Will you either answer no to this question or pay me a million dollars?
(Raymond Smullyan)
Author: Greg Ross
Equal Opportunity
She frowned and called him Mr.
Because in sport he Kr.
And so in spite
That very night
This Mr. Kr. Sr.
— Anonymous
Better Safe
For several years during the Cold War, New York police guarded the Soviet consulate at 9 East 91st Street in Manhattan. Officers manned a pale blue guard post 24 hours a day. “It’s like being a prisoner of war stuck in a telephone booth,” one said.
The Soviets left in 1980, and the police department accordingly canceled the guard, but two months later the 23rd precinct received a call from an Officer Cowans who said that Inspector Whitmore of police intelligence had ordered the guard to be reactivated. So the police resumed their vigil over the now-disused building.
Five months later, in May 1982, the police happened to mention the consulate duty in a report. “What booth?” asked a bewildered intelligence official. It turned out that Officer Cowans and Inspector Whitmore did not exist; the police had been guarding an empty building around the clock for five months, right through Christmas, for no reason.
They closed up shop and removed the booth. “Whoever did this was someone who wanted to break chops or who stood to gain from it,” Lt. Robert McEntire told the New York Times. “We’re not sure which, and we probably never will be.”
Misc
- The telephone number 266-8687 spells both AMOUNTS and CONTOUR.
- 38856 = (38 – 85) × 6
- CARTHORSE is an anagram of ORCHESTRA.
- The French for paper clip is trombone.
- “The oldest books are only just out to those who have not read them.” — Samuel Butler
Gilbreath’s Conjecture
Doodling on a napkin in 1958, mathematician Norman L. Gilbreath noticed something odd. First he wrote down the first few prime numbers in a row. Then, on each succeeding row, he recorded the (unsigned) difference between each pair of numbers in the row above:
The first digit in each row (except the first) is 1. Will this always be true, no matter how many prime numbers we start with? It’s been borne out in computer searches extending to hundreds of billions of rows. But no one knows for sure.
A Matter of Interpretation
A French gentleman made a will in which, among other bequests, he left handsome sums of money to his two nephews, Charles and Henri. The sums were equal in amount. When the testator died and the will came to be proved, the nephews expected to receive two hundred thousand francs each as their specific bequests. But the executors disputed this, and said that each legacy was for one hundred thousand francs.
The legatees pointed to the word deux.
‘No,’ said the executors, ‘there is a comma or apostrophe between the d and the e, making it d’eux.’
‘Not so,’ rejoined Charles and Henri; ‘that is only a little blot of ink, having nothing to do with the actual writing.’
Let us put the two interpretations in juxtaposition:
À chacun deux cent milles francs.
À chacun d’eux cent milles francs.The first form means, ‘To each two hundred thousand francs,’ whereas the other has the very different meaning, ‘To each of them a hundred thousand francs.’ This little mark (‘) made all the difference.
The paper had been folded before the ink was dry. A few spots of ink had been transposed from one side of the fold to the other, and the question was whether the apparent or supposed apostrophe was one such spot.
The legatees had very strong reasons–two hundred thousand strong–for wishing that the little spot of ink should be proved merely a blot; but their opponents had equally strong reasons for wishing that the blot should be accepted as an apostrophe, an intended and component element in the writing.
The decision was in favor of the legatees, but was only reached after long and expensive litigation.
— William Shepard Walsh, Handy-Book of Literary Curiosities, 1892
In a Word
lipwisdom
n. wisdom in talk without practice
“It is easier to be wise for others than for ourselves.” — La Rochefoucauld
Bad Neighbors
In 1878, railroad millionaire Charles Crocker decided to buy up the lots surrounding his mansion on San Francisco’s Nob Hill to improve his view of the surrounding vistas. He reached agreements with all the neighbors except for German undertaker Nicholas Yung, who refused to sell.
“I would have been happier than a condor in the sky,” Crocker wrote, “except for that crazy undertaker.”
