Maud was Tennyson’s own favorite poem, but critics were put off by its themes of death, loss, war, and murder.
One suggested that there were too many vowels in the title — and that either of them could go.
Author: Greg Ross
Fox in Stocks
In 2007, prison inmate Charles Jay Wolff sent a hard-boiled egg to U.S. District Court Judge James Muirhead in Concord, N.H.
Wolff, who was awaiting trial for sexual assault, said he was an Orthodox Jew and demanded a kosher diet.
In his judgment, Muirhead wrote:
I do not like eggs in the file.
I do not like them in any style.
I will not take them fried or boiled.
I will not take them poached or broiled.
I will not take them soft or scrambled,
Despite an argument well-rambled.
No fan I am of the egg at hand.
Destroy that egg! Today! Today!
Today I say!
Without delay!
“We’ve told him, if you don’t like the eggs, don’t eat them,” said Assistant Attorney General Andrew Livernois.
Squirt Guard
Why didn’t this catch on? Joseph Fallek’s “grapefruit shield,” patented in 1927, would have saved generations of spouses from spattered juice.
And after breakfast, the rind could sail to the New World.
“Singular Phenomenon”
A short time ago, I was pricking out some annuals on a flower-bed, on which some geraniums were already planted, when I was surprised to see flashes of light coming from a truss of geranium flowers. At first I thought it was imagination, but my wife and a friend who were present also saw them. Time was about 9 p.m., and the atmosphere clear. There were other geraniums a different colour on the same bed, but there was no effect on them. The particular geranium was a Tom Thumb. Is this at all common? I have never seen or read of it before. — S. Ingham
— Knowledge, July 27, 1883
The Mirror
From Albert Beiler, Recreations in the Theory of Numbers (1964):
1 + 4 + 5 + 5 + 6 + 9 = 3 + 2 + 3 + 7 + 8 + 7
Pair each digit on the left with one on the right (for example, 13, 42, 53, 57, 68, 97). The sum of these six numbers will always equal its mirror image:
13 + 42 + 53 + 57 + 68 + 97 = 79 + 86 + 75 + 35 + 24 + 31
This works for all 720 possible combinations.
Most remarkably, you can square every term in these equations and they still hold:
132 + 422 + 532 + 572 + 682 + 972 = 792 + 862 + 752 + 352 + 242 + 312
A Look Around
In September 1893, London doctor Farquhar Matheson was sailing with his wife on Scotland’s Loch Alsh, between the isle of Skye and the mainland. “Our sail was up and we were going gaily along when suddenly I saw something rise out of the loch in front of us–a long, straight, necklike thing as tall as my mast.”
The thing was 200 yards away; it was not until it began to submerge that Matheson saw “it was a large sea-monster–of the saurian type, I should think.”
He likened the head and neck to those of a giraffe. He watched the creature surface again three times, at intervals or two or three minutes, as he followed it for perhaps a mile. “It was not a sea-serpent, but a much larger and more substantial beast–something of the nature of a gigantic lizard, I should think.”
He denied emphatically that he had seen only an optical illusion, noting that he had watched the creature’s head gradually descend and ascend several times, and saw the light glisten on its smooth skin.
That evening he described the event to some gentlemen, including Sir James Farrar. They laughed at first, but “when I showed them that none of their theories would fit the case, they admitted that the sea-serpent, or sea-monster, could not be altogether a myth.”
Certainly, Officer
It’s said that police sergeants in Leith, Scotland, used this tongue twister as a sobriety test:
The Leith police dismisseth us,
I’m thankful, sir, to say;
The Leith police dismisseth us,
They thought we sought to stay.
The Leith police dismisseth us,
We both sighed sighs apiece;
And the sigh that we sighed as we said goodbye
Was the size of the Leith police.
If you can’t say it, you’re drunk.
In a Word
picqueter
n. one who arranges artificial flowers for a living
Arnold Bennett was surprised to find no fresh flowers in George Bernard Shaw’s apartment.
“But I thought you were so fond of flowers,” he said.
“I am,” Shaw replied, “and I’m very fond of children too, but I don’t chop their heads off and stand them in pots about the house.”
“Turks Flee From a Mirage at Shaiba”
On April 12th, a three days’ battle opened at Shaiba with an attack by a motley army of 22,000 Turks, Kurds, and Arabs commanded by German officers. During the thick of the fighting, and when success was well within their grasp, the Turkish forces ceased firing and fled in wild panic from field.
A Turkish prisoner subsequently explained the cause of the Turkish withdrawal. It appears that a pack train, approaching the British line from the rear, had been so distorted by a mirage that it appeared to the Turks as a great body of reinforcements. Believing themselves to be fighting against enormous odds, they had yielded up a victory almost won.
– William C. King, King’s Complete History of the World War, 1922
A Field Guide
Medieval sportsmen invented collective nouns for everything from owls to otters. Less well known are the terms they invented for people — this list is taken from Joseph Strutt, The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England, 1801:
- a state of princes
- a skulk of thieves
- an observance of hermits
- a lying of pardoners
- a subtlety of sergeants
- a multiplying of husbands
- an incredibility of cuckolds
- a safeguard of porters
- a stalk of foresters
- a blast of hunters
- a draught of butlers
- a temperance of cooks
- a melody of harpers
- a poverty of pipers
- a drunkenship of cobblers
- a disguising of tailors
- a wandering of tinkers
- a malapertness of peddlers
- a fighting of beggars
- a blush of boys
- a nonpatience of wives
- a superfluity of nuns
- a herd of harlots