It’s legal for me to expose your infidelity.
And it’s legal for me to seek $10,000 from you in a business transaction.
So why is it illegal for me to blackmail you for $10,000?
“Most crimes do not need theories to explain why the behavior is criminal,” writes Northwestern law professor James Lindgren. “The wrongdoing is self-evident. But blackmail is unique among major crimes: no one has yet figured out why it ought to be illegal.”
WON TON spelled backward is NOT NOW.
A story is told of Sheridan, himself an Irishman, that one day, when coming back from shooting with an empty bag, he did not like to go home completely empty, and seeing a number of ducks in a pond, and a man or farmer leaning on a rail watching them, Sheridan said, ‘What will you take for a shot at the ducks?’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I will take half a sovereign.’
‘Done!’ said Sheridan, and he fired into middle of the flock, killing a dozen. ‘I am afraid you made a bad bargain!’
‘I don’t know,’ said the man: ‘they weren’t mine.’
— Tit-Bits From All the Most Interesting Books, Periodicals and Newspapers in the World, Oct. 29, 1881
Thomas Jefferson writhed under the criticisms of the Continental Congress as it reviewed his draft of the Declaration of Independence. Seeing this, Benjamin Franklin took him aside. “I have made it a rule,” he said, “whenever in my power, to avoid becoming the draftsman of papers to be reviewed by a public body. I took my lesson from an incident which I will relate to you.
“When I was a journeyman printer, one of my companions, an apprenticed hatter, having served out his time, was about to open shop for himself. His first concern was to have a handsome signboard, with a proper inscription. He composed it in these words: John Thompson, Hatter, makes and sells hats for ready money, with a figure of a hat subjoined. But he thought he would submit it to his friends for their amendments.
“The first he showed it to thought the word hatter tautologous, because followed by the words makes hats, which showed he was a hatter. It was struck out. The next observed that the word makes might as well be omitted, because his customers would not care who made the hats; if good and to their mind they would buy, by whomsoever made. He struck it out. A third said he thought the words for ready money were useless, as it was not the custom of the place to sell on credit. Every one who purchased expected to pay. They were parted with, and the inscription now stood, John Thompson sells hats. ‘Sells hats?’ says his next friend; ‘why, nobody will expect you to give them away. What, then, is the use of that word?’ It was stricken out, and hats followed, the rather as there was one painted on the board.
“So his inscription was ultimately reduced to John Thompson, with the figure of a hat subjoined.”
As a mason, at a village near Kirkaldy, in Scotland, was dressing a barley millstone from a large block, after cutting away a part, he found a lizard imbedded in the stone. It was about an inch and a quarter long, of a brownish yellow colour, and had a round head, with bright, sparkling, projecting eyes. It was apparently dead; but after being about five minutes exposed to the air, it showed signs of life, and soon after ran about with much celerity; after half an hour, it was brushed off the stone and killed. There were about 14 feet of earth above the rock, and the block in which the lizard was found was seven or eight feet deep in the rock; so that the whole depth of the animal from the surface was 21 or 22 feet. The stone had no fissure, was quite hard, and one of the best to be got from the quarry of Cullaloe, reckoned perhaps the first in Scotland.
— Kaleidoscope, Aug. 14, 1821
We learned in this problem that (spoiler!) if two squares of the same color are cut out of a chessboard, the remaining 62 squares cannot be tiled by 31 dominoes.
What if the squares removed are of different colors? Is the task possible then?
“I used to wake up at 4 a.m. and start sneezing, sometimes for five hours. I tried to find out what sort of allergy I had but finally came to the conclusion it must be an allergy to consciousness.” — James Thurber
Concerned that the men of 1768 no longer read the Bible, Edward Harwood decided to translate the New Testament into modern language. The result has been called “turgid,” “absurd,” “ridiculous,” and “one of the most discussed and insulted” Bibles of the 18th century. Samples of his work:
Before: “So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.”
After: “Since therefore you are now in a state of lukewarmness, a disagreeable medium between the two extremes, I will in no long time eject you from my heart with fastidious contempt.”
Before: “Give us this day our daily bread.”
After: “As thou hast hitherto most mercifully supplied our wants, deny us not the necessaries and conveniences of life, while thou art pleased to continue us in it.”
Before: “We shall not all die, but we shall all be changed.”
After: “We shall not all pay the common debt of nature, but we shall by a soft transition be changed from mortality to immortality.”
And here’s the Lord’s Prayer:
O thou great governor and parent of universal nature (God) who manifestest thy glory to the blessed inhabitants of heaven–may all thy rational creatures in all the parts of thy boundless dominion be happy in the knowledge of thy existence and providence, and celebrate thy perfections in a manner most worthy of thy nature and perfective of their own! May the glory of thy moral development be advanced and the great laws of it be more generally obeyed. May the inhabitants of this world pay as cheerful a submission and as constant an obedience to Thy will, as the happy spirits do in the regions of immortality.
Harwood said his translation “left the most exacting velleity without ground for quiritation.”
A strangely “costless” ambiguity: The H and the A are identical, but most people can read this phrase without effort.
From The Strand, July 1908:
“If you ask what Fig. 1 represents, nine people out of ten will tell you that it is a triangular piece of wood fastened to a folding screen on the inside, or something to that effect. It represents in reality a solid rectangular block of wood, with a notch cut in one side. Fig. 2 shows the view looking in the direction of the arrow, the position of the notch being shown by the dotted lines.”
