A Hazy Mate

smullyan undetermined mate

Raymond Smullyan presented this oddity in his Chess Mysteries of Sherlock Holmes in 1980. Suppose we come upon this abandoned chess game. Can White mate in two moves? The answer seems to be yes. If Black can’t castle, then White can play 1. Ke6 and then promote his g-pawn, giving mate. If Black can castle, that means that neither his king nor his rook has yet moved, and hence he must just have moved his pawn to e5. That permits White to capture the pawn en passant. Now if Black castles then 2. b7 is mate, and if he plays any other move then the g-pawn promotes. Either way, White mates Black on his second move.

But that’s odd. We’ve decided that a mate in two exists, but we can’t show it — and we don’t even know how White commences!

(F. Alexander Norman, “Classicists and Constructivists: A Dilemma,” Mathematics Magazine 62:5 [December 1989], 340-342. See Donkey Sentences.)

02/17/2025 UPDATE: Reader Eugene Kruglov points out that 1. Ke6 works in Smullyan’s position whether or not Black castles — if he does, then 2. a8=Q is mate. The position below works as Smullyan intended — when Black castles, only the en passant capture leads to mate in two. (Thanks, Eugene.)

kruglov improvement

February 14, 2025February 17, 2025 | Oddities

Narrow Meaning

Reader J. William Hook submitted this curiosity to the Strand in August 1899. Holding the page level with the eyes foreshortens the characters and reveals a love poem:

Art thou not dear unto my heart?
Oh, I search that heart and see
And from my bosom tear the part
That beats not true to thee.

But to my bosom thou art dear,
More dear than words can tell,
And if a fault be cherished there,
‘Tis loving thee too well.

There seems to have been a little vogue for this kind of thing — C. Field submitted a similar image three months later.

February 10, 2025February 9, 2025 | Oddities · Poems

Some Lost Snowmen

In his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550), Giorgio Vasari notes that in January 1494, while Michelangelo was working on his first full-scale stone figure, “there was a heavy snowfall in Florence and Piero de’ Medici, Lorenzo’s eldest son … wanting, in his youthfulness, to have a statue made of snow in the middle of his courtyard, remembered and sent for Michelangelo and had him make the statue.”

A heavy snowfall did occur that month: One chronicler wrote, “There was the severest snowstorm in Florence that the oldest people living could remember.” And it was a tradition on such occasions for outstanding artists to sculpt large snow figures, including the Marzocco, the heraldic lion that is the city’s symbol. But “What snow figure Michelangelo fashioned is not known,” writes critic Georg Brandes, “only that it stood in the courtyard of the Palazzo Medici.”

Seventeen years later, Brussels residents protested the wealthy Habsburgs by building 110 satirical snowmen, more than half of which were said to be pornographic. There’s no visual record of that, either. It’s known as the Miracle of 1511.

February 2, 2025February 1, 2025 | Art · Oddities · Society

Academia

Caprices of Oxford dons, recounted in Maurice Bowra’s Memories: 1898-1939:

“In his quiet way [Wadham College Warden Joseph Wells] had an impressive authority, and it was told that once, when he heard a fearful row in the back quad, he walked up in the dark and said, ‘If you don’t stop at once, I shall light a match.’ They stopped.”

“[Oxford administrator Benjamin Parsons] Symons never admitted that he was wrong. An undergraduate was found drunk, and Symons abused another, quite innocent man for it, who said that his name was not that by which Symons had called him, but Symons would not admit it. ‘You’re drunk still. You don’t even know your own name. Go to your room at once.'”

“[Philosophy tutor Frank] Brabant kept a car and drove it badly, even by academic standards, which, from myopia, or self-righteousness, or loquacity, or absorption in other matters, are notoriously low. Once when I was with him, he drove straight into a cow and knocked it down, fortunately without damage. When the man in charge of it said quite mildly, ‘Look out where you are going,’ Brabant said fiercely, ‘Mind your own business,’ and drove on.”

See Metathesis.

