Elphinston: What, have you not read it through?
Johnson: No, Sir, do you read books through?
— Life of Samuel Johnson, 1791
Author: Greg Ross
Slippery When Wet
While M.V. Tancred was riding out a typhoon in Kobe Bay in early October 1954, E. Gherzi and his companions noted something strange: The waves had steps.
[T]here were a number of well-defined steps, carved so to say into the water just like the steps of a ladder, starting from the trough of the wave up to about half its height. Although the waves were moving quickly, the steps remained, steadily extending parallel to each other for one or two metres in length. There were at times as many as twenty of these nicely successive steps cut into the body of the wave. We tried to photograph them, but the very poor visibility and the fast motion of the waves resulted only in a blurred print.
— “Peculiar Stratified Shape of Typhoon Waves,” Nature, Feb. 12, 1955
Lonely Words
What is gopher wood? Noah used it to build his ark, but there’s no other reference to it in the Bible.
Similarly, no one’s quite sure what a kankedort is. It appears in one passage in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde:
Was Troilus nought in a kankedort,
That lay, and myghte whisprynge of hem here,
And thoughte, “O Lord, right now renneth my sort
Fully to deye, or han anon comfort!”
The Oxford English Dictionary defines it helplessly as an awkward situation or affair and says it’s “of unascertained etymology.”
See Hapax Legomenon.
A Goodnight Kiss
On Oct. 13, 1863, Connecticut manufacturer S.R. Wilmot was sailing from Liverpool to New York aboard the steamer City of Limerick when he dreamed that his wife visited his stateroom and kissed him. When he awoke, his cabin mate said, “You’re a pretty fellow, to have a lady come and visit you this way.” He related what he had seen, lying awake in his bunk, and Wilmot was surprised to find it corresponded exactly with his dream.
When he joined his wife in Watertown, she asked, “Did you receive a visit from me a week ago Tuesday?”
“A visit from you?” he asked. “We were more than a thousand miles at sea.”
“I know it,” she said, “but it seemed to me that I visited you.”
She explained that she had been thinking about him on the night in question, and “it seemed to her that she went out to seek me. Crossing the wide and stormy sea, she came at length to a low, black steamship, whose side she went up, and then descending into the cabin, passed through it to the stern until she came to my state-room.”
“Tell me,” she said, “do they ever have state-rooms like the one I saw, where the upper berth extends further back than the under one? A man was in the upper berth, looking right at me, and for a moment I was afraid to go in, but soon I went up to the side of your berth, bent down and kissed you, and embraced you, and then went away.”
“The description given by my wife of the steamship was correct in all particulars, though she had never seen it.”
(Frederic Myers, Principles of Psychology, 1891)
Misc
- Which is worth more, a pound of $10 gold pieces or half a pound of $20 gold pieces?
- A kazoo costs $1 plus half its price. How much does it cost?
- On its March 1961 cover, MAD Magazine pointed out that 1961 was the first “upside-up” year — the first year that reads the same upside down — since 1881. What will be the next such year?
White Heat
Ralph R. Maerz patented this snowball maker in 1989, to produce balls with an “aesthetically pleasing and aerodynamically sound round shape.”
It would have been a doomsday weapon in Edinburgh in 1838, when a snowball fight escalated into a full-scale riot:
On the 10th January some snowballing took place in front of the College, in which the students took part. The warfare between the students and the townspeople was renewed on the 11th, and became more serious. Several shop windows were broken, the shops were closed, and the street traffic suspended. The students, believing that the constables took the side of the mob against them, appeared on the 12th armed with sticks, to defend themselves against the constables’ batons. Then a regular riot took place, sticks and batons being freely used, and matters became so serious that the magistrates found it necessary to send to the Castle for a detachment of soldiers of the 79th Highlanders, which arrived and drew up across the College quadrangle, and peace was restored. [University Snowdrop, 1838]
This may be history’s only instance of military intervention in a snowball fight. Five students were tried; all were acquitted.
Music Appreciation
“Debussy’s music is the dreariest kind of rubbish. Does anybody for a moment doubt that Debussy would write such chaotic, meaningless, cacophonous, ungrammatical stuff, if he could invent a melody?” — New York Post, 1907
“It is probable that much, if not most, of Stravinsky’s music will enjoy brief existence.” — New York Sun, Jan. 16, 1937
“Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto, like the first pancake, is a flop.” — Nicolai Soloviev, Novoye Vremya, St. Petersburg, Nov. 13, 1875
“Rigoletto is the weakest work of Verdi. It lacks melody.” — Gazette Musicale de Paris, May 22, 1853
“Sure-fire rubbish.” — New York Herald Tribune on Porgy and Bess, Oct. 11, 1935
Got That?
There is no Pope John XX. In numbering its pontiffs, the church skipped directly from Pope John XIX to Pope John XXI because confusion in the records led Pope John XX to believe that Pope John XIV had been succeeded by a second Pope John XIV, but that Pope John XV to Pope John XIX had overlooked his existence. So Pope John XX ordered his designation changed to Pope John XXI so that Pope John XV to Pope John XIX could be renumbered Pope John XVI to Pope John XX. But there was no second Pope John XIV, so Pope John XV to Pope John XIX were correctly numbered and the new Pope John XXI should have remained Pope John XX.
Worse, Pope John XVI was a disputed claimant whose number should have been reused, moving all subsequent Popes John back a notch. That hasn’t happened either.
The bottom line is that there’s still time for you to be Pope John XX if you want to. You just need to be elected by the College of Cardinals.
An Artificial Aurora
Karl Selim Lemström worked a quiet miracle in 1882: He strung conducting wire over the summit of a Lapland mountain and watched it draw down a shaft of light from the night sky — poetic proof that the aurora borealis is an electrical discharge from the upper atmosphere.
See Charged Words.
Imaginative Literature
False book-backs ordered by Charles Dickens in 1851 to fill blank spaces in his study at Tavistock House:
- Five Minutes in China (3 volumes)
- Forty Winks at the Pyramids (2 volumes)
- History of the Middling Ages (6 volumes)
- Jonah’s Account of the Whale
- Captain Parry’s Virtues of Cold Tar
- Kant’s Ancient Humbugs (10 volumes)
- Bowwowdom: A Poem
- The Quarrelly Review
- The Art of Cutting the Teeth
- Drowsy’s Recollections of Nothing (3 volumes)
- Heavysides Conversations With Nobody (3 volumes)
- Growler’s Gruffiology, With Appendix (4 volumes)
- Miss Biffin on Deportment
- Lady Godiva on the Horse
- Munchausen’s Modern Miracles
- On the Use of Mercury by the Ancient Poets
And Hansard’s Guide to Refreshing Sleep, “as many volumes as are required to fill up.”