Investor Relations

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

Letter from Groucho Marx to the Franklin Corporation, April 24, 1961:

Dear Mr. Goodman:

I received the first annual report of the Franklin Corporation and though I am not an expert at reading balance sheets, my financial advisor (who, I assure you, knows nothing) nodded his head in satisfaction.

You wrote that you hope I am not one of those borscht circuit stockholders who get a few points’ profit and hastily scram for the hills. For your information, I bought Alleghany Preferred eleven years ago and am just now disposing of it.

As a brand new member of your family, strategically you made a ghastly mistake in sending me individual pictures of the Board of Directors. Mr. Roth, Chairman of the Board, merely looks sinister. You, the President, look like a hard worker with not too much on the ball. No one named Prosswimmer can possibly be a success. As for Samuel A. Goldblith, PhD., head of Food Technology at MIT, he looks as though he had eaten too much of the wrong kind of fodder.

At this point I would like to stop and ask you a question about Marion Harper Jr. To begin with, I immediately distrust any man who has the same name as his mother. But the thing that most disturbs me about Junior is that I don’t know what the hell he’s laughing at. Is it because he sucked me into this Corporation? This is not the kind of face that inspires confidence in a nervous and jittery stockholder.

George S. Sperti, I dismiss instantly. Any man who is the President of an outfit called Institutum Divi Thomae will certainly bear watching. Is he trying to impress stockholders with his knowledge of Latin? If so, why doesn’t he read, ‘Winnie ille Pu’? James J. Sullivan, I am convinced, is Paul E. Prosswimmer photographed from a different angle.

Offhand, I would say that I have summed up your group fairly accurately. I hope, for my sake, that I am mistaken.

In closing, I warn you, go easy with my money. I am in an extremely precarious profession whose livelihood depends upon a fickle public.

Sincerely yours,

Groucho Marx
(temporarily at liberty)

| Entertainment

Open and Shut

http://www.sxc.hu/photo/845582

A warden oversees an empty prison with 100 cells, all closed. Bored one day, he walks through the prison and opens every cell. Then he walks through it again and closes the even-numbered cells. On the third trip he stops at every third cell and closes the door if it’s open or opens it if it’s closed. And so on: On the nth trip he stops at every nth cell, closing an open door or opening a closed one. At the end of the 100th trip, which doors are open?

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

Narcissus Prime

Repeat the string 1808010808 1560 times, and tack on a 1 the end:

tetradic prime

The resulting 15601-digit number is prime, and because it’s a palindrome made up of the digits 1, 8, and 0, it remains prime when read backward, upside down, or in a mirror.

Unrelated mirror curiosity: Outline the reflection of your head on the glass of a mirror, then back away. At any distance, the image continues to fill the outline (which is half the size of your head).

| Science & Math

Stage Whispers

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Frederick_Leighton_-_The_Reconciliation_of_the_Montagues_and_Capulets_over_the_Dead_Bodies_of_Romeo_and_Juliet.jpg

Fanny Kemble’s 1833 American tour was not a uniform success — her journal gives this account of one eventful scene in Baltimore:

ROMEO: Tear not our heart strings thus! They crack! They break! — Juliet! Juliet! (dies)

JULIET: (to corpse) Am I smothering you?

CORPSE: (to Juliet) Not at all. Could you be so kind, do you think, as to put my wig on again for me? It has fallen off.

JULIET: (to corpse) I’m afraid I can’t, but I’ll throw my muslin veil over it. You’ve broken the phial, haven’t you? (corpse nods)

JULIET: Where’s your dagger?

CORPSE: ‘Pon my soul, I don’t know.

“The play went off pretty well, except they broke one man’s collar-bone, and nearly dislocated a woman’s shoulder by flinging the scenery about.”

| Literature

Epic Fantasy

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Unico_Anello.png

From a letter from J.R.R. Tolkien to his publishers, February 1950:

My work has escaped my control, and I have produced a monster; an immensely long, complex, rather bitter, and rather terrifying romance, quite unfit for children (if fit for anybody); and it is not really a sequel to The Hobbit, but to The Silmarillion. Ridiculous and tiresome as you may think me, I want to publish them both — The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings. That is what I should like. Or I will let it all be. I cannot contemplate any drastic rewriting or compression. But I shall not have any just grievance (nor shall I be dreadfully surprised) if you decline so obviously unprofitable a proposition.

At 150 million copies, The Lord of the Rings is now the third best-selling novel of all time.

| Literature

Saw 6

http://etc.usf.edu/clipart/42700/42768/cubes-6_42768.htm

We want to cut a 3-inch cube into 27 1-inch cubes. We can do this by making six cuts, as shown. Can we accomplish the task with fewer cuts by rearranging the pieces between cuts?

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

Art Direction

E. Gertrude Thomson

In 1879, illustrator Emily Gertrude Thomson appointed to meet Lewis Carroll at the South Kensington Museum. She had arrived at the rendezvous before she realized that neither of them knew what the other looked like.

“The room was fairly full of all sorts and conditions, as usual,” she wrote later, “and I glanced at each masculine figure in turn, only to reject it as a possibility of the one I sought.”

As the clock struck, she heard high voices and children’s laughter ringing down the corridor, and a tall, slim gentleman entered holding two little girls by the hand. “He stood for a moment, head erect, glancing swiftly over the room, then, bending down, whispered something to one of the children; she, after a moment’s pause, pointed straight at me.”

He dropped their hands, came forward with a smile, and said, “I am Mr. Dodgson; I was to meet you, I think?” She smiled and asked how he had recognized her.

“My little friend found you,” he said. “I told her I had come to meet a young lady who knew fairies, and she fixed on you at once.”

| Literature

A Last Courtesy

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Great_plague_of_london-1665.jpg

… Not that the eye-witness accounts of the over-publicized Great Plague of London can be called exaggerated. There are heartrending records of what happened in rural villages too. In one small hamlet, a parish register informs us, more or less incidentally, everyone died, and the last full-grown man to get the disease actually dug his own grave in the yard and buried himself in it. He seems to have taken this strange action because he was certain he must die and because he knew that the servant-girl and boy, who alone would be left alive, would never be able to get his body out of the house. This was at Malpas in Cheshire in September, 1625.

— Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost, 1965

| Death

A Key Point

Complaint received by a French typewriter shop, reprinted in a local newspaper on the Île de Ré:

Monsixur,

Il y a quxlquxs sxmainxs jx mx suis offxrt unx dx vos machinxs à écrirx. Au début j’xn fus assxz contxnt. Mais pas pour longtxmps. Xn xffxt, vous voyxz vous-mêmx lx défaut. Chaqux fois qux jx vxux tapxr un x, c’xst un x qux j’obtixns. Cxla mx rxnd xnragé. Car quand jx vxux un x, c’xst un x qu’il mx faut xt non un x. Cxla rxndrait n’importx qui furixux. Commxnt fairx pour obtxnir un x chaqux fois qux jx desirx un x? Un x xst un x, xt non un x. Saisissxz-vous cx qux jx vxux dirx?

Jx voudrais savoir si vous êtxs xn mxsurx dx mx livrxr unx machinx à écrirx donnant un x chaqux fois qux j’ai bxsoin d’un x. Parcx qux si vous mx donnxz unx machinx donnant un x lorsqu’on tapx un x, vous pourrxz ravoir cx damné instrumxnt. Un x xst très bixn tant qux x, mais, oh xnfxr!

Sincèrxmxnt à vous, un dx vos clixnts rxndu xnragé.

Xugènx X—-

From John Julius Norwich, Christmas Crackers, 1981.

| Language