January 30, 2025January 29, 2025 | Literature · Oddities

“A ‘Religious’ Fish”

Describing this fish (Holocanthus Alternaus), which was caught off Zanzibar, a correspondent of the ‘Times of India’ wrote: ‘… On the one side of the tail are the words, La-ilaha-illa Allah’ — ‘There is no God but God.’ On the other side, ‘Shan Allah’ — ‘God’s Work,’ or ‘An Act of God.’ … Many of our readers who know Arabic will be able to see for themselves from this untouched photograph that the fish is a devout Moslem.’ We have shown the photographs to an expert in this country, who informs us that the letters are certainly intended to represent Arabic characters, but that there is nothing sufficiently distinguishable to enable it to be said that they mean what they are alleged to mean. A further opinion is expressed that the ‘inscriptions’ may not be genuine.

— Illustrated London News, Dec. 28, 1929

January 25, 2025January 24, 2025 | Oddities

Pigs Penned

In 1899 the Strand invited 13 British celebrities to draw a pig with their eyes closed.

Field Marshal Frederick Sleigh Roberts:

Judge Sir Francis Jeune:

Mary Jeune, Baroness St Helier:

Hugh Jermyn, Bishop of Brechin:

Astronomer Sir Robert Ball:

Chemist William Ramsay:

Stage actor Henry Irving:

Illustrator Sir John Tenniel:

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle:

Novelist Walter Besant:

Organist Sir Frederick Bridge:

Inventor Hiram Maxim:

Magician Nevil Maskelyne:

(Illustrator Harry Furniss says the trick is to use your free hand as a guide.)

January 22, 2025January 22, 2025 | Oddities

The 40-Letter Paradox

A sentence must contain forty letters to be true.
This sentence does have a total of forty letters.
Therefore the second sentence is a true sentence.

This logic seems to hold up. Unfortunately, sentences 1 and 2 have 40 letters each — and sentence 3 has 41.

(David Morice, “Kickshaws,” Word Ways 22:1 [February 1989], 44-52.)

December 23, 2024December 22, 2024 | Oddities

Too Tired

Freezing in the Canadian arctic in 1821, John Franklin noted some telling effects of fatigue in his companions:

I observed, that in proportion as our strength decayed, our minds exhibited symptoms of weakness, evinced by a kind of unreasonable pettishness with each other. Each of us thought the other weaker in intellect than himself, and more in need of advice and assistance. So trifling a circumstance as a change of place, recommended by one as being warmer and more comfortable, and refused by the other from a dread of motion, frequently called forth fretful expressions, which were no sooner uttered than atoned for, to be repeated, perhaps, in the course of a few minutes. The same thing often occurred when we endeavoured to assist each other in carrying wood to the fire; none of us were willing to receive assistance, although the task was disproportioned to our strength.

From Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the Years 1819-20-21-22, 1823.

December 11, 2024December 10, 2024 | History · Oddities

Outwitted

Two “tricky” animal traps, described in the Strand, July 1898:

Attracted by bait placed on a tree limb, a bear finds its way blocked by a hanging stone and pushes it aside with its paw. “But, alas! the bear has no knowledge of mechanics, and suffers in consequence, for the weight swings back and strikes him heavily.” Angered, the bear strikes the stone a harder blow, and the contest escalates until he’s knocked off the limb.

Below, a python can allegedly be caught by boring a 6-inch hole in the base of a wall and tying up a pig on either side. “The python comes, sees the first pig, and swallows it; then noticing the through the hole that there is another pig on the other side, puts its head through and swallows that also.” Now it’s trapped, unable to advance or retreat.

The author suggests that both of these techniques are used by villagers in India, but doesn’t say where.

(A. Sarathkumar Ghosh, “Tricky Traps,” Strand 16:91 [July 1898], 27-32.)

December 10, 2024December 9, 2024 | Oddities

Pigcasso

The first nonhuman artist to be given her own art exhibition was a female pig rescued from a South African slaughterhouse in 2016. When her keeper, Joanne Lefson, noticed that the pig ate everything in her stall except some paintbrushes, she taught her to hold a brush in her mouth and apply paint to an easel, and Lefson could sell the resulting works to raise funds for the sanctuary.

Pigcasso’s works have been exhibited in the Netherlands, Germany, the United Kingdom, and China. In 2021 German collector Peter Esser paid £20,000 for her painting Wild and Free, a record price for an artwork created by an animal. Altogether the pig’s sales have raised more than $1 million. She died in March 2024, one day before Jane Goodall could arrive to meet her.

December 5, 2024December 4, 2024 | Art · Oddities