Solitaire

In 1985, 61-year-old Oreste Lodi came up with a novel way to raid his own trust fund: He sued himself. In a suit filed in the Shasta County (Calif.) Superior Court, Lodi named himself as defendant, failed to answer the complaint, then asked that a default judgment be entered against himself.

When a judge threw out the case, he appealed to the Third Appellate District, filing briefs on both sides. Unfortunately, the appeals court called Lodi’s case “a slam-dunk frivolous complaint.”

“This result cannot be unfair to Mr. Lodi,” it noted. “Although it is true that, as plaintiff and appellant, he loses, it is equally true that, as defendant and respondent, he wins! It is hard to imagine a more evenhanded application of justice.”

| Society

Unquote

“Absolutely speaking, Do unto others as you would that they should do unto you is by no means a golden rule, but the best of current silver. An honest man would have but little occasion for it.” — Thoreau

| Quotations

Handfuls

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bi%C3%A1ng_(regular_script).svg
Images: Wikimedia Commons

Left: The Chinese character for biáng, a type of noodle from the Shaanxi province, requires 57 strokes to write.

Right: The Japanese character for “the appearance of a dragon in flight” requires 84 strokes.

The Japanese character includes three identical “cloud” characters, so it’s not as complex as it looks. Not so the biáng character — residents of Shaanxi have invented ditties to help them remember how to write it.

| Language

The Motor Hire

A puzzle from R.M. Abraham, Diversions & Pastimes, 1933:

Michael O’Bleary hired a motor-car at a cost of fifteen dollars to take him to Ballygoogly market and back again in the evening. When he got half-way on his outward journey he met a friend, gave him a lift to the market, and brought him back to the point where he picked him up in the morning. There was a dispute about the payment. How much should Michael charge his passenger for his share of the motor hire?

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

Molyneaux’s Problem

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Brockhaus_and_Efron_Encyclopedic_Dictionary_b67_300-0.jpg

In 1688, John Locke received a letter from scientist William Molyneaux posing a curious philosophical riddle: Suppose a blind man learned to identify a cube and a sphere by touch. If the shapes were then laid before him and his vision restored, could he identify them by sight alone?

Locke responded, “Your ingenious problem will deserve to be published to the world,” and he included a formulation of the problem in the second edition of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding.

Three hundred years later, it’s still an open question. (Locke agreed with Molyneaux that the answer is probably no: “The blind man, at first sight, would not be able with certainty to say which was the globe, which the cube, whilst he only saw them; though he could unerringly name them by his touch, and certainly distinguish them by the difference of their figures felt.”)

| Science & Math

In a Word

semiopathy
n. the tendency to read humorously inappropriate meanings into signs

CROSS CHILDREN WALK. Don’t listen to their screams,
But watch the CAUTION MEN AT WORK. It seems
They’re making sure that all DEAF CHILDREN DRIVE
CAREFULLY. Now let us look alive,
And take TRUCKS TURNING (named for Captain Trucks,
Who turned here when he went out hunting ducks).
Here on a sign the advertising’s clear
(Though deer can’t tell the time) for WATCH FOR DEER.
At FREE MUNICIPAL PARKING let us pause,
And wonder who enslaved it, for what cause.
A DANGEROU is what we’ll hope to see:
DANGEROUS CROSSINGs certainly abound.
Now will they leap across from tree to tree,
Or buck the passing traffic on the ground?

— Ralph P. Boas Jr.

| Language · Poems

“Doppelgänger”

Entering the lonely house with my wife
I saw him for the first time
Peering furtively from behind a bush –
Blackness that moved,
A shape amid the shadows,
A momentary glimpse of gleaming eyes
Revealed in the ragged moon.
A closer look (he seemed to turn) might have
Put him to flight forever –
I dared not
(For reasons that I failed to understand),
Though I knew I should act at once.

I puzzled over it, hiding alone,
Watching the woman as she neared the gate.
He came, and I saw him crouching
Night after night.
Night after night
He came, and I saw him crouching,
Watching the woman as she neared the gate.

I puzzled over it, hiding alone –
Though I knew I should act at once,
For reasons that I failed to understand
I dared not
Put him to flight forever.

A closer look (he seemed to turn) might have
Revealed in the ragged moon
A momentary glimpse of gleaming eyes
A shape amid the shadows,
Blackness that moved.

Peering furtively from behind a bush,
I saw him, for the first time,
Entering the lonely house with my wife.

— J.A. Lindon

| Language · Poems

A Kinder Cut

http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=9cxLAAAAEBAJ

In the 19th century manuals such as Gunn’s Domestic Medicine promised that “any man, unless he be an idiot or an absolute fool,” could perform an amputation. But Pennsylvania surgeon George Griswold had found that “persons unskilful in the use of the saw, and even the most experienced, will find it difficult to hold the bone firmly,” increasing both the patient’s pain and length of the operation. He invented this “amputator’s assistant” to hold a limb steady while a surgeon saws through it.

He patented it in 1854, only seven years before the Civil War. I haven’t been able to learn how widely it was used.

| Technology

Knitted News

In making up newspapers–that is, in piecing together paragraphs into columns–two separate items may sometimes be jumbled together with amazing results. Thus, the New Haven Journal announced in one paragraph that ‘The large cast-iron wheel, revolving nine hundred times a minute, exploded in that city yesterday after a long and painful illness. Deceased was a prominent thirty-second degree Mason,’ and in another that ‘John Fadden, a well-known florist and real-estate broker of Newport, Rhode Island, died in Wardner Russell’s sugar-mill at Crystal Lake, Illinois, on Saturday, doing $3000 damages to the building and injuring several workmen severely.’

— William Shepard Walsh, Handy-Book of Literary Curiosities, 1892

| Language · Literature