There was an old woman who lived in a shoe … and presumably she needed to take her kids for a stroll occasionally. Iowa inventory George Clark patented this “child’s carriage” in 1884. The shoe is fitted with a lace cord, h, so that “the child or doll may be placed in the carriage and then held securely in place without danger of falling out.”
“If desired, the carriage may be provided with an umbrella, o.”
The will of John George, of Lambeth, who died in London in June, 1791, contained the following words: ‘Seeing that I have had the misfortune to be married to the aforesaid Elizabeth, who ever since our union has tormented me in every possible way; that, not content with making game of all my remonstrances, she has done all she could to render my life miserable; that heaven seems to have sent her into the world solely to drive me out of it; that the strength of Samson, the genius of Homer, the prudence of Augustus, the skill of Pyrrhus, the patience of Job, the philosophy of Socrates, the subtlety of Hannibal, the vigilance of Hermogenes, would not suffice to subdue the perversity of her character; that no power on earth can change her, seeing we have lived apart during the last eight years, and that the only result has been the ruin of my son, whom she has corrupted and estranged from me; weighing maturely and seriously all these considerations, I bequeath to my said wife Elizabeth the sum of one shilling, to be paid unto her within six months after my death.’
— Albany Law Journal, March 24, 1900
Lieutenant Colonel Nash got even with his wife by leaving the bell ringers of Bath abbey 50 pounds a year on condition that they muffle the bells of said abbey on the anniversary of his marriage and ring them with ‘doleful accentuation from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m.’ and on the anniversary of his death to ring a merry peal for the same space ‘in memory of his happy release from domestic tyranny and wretchedness.’
— The Bar, November 1908
You’re confronted with two doors. One leads to fortune, the other to death, but you don’t know which is which.
The doors are attended by two guards. One always lies, and the other always tells the truth, but again you don’t know which is which.
You can ask one question of one guard. What should you ask?
The Duke of Wellington contemplates a wax model of the dead Napoleon at Madame Tussaud’s in London. Wellington was one of the exhibition’s first visitors, and this was one of his favorite figures.
Napoleon and Wellington were both born in 1769, and each had four brothers and three sisters. Each was educated at a French military academy, speaking French as a second language, and each lost his father during adolescence. In 1796 Napoleon changed his surname from Buonaparte to Bonaparte; in 1798 Wellington changed his surname from Wesley to Wellesley. Both admired Hannibal above all other military heroes and gave special attention to topography in making war. Both took Caesar’s Commentaries on campaign. Napoleon saw his first action at Toulon in 1793, Wellington in Holland almost precisely a year later. They shared two mistresses, and Wellington’s brother married Napoleon’s brother’s ex-wife’s sister-in-law. Each man received a great early opportunity through the intercession of his brother, and each came to prominence fighting on a peninsula.
“But there the similarities cease,” writes Andrew Roberts in Napoleon and Wellington (2001). “For by the time Wellington gained his first European command of any great note, in Portugal in 1808, Napoleon was already master of the continent.”
When Wellington died in 1852, Tussaud’s successor created a wax figure intended to reflect his visits to the collection. So visitors to Tussaud’s saw the wax figure of a real man who was viewing the wax figure of a real man.
The wise optician smiled and said:
“The upper half to look ahead;
The lower half whereby to read;
And thus one pair is all you need.
Have patience; in a week or two
Bifocals will not trouble you.”
I muttered as I left the shop:
“For distance vision use the top;
The bottom lenses you will need
When you sit down to write or read.”
I raised my right foot high in air
To mount a step which wasn’t there.
The level street became a hill;
I looked at people standing still,
And, since I used the lower glass,
There seemed no room for me to pass.
I turned a corner of the street
And knocked a woman from her feet.
And all that day throughout the town
My eyes kept looking up and down,
“That fellow’s drunk,” I heard men say
As I went reeling down the way.
With those bifocals on my face
The town became a crazy place.
Bifocal troubles curious are:
The far seems near, the near seems far.
You step from heights that ne’er exist,
And jostle folks you should have missed;
Until man grows bifocal-wise
He finds he can’t believe his eyes.
— Edgar Guest
In a certain town, 90 percent of the residents drink coffee, 80 percent drink tea, 70 percent drink whiskey, and 60 percent drink gin. No one drinks all four. What percent of the residents drink liquor?
“The central function of imaginative literature is to make you realize that other people act on moral convictions different from your own.” — William Empson
One day I paid him a visit [an orangutan at the Paris Zoological Gardens], accompanied by an illustrious old gentleman, who was a clever, shrewd observer. His somewhat peculiar costume, bent body, and slow, feeble walk at once attracted the attention of the young animal, who, while doing most complacently all that was required of him, kept his eyes fixed on the object of his curiosity. We were about leaving, when he approached his new visitor, and, with mingled gentleness and mischief, took the stick which he carried, and pretending to lean upon it, rounding his shoulders, and slackening his pace, walked round the room, imitating the figure and gait of my old friend. He then gave him back the stick of his own accord, and we took our leave, convinced that he also knew how to observe.
— M. Flourens, quoted in Ernest Menault, The Intelligence of Animals, 1869
A baseball pitcher played an entire game while throwing the minimum possible number of pitches. The game was not called before completion. How many pitches did he throw?
In 1855 the Western Lancet published a letter from an officer in the Crimea:
A curious thing occurred yesterday. A sapper was brought from the trenches with his jaw broken, and the doctor told me that there was a piece of it sticking out an inch and a half from his face. The man said it was done by a round shot, which the doctor disbelieved, but the poor fellow insisted, and said, ‘Yes, and it took off the head of the man next me.’ This was conclusive, and the surgeon proceeded to remove the bone: it came out easy, when the doctor said to the man, whose face appeared to preserve its form pretty well, ‘Can you move your jaw?’ ‘Oh, yes, sir,’ was the reply. The doctor then put his finger into the man’s mouth, and found the teeth were there, and at length assured the soldier that it was no jaw of his that was broken, but that of his headless comrade, inflicting a severe but not dangerous wound. Upon this, the man’s visage, which had been rather lengthened, rounded up most beautifully.
Reprinted in Paul Fitzsimmons Eve, A Collection of Remarkable Cases in Surgery, 1857.