His solution was pure spite: He built a 40-foot fence around Yung’s cottage on three sides, spoiling his view in hopes that he would sell. The fence can be seen behind the central mansion in this photo; only the chimneys of Yung’s house project above it.
“How gloomy our house became, how sad,” Yung’s daughter later wrote. “All we could see out our windows was the blank wood of the rich man’s fury. … The flowers in the garden all died, and our lawn turned brown, while inside the house everything felt perpetually damp.”
Yung held out nonetheless — according to some reports he mounted a 10-foot coffin atop the wall facing Crocker’s house — and the two maintained a senseless deadlock for years. Yung died in 1880 and Crocker in 1888; only then, when the mansion was sold to a new owner, did Yung’s heirs relent and sell their lot.
Rogue Don
In 1948, while a student at Cambridge, future MP Humphry Berkeley conceived “the only practical joke that I have played in my life.” He invented a public school called Selhurst and, writing on fake letterhead, began to send letters to public figures posing as its eccentric headmaster, H. Rochester Sneath.
Sneath invited George Bernard Shaw to speak, William Reid Dick to erect a statue, and Giles Gilbert Scott to design a new house at Selhurst (all declined). But mostly he plagued and bewildered the masters of English public schools, seeking advice regarding rats, ghosts, and other peculiar problems at his college. In March 1948 he sent a warning to the master of Marlborough College:
Dear Heywood,
I am writing you this letter in the strictest confidence. I understand from a Mr. Robert Agincourt who was Senior French Master at Selhurst, for one term two years ago, that he is applying for a post on the staff of Marlborough College.
He has asked me if I could give him a testimonial to present to you and I told him that by no stretching of veracity was I able to do this. You will understand that nothing that I have to say about Mr. Agincourt is actuated by any personal malice but I feel it my duty to inform you of the impression that he gave while he was at Selhurst.
During his brief stay no less than five boys were removed from the school as a result of his influence, and three of the Matrons had nervous breakdowns. The pictures on the walls of his rooms made a visiting Bishop shudder and would certainly rule out another Royal visit. His practices were described by the Chairman of the County Hospital as ‘Hunnish.’ The prominent wart on his nose was wittily described as ‘the blot on the twentieth century’ by a visiting conjuror.
As you cannot fail to have noticed, his personal appearance is against him, and, after one memorable Carol Service, a titled Lady who was sitting next to him collapsed in a heap. He was once observed climbing a tree in the School Grounds naked at night and on another occasion he threw a flower pot at the wife of the Chairman of the Board of Governors.
Should you wish any further information, I should be glad to furnish it for I could not wish another Headmaster to undergo the purgatory that I suffered that term.
(When the Marlborough master replied that the man had not approached him, Sneath reported that he had abandoned the idea of an academic career and “has now become a waiter in a Greek restaurant in Soho.” He also asked for the name of a good private detective and a nursery maid.)
When Sneath wrote to The Daily Worker complaining that he was being prevented from teaching compulsory Russian at Selhurst, a reporter exposed the hoax. The master of Pembroke College formally rebuked Berkeley and barred him from the college for two years — though, Berkeley wrote, “I think that I saw a twinkle in his eye.”
Recalling Yesterday
From P.M.H. Kendall and G.M. Thomas, Mathematical Puzzles for the Connoisseur, 1962:
I’ve just been reading Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days — you know, where Phileas Fogg lost a day on the way round. Our science master says that ships put it right nowadays by having a thing called a Universal Date Line in the Pacific. When you cross the line from East to West you put the calendar on a day; and when you cross it the other way you put the calendar back. What I want to know is, when Puck put a girdle round the Earth in forty minutes and presumably did the right thing on crossing the Date Line, why didn’t he get back on the day before he started — or the day after, according to which way round he went?
I asked the English master this and he got quite cross about it and said it was nothing to do with Shakespeare. But if you flew round the earth as quickly as Puck it would matter, wouldn’t it?
Wouldn’t it? Why doesn’t Puck lose a day?