A member of Congress can’t be sued for libel and slander for anything he says on the floor of the House or Senate. This immunity extends to committee hearings and to material he publishes in the Congressional Record.
The framers of the Constitution wanted to protect legislators from the harassment that critics of the British king had suffered in Parliament.
In 1499, a bear which had been terrorizing a German village and had killed people, was captured and brought to trial. The attorney appointed to defend the bear was allowed to argue for days that the animal had the right to be judged by a jury of its peers (that is, other bears). However, the animal was tried and convicted by human beings. It was sentenced to dangle from the public gallows until relatives of its victims stoned the bear to death.
— Thomas J. Gardner and Victor Manian, Criminal Law: Principles, Cases and Readings, 1975
This problem originated in Russia, according to various sources, but no one’s sure precisely where:
Before you is a square table that can rotate freely. In each corner is a deep well, at the bottom of which is a tumbler that’s either upright or inverted. You can’t see the tumblers, but you can reach into the wells to feel their positions.
Periodically the table rotates and stops at random. After each stop, you can feel two of the tumblers and turn over either, both, or neither. If all four of the tumblers are in the same state — all upright or all inverted — then a bell sounds. Otherwise the table rotates again and you make another “move.”
Can you guarantee to ring the bell in a finite number of moves? If so, how?
glabella
n. the space between the eyebrows
cejijunto
n. a person with one long continuous eyebrow
In England’s Court of Chancery, a litigant’s charges were converted into “interrogatories,” or searching questions to be put to the defendant, who had to answer them under oath. For example:
“Whether or no was the said testator, G. H., at the time of his death indebted to any and what persons or person in any and what sums or sum of money?”
Composing these questions was such mournfully mechanical work that a thoughtless clerk could turn almost anything into an interrogatory. Junior counsel Edward Karslake once submitted a rather florid account of a broken trust, and the clerk absently returned this:
“Did not the defendant fall down on her knees or on one and which of them and implore the plaintiff with tears in her eyes or in one and which of them to advance the said sum of £—- to her husband to save him from bankruptcy and their children from ruin or how otherwise?”
According to one story, a junior counsel wagered that if the first few lines of Paradise Lost were inserted into a bill, his clerk would render them into interrogatories “without turning a hair.” Here’s Milton’s text:
Of Man’s First Disobedience, and the Fruit
Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste
Brought Death into the World, and all our woe …
And here’s what the clerk produced:
“Was it man’s first or some other and what disobedience, and the fruit of that forbidden or some other and what tree, whose mortal taste brought death into this or some other and what world and all our woe, and if not why not or how otherwise?”
It was this tedious officiousness that Dickens railed about in Bleak House. He had some justice: The novel’s central case was inspired by a Chancery suit that took 36 years to get through court.
If you see a kangaroo wearing a man’s waistcoat with $20 in one pocket, please notify William Thompson, farmer of Grafton, near Sydney, Australia. When Thompson found a kangaroo caught in a wire fence he acted on impulse, removing his old waistcoat and buttoning it firmly on the kangaroo, which then bounded away. It was several hours later when he remembered the money in the pocket.
— The Paris News, Feb. 4, 1946
One summer afternoon in 1917, Royal Flying Corps trainee Graham Donald prepared to try a new maneuver with his Sopwith Camel. He ascended into a vertical loop, intending to flip the plane at the top and fly off in the opposite direction. Unfortunately, when the airplane was fully inverted at 6,000 feet, his safety belt gave way and “suddenly I dived clean through it and fell out of the cockpit.”
“The first 2,000 feet passed very quickly, and terra firma looked damnably ‘firma,'” he recalled later. But as he fell, “I began to hear my faithful little Camel somewhere nearby.” He dropped onto the diving plane and managed to grip its top wing, “and that saved me from slithering straight through the propeller, which was glistening beautifully in the evening sunshine.”
As the ground neared at 140 mph, he reached into the cockpit and pulled back on the control stick. Unfortunately, this sent the plane into an inverted spin. With 2,500 feet left, Donald managed to put his right foot on the stick and push it forward, and he found himself clinging to a plane that was flying upside down. He reached the controls, righted the plane, and climbed into the cockpit with about 800 feet to spare. To prevent further strain on the wings, he cut the engine and glided back to the airfield.
“I made an unusually good landing, but there was no one there to applaud — every man-jack of the squadron had mysteriously disappeared. After a minute or so, heads began to appear all over the place — popping up like bunny rabbits from every hole. Apparently, when I had pressed my foot on the control stick, I’d also pressed both triggers and the entire airfield had been sprinkled with bullets. Very wisely, the ground crew dived as one man for the nearest ditch.”
(From Joshua Levine’s 2008 book On a Wing and a Prayer. Thanks, Paul.)
A logic puzzle by Lewis Carroll, July 2, 1893. What conclusion can be drawn from these premises?
Marvin Harold Hewitt was bright enough to find schoolwork boring, so he dropped out of high school. That didn’t hold him back:
In all, Hewitt spent nine years teaching mathematics, engineering, and physics at seven different schools and universities, using forged credentials throughout. “The ease with which Hewitt obtained these jobs fills him with indignation,” reported Life magazine, which profiled him in 1954 when it was all over. “The unquestioning acceptance of a transcript and careless checking of references is, in his fairly expert opinion, a universal weakness throughout the U.S. higher educational system. When he considers what might have happened to a great many people had he made medicine or surgery his field, he shudders.”
What’s the most comprehensive contraction? Philip Cohen proposes this story:
An old salt was telling of going through a typhoon in his sailing ship. At the top of the storm, he said, ‘M’ jibs’l’s lines snapped. And m’t’g’ll’nts’ls’d’a done the same if it hadn’t slacked off just then.’
M’t’g’ll’nts’ls’d’a means “my topgallant sails would have” — a savings of 14 letters and four spaces using seven apostrophes. An old sailor knows the value of efficiency.