Author: Greg Ross
Dueling Doppelgängers
When World War I broke out in August 1914, Germany enlisted a large ocean liner, the Cap Trafalgar, to attack British merchant ships around Cape Horn. While at a supply base on Trinidade, it was surprised by the HMS Carmania, a British liner that had been similarly pressed into service by the British navy.
The two enormous ships squared off and fought a murderous sea battle. In the end the Cap Trafalgar sank, and the Carmania limped away to a Brazilian port.
An observer might still have wondered which side won — by an ironic coincidence, the Cap Trafalgar had been disguised as the Carmania and the Carmania as the Cap Trafalgar.
Smoldering Chic
This should have caught on — Watson P. Aull’s “cigarette ring,” patented in 1938, clamps a cigarette in a ring worn on the left forefinger, so that the smoker has full use of her hands.
Here’s a related stunt from R.M. Abraham’s Diversions & Pastimes (1933):
“A cigarette may be lit quite easily by holding it 4 or 5 inches above the flame of the match.”
I haven’t tried it.
Book Perils
“I suppose every old scholar has had the experience of reading something in a book which was significant to him, but which he could never find again. Sure he is that he read it there, but no one else ever read it, nor can he find it again, though he buy the book, and ransack every page.” — Emerson
“When we read, we are, we must be, repeating the words to ourselves unconsciously; for how else should we discover, as we have all discovered in our time, that we have been mispronouncing a word which, in fact, we have never spoken? I refer to such words as ‘misled,’ which I, and millions of others when young, supposed to be ‘mizzled.'” — A.A. Milne
“It is one of the oddest things in the world that you can read a page or more and think of something utterly different.” — Christian Morgenstern
A Pretty Problem
In Longfellow’s novel Kavanagh, Mr. Churchill reads a word problem to his wife:
“In a lake the bud of a water-lily was observed, one span above the water, and when moved by the gentle breeze, it sunk in the water at two cubits’ distance. Required the depth of the water.”
“That is charming, but must be very difficult,” she says. “I could not answer it.”
Is it? If a span is 9 inches and a cubit is 18 inches, how deep is the water?
Unquote
“Snow is a faked cleanliness.” — Goethe
Missing Person
At 5 p.m. on Dec. 2, 1919, Canadian theater magnate Ambrose Small met with a lawyer in his Toronto office. The lawyer departed at 5:30 p.m. Between 5:30 and 6:00, Small vanished.
No one saw him leave the office, and no body was ever found. The disappearance seemed senseless. Small was a self-made millionaire; no money was missing, there was no evidence of kidnapping, and no ransom note was ever received.
Curiously, writer Ambrose Bierce had disappeared in Mexico six years earlier. Charles Fort wondered, “Was somebody collecting Ambroses?”
Found Out
In spite of twenty-five years in Southern California, [Aldous Huxley] remains an English gentleman. The scientist’s habit of examining everything from every side and of turning everything upside down and inside out is also characteristic of Aldous. I remember him leafing through a copy of Transition, reading a poem in it, looking again at the title of the magazine, reflecting for a moment, then saying, ‘Backwards it spells NO IT ISN(T) ART.’
— Igor Stravinsky, Dialogues, 1982
In a Word
schoenobatist
funambulist
equilibrist
n. a tightrope walker
Stool Pigeon
On July 12, 1942, someone shot Max Geller, the owner of Harlem’s Green Parrot Restaurant. The restaurant was locally famous for its namesake parrot, who had a useful vocabulary and could greet regular patrons by name.
No customer could identify the killer, and the agitated bird would cry only “Robber! Robber!” As the investigation foundered, someone suggested that perhaps it was saying “Robert! Robert!”
On the list of Geller’s regular customers detectives found a Robert Butler, a cab driver who had disappeared after the shooting. They traced him to the Bethlehem Steel plant in Baltimore, and he confessed: He’d shot Geller in a drunken rage for refusing to serve him. He was convicted in February 1944 and sentenced to 15 years.
He said, “I never did like that bird.”