Max Weiss and Jacques Schwarz led oddly symbolic chess careers: Their names mean “white” and “black,” and they tended to reach draws together. Here’s their encounter from the Nuremberg tournament of 1883:

1.e4 e6 2.d4 d5 3.exd5 exd5 4.Nf3 Nf6 5.Bd3 Bd6 6.O-O O-O 7.Bg5 Bg4 8.c3 c6 9.Nbd2 Nbd7 10.Qc2 Qc7 11.Rfe1 Rfe8 12.h3 Bxf3 13.Nxf3 h6 14.Bxf6 Nxf6 15.Nh4 Rxe1+ 16.Rxe1 Re8 17.Rxe8+ Nxe8 18.Nf5 Bf8 19.Qe2 Nd6 20.Nxd6 Qxd6 21.Qe8 Qe7 22.Qxe7 Bxe7 23.Bf5 Bg5 24.Bc8 Bc1 25.Bxb7 Bxb2 26.Bxc6 Bxc3 27.Bxd5 Bxd4 1/2-1/2

The final position is perfectly symmetrical.

Irving Chernev calls this “the perfect game” — proof, perhaps, that chess is a theoretical draw.

In a letter, Lewis Carroll asked his sister to analyze a little girl’s reasoning:

“I’m so glad I don’t like asparagus — because, if I did like it, I should have to eat it — and I can’t bear it!”

Carroll added: “It bothers me considerably.”

God started tiling Tasmania, but he ran out of grout.

Either that or erosion has exaggerated some natural fractures, producing this remarkable tessellation at Eaglehawk Neck.

One or the other.

Hughie Jennings was a baseball magnet. In five seasons with the Baltimore Orioles, Jennings was hit by pitches 202 times, sometimes thrice in a single game. In 1896 alone he was hit 51 times, a record that has stood for a century.

Getting hit can be a deliberate tactic, but Jennings did it regardless of the game situation. The Sporting Life wrote, “He seemed unable to convey the sense of danger from his brain to his limbs.” He wore crude pads under his uniform, but the repeated blows — 287 in his major-league career — left him black and blue; after one game he collapsed and remained unconscious for three days.

Curiously, the beatings continued off the field. At Cornell, where he earned a law degree, Jennings dove into a swimming pool one night only to discover it was empty. And in a 1911 auto accident he broke three limbs and suffered a concussion.

All this damage took its toll. At the end of the 1925 season Jennings had a nervous breakdown, and three years later he was dead. But he seemed philosophical about his bruises. “Life is full of trials,” he said, “which is a good thing for lawyers.”

Aug. 1, 1932, was a strange day for Londoner G.A. Hinkson:

Suddenly torrential rain fell only one hundred yards from where I was standing. The nearest trees in Kensington Gardens were almost hidden behind a milky mist of heavy rain. The rain-drops rebounding off the street created a layer of spray as high as the tops of the wheels of the taxis standing in the street. Where I was sheltering, hardly a drop of rain was falling. … Then the spray on the ground came nearer like a wave and receded. Suddenly it vanished completely.

From Meteorological Magazine, 64:159-60, 1932.

Ordered to join a jungle snake cult in his native Togo, Tété-Michel Kpomassie chanced to find a book about Greenland in a local Jesuit library. At the first opportunity he ran away.

Kpomassie’s 1981 autobiography, An African in Greenland, tells of his odyssey through West Africa and Europe seeking a route to the frozen island. He finally arrived in the mid-1960s, a black giant among the Inuit:

As soon as they saw me, all stopped talking. So intense was the silence, you could have heard a gnat in flight. Then they started to smile again, the women with slightly lowered eyes. When I was standing before them on the wharf, they all raised their heads to look me full in the face. Some children clung to their mothers’ coats, and others began to scream with fright or to weep.

Kpomassie happily spent the next two years driving a dogsled and hunting seal in a kayak. After eight years, he had reached the land of his dreams — a country with no trees and no snakes.