10 Downing Street has no keyhole.
Author: Greg Ross
“Paradox”
From Miscellanea Curiosa: or, Entertainments for the Ingenious of Both Sexes, January 1734:
One evening, as I walk’d to take the Air,
I chanc’d to overtake two Ladies fair;
Each by the Hand a lovely Boy did lead,
To whom in courteous Manner thus I said:
Ladies! so far oblige me as to shew
How near akin these Boys are unto you?
They, smiling, quickly made this dark Reply,
Sons to our Sons they are, we can’t deny:
Though it seem strange, they are our Husbands’ Brothers,
And likewise each is Uncle to the other:
They both begot, and born in Wedlock were,
And we their Mothers and Grandmothers are.
Now try if you this Mystery can declare.
Free Study
“A man ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.” — Samuel Johnson
“Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.” — Plato
“Oh! it is absurd to have a hard and fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn’t. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn’t read.” — Oscar Wilde
“The Chemist to His Love”
I love thee, Mary, and thou lovest me–
Our mutual flame is like th’ affinity
That doth exist between two simple bodies:
I am Potassium to thine Oxygen.
‘Tis little that the holy marriage vow
Shall shortly make us one. That unity
Is, after all, but metaphysical.
Oh, would that I, my Mary, were an acid,
A living acid; thou an alkali
Endow’d with human sense, that, brought together,
We both might coalesce into one salt,
One homogeneous crystal. Oh, that thou
Wert Carbon, and myself were Hydrogen;
We would unite to form olefiant gas,
Or common coal, or naphtha–would to heaven
That I were Phosphorus, and thou wert Lime!
And we of Lime composed a Phosphuret.
I’d be content to be Sulphuric Acid,
So that thou might be Soda. In that case
We should be Glauber’s Salt. Wert thou Magnesia
Instead we’d form the salt that’s named from Epsom.
Couldst thou Potassa be, I Aqua-fortis,
Our happy union should that compound form,
Nitrate of Potash–otherwise Saltpetre.
And thus our several natures sweetly blent,
We’d live and love together, until death
Should decompose the fleshly tertium quid,
Leaving our souls to all eternity
Amalgamated. Sweet, thy name is Briggs
And mine is Johnson. Wherefore should not we
Agree to form a Johnsonate of Briggs?
— “A Rochester druggist,” quoted in The Medical Age, Oct. 11, 1886
Mail Call
From Andrew Carroll’s Behind the Lines (2005) — during World War II, the parents of William Kyzer received this letter from their son, an infantry rifleman stationed in the Pacific:
Dear Dad & Carmilita
I’m OK, days flies by here in
Well maybe it can be all again soon. I’m praying for it. Write soon Nothing like getting a letter from home. Here on
Love
Bill
P.S. They may censor this letter
Carroll writes: “In fact, Kyzer’s mail was not edited at all; he simply hated writing letters and only penned the few sentences at the top and bottom so that his folks would believe that the censors were responsible for slicing out the rest.”
Forget-Me-Not
In 1989 Sondra Rockhill patented “a method to avoid forgetting an umbrella when leaving an establishment.” A plastic panel is attached by a spring clip to the umbrella’s handle. When you enter a building with a wet umbrella, you unclip the panel, deposit the umbrella, and clip the panel to your keyring. Now if you forget to reclaim the umbrella, you’ll have a reminder when you get to the car. “After the umbrella has been retrieved, the identification device is unclipped from the key ring and reattached to the eye device on the umbrella for the next use.”
Countdown
Will a prime number ever appear in this series?
9
98
987
9876
98765
987654
9876543
98765432
987654321
9876543210
98765432109
987654321098
9876543210987
…
Earwitness
Mike and Tobye Madison of Baytown, Texas, had two odd experiences in January 1984: Their house was burglarized, and Baby, their exotic talking bird, began saying “Come here, Robert. Come here, Ronnie.”
“When the lady told me about it I almost broke up,” Baytown police detective Reggie Harper told the Associated Press. “I almost didn’t write it down.”
Apparently Baby, a female yellow-headed Amazon, was repeating the words of the intruders. This helped police identify two men and a 16-year-old boy and charge them with a series of house burglaries involving the loss of $50,000 in property.
Forty years earlier, the same thing had happened in New York.
Set Dressing
In 1889 Monet was midway through a landscape when a pivotal oak tree sprouted leaves.
He mulled this for a few days and then approached the landowner with an unusual proposition. On May 9 he wrote:
I am overjoyed — permission to remove the leaves of my beautiful oak has been graciously accorded! It was a huge job bringing large enough ladders into this ravine. Enfin, it is done, two men have been busy with it since yesterday. Isn’t it a feat to finish a winter landscape at this time of year?
In The Ultimate Irrelevant Encyclopaedia (1984), Bill Hartston remarks, “Monet makes the leaves go aground.”
Working Late
For twenty-five years past an oral addition to the written standing orders of the native guard at Government House, near Poona, had been communicated regularly from one guard to another, on relief, to the effect that any cat passing out of the front door after dark was to be regarded as His Excellency the Governor, and to be saluted accordingly. The meaning of this was that Sir Robert Grant, Governor of Bombay, had died there in 1838, and on the evening of the day of his death a cat was seen to leave the house by the front door and walk up and down a particular path, as had been the Governor’s habit to do, after sunset. A Hindu sentry had observed this, and he mentioned it to others of his faith, who made it a subject of superstitious conjecture, the result being that one of the priestly class explained the mystery of the dogma of the transmigration of the soul from one body to another, and interpreted the circumstance to mean that the spirit of the deceased Governor had entered into one of the house pets. It was difficult to fix on a particular one, and it was therefore decided that every cat passing out of the main entrance after dark was to be regarded as the tabernacle of Governor Grant’s soul, and to be treated with due respect and the proper honours. This decision was accepted without question by all the native attendants and others belonging to Government House. The whole guard, from sepoy to subadar, fully acquiesced in it, and an oral addition was made to the standing orders that the sentry at the front door would ‘present arms’ to any cat passing out there after dark.
— Sir Thomas Edward Gordon, A Varied Life, 1906