cannot see anything beneath it except the bottom of this dress. I feel cold half way. I can feel the tops of my stocking plainly by the difference in the temperature where they end.
“I would not dare appear in company in this rig, even if it fitted me; at least not without taking a course of instructions first,” the man said. “You see, I know enough to put my hands in my lap; but they don’t go there. I keep hanging them down by my sides. Then I cannot cross my legs. Every time I try it I get the petticoats and dress all mixed up with my knees. When I sit down I feel as if I was sitting on a pair of long coat-tails all rumpled up. The dress and other things all get into creases and lumps under me. There are some good points about the costume. It is easy round the neck, and your legs are so free that you feel as if you were walking on air; but even in this warm room I would get pneumonia in four hours, for my legs are stone cold and my chest is not much warmer, though my waist is burning hot. Then there is a dragging weight on my hips, while as for the corset — Get out of the room, boys, and let Tom help me off with the blessed thing.”
(From “A Petticoat in Trousers,” Modern Society, Jan. 31, 1891.)
