macroscian
adj. casting a long shadow
umbratile
adj. pertaining to the shade
obtenebrate
v. to cast a shadow over
lucifugous
adj. shunning light
Author: Greg Ross
Label Mates
An exchange of letters in the Times, November 1941:
Sir,
Among the minor reforms that are coming would not the suppression of ‘Esquire’ in general and business correspondence be welcomed? It is a relic of mid-Victorian snobbery, and has little or nothing to commend it. I believe the United Kingdom is the only part of the Empire that uses it.
Yours truly,
Loughlan Pendred
Sir,
How right Mr Loughlan Pendred is in denouncing the use of this word as ‘a relic of mid-Victorian snobbery’ and in demanding its ‘suppression’! But why does he not go further? Is not our all too frequent utterance or inscription of the word ‘Mr’ an equally gross survival from an era which men of good will can hardly mention without embarrassment and shame? I do hope Pendred will go further.
Your obedient servant,
Max Beerbohm
Sir,
Beerbohm’s suggestion that the prefix ‘Mr’ should be abolished does not go far enough. We are still left with our surnames, and this is undemocratic. I demand that we should all be called by the same name, as plain a one as possible. If this should render difficult the filling up of forms, a number could be attached to each — or rather the same — name.
Yours faithfully,
Osbert Sitwell
R&R
Grover Cleveland underwent a secret surgery for cancer during his second term as president. The United States was in the grip of a financial panic in 1893 when Cleveland noticed a sore on the roof of his mouth. Doctors diagnosed a cancer and urged the president to have it removed, but Cleveland insisted on secrecy — Ulysses Grant’s death by an apparently similar cancer only eight years earlier had unsettled the nation, and Cleveland was loath to publicize his health concerns in the midst of an economic depression.
So on June 30 Cleveland boarded a friend’s yacht under the pretense of a four-day fishing trip to the president’s summer home in Cape Cod. The ship’s saloon had been outfitted as an operating room, and six doctors quietly joined the president before the yacht set sail. Cleveland was anesthetized and surgeon Joseph Bryant removed five teeth and a large portion of his palate and upper jawbone. The team fitted him with a rubber prosthesis to conceal his disfiguration and told the press that only two bad teeth had been removed.
The secret was nearly lost when E.J. Edwards, a reporter for the Philadelphia Press, published an article about the surgery after confirming it with one of the doctors. But Cleveland denied it flatly and launched a smear campaign against him. The president returned to health, served out the remainder of his second term, and died finally in 1908. The disgraced reporter was vindicated only 24 years later, when one of the surviving doctors finally published an article acknowledging the truth.
(Thanks, Colin.)
What?
James D. Williams’ “animal ear protectors,” patented in 1980, provide “a device for protecting the ears of animals, especially long-haired dogs, from becoming soiled by the animal’s food while the animal is eating.” The ears are protected by plastic tubes that are held to the animal’s head by adjustable straps.
The invention “may be itself decorated so as to enhance the appearance of the animal in the eyes of its owner and of others.” What that looks like is left to the imagination.
Identity Crisis
This notice appeared in Dublin in July 1781:
This is to certify that I, Daniel O’Flannaghan, am not the Person that was tarred and feathered by the Liberty Mob, on Tuesday last; and I am ready to give 20 Guineas to any one that will lay me 50, that I am the other Man who goes by my Name.
Witness my Hand, this 30th July.
Daniel O’Flannaghan.
Wrote Henry Sampson, “A man who can afford to lay seventy guineas to thirty that he is himself, and nobody else, deserves credit for his boldness, if not for his ingenuity.”
Project Management
A puzzle by Polish mathematician Paul Vaderlind:
If a blacksmith requires five minutes to put on a horseshoe, can eight blacksmiths shoe 10 horses in less than half an hour? The catch: A horse can stand on three legs, but not on two.
Unquote
“The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the sea searching for a suitable rock or hunk of coral to cling to and make its home for life. For this task, it has a rudimentary nervous system. When it finds its spot and takes root, it doesn’t need its brain anymore, so it eats it. It’s rather like getting tenure.” — Daniel Dennett
From the Notebooks
More aphorisms of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg:
- “A man who has once stolen his hundred thousand dollars can live honestly ever after.”
- “In the world we live in, one fool makes many fools, but one sage only a few sages.”
- “A double louis d’or certainly counts more than two singles.”
- “Non cogitant, ergo non sunt.” (They do not think, therefore they do not exist.)
- “Health is infectious.”
- “A donkey appears to me like a horse translated into Dutch.”
- “A man can never really know whether he isn’t sitting in a madhouse.”
- “Isn’t it strange? We always consider that those who praise us are competent critics, but as soon as they blame us, we declare them incapable of judging creations of the intellect.”
- “When sitting in a shabby carriage, one can actually put on such airs that the whole carriage looks good, and the horse too.”
- “Everyone is a genius at least once a year. The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together.”
“Is it really so absolutely certain that our reason can know nothing metaphysical? Might man not be able to weave his ideas of God with just as much purpose as the spider weaves his net to catch flies? Or, in other words: might not beings exist who admire us as much for our ideas of God and immortality as we admire the spider and the silkworm?”
Swine Wave
A bewildering puzzle by Lewis Carroll: Place 24 pigs in these sties so that, no matter how many times one circles the sties, he always find that the number in each sty is closer to 10 than the number in the previous one.
The Sincerest Form
Excerpt from Beer in the Sergeant Major’s Hat, a parody found in Raymond Chandler’s notebook:
Hank went into the bathroom to brush his teeth.
‘The hell with it,’ he said. ‘She shouldn’t have done it.’
It was a good bathroom. It was small and the green enamel was peeling off the walls. But the hell with that, as Napoleon said when they told him Josephine waited without. The bathroom had a wide window through which Hank looked at the pine and larches. They dripped with a faint rain. They looked smooth and comfortable.
‘The hell with it,’ Hank said. ‘She shouldn’t have done it.’
He opened the cabinet over the washbasin and took out his toothpaste. He looked at his teeth in the mirror. They were large yellow teeth, but sound. Hank could still bite his way for a while.
Hank unscrewed the top of the toothpaste tube, thinking of the day when he had unscrewed the lid of the coffee jar, down on the Pukayak River, when he was trout fishing. There had been larches there too. It was a damn good river, and the trout had been damn good trout. They liked being hooked. Everything had been good except the coffee, which had been lousy. He had made it Watson’s way, boiling it for two hours and a half in his knapsack. It had tasted like hell. It had tasted like the socks of the Forgotten Man.
‘She shouldn’t have done it,’ Hank said out loud. Then he was silent.
He had written it on Aug. 7, 1932, and dedicated it to “the greatest living American novelist — Ernest Hemingway.”