Line of Thought

At Mr Currie’s table I met several ingenious persons, who entertained me with curious and interesting reminiscences. Dr Adam Smith, author of ‘The Wealth of Nations,’ was a native of Kirkcaldy, and in the place composed his great work. While engaged in composition he frequently fell into a condition of reverie, so as to be entirely unconscious of his relations with the external world. Early on a Sunday morning he walked into his garden, his mind occupied with a train of ideas; he unconsciously travelled into the turnpike road, along which he proceeded in a state of abstraction, till he reached Dunfermline, at a distance of fifteen miles. The people were going to church, and the sound of the bells awakened the philosopher from his dream. Arrayed in an old dressing-gown, he was regarded as an oddity.

— Charles Rogers, Leaves From My Autobiography, 1876

| Literature · Oddities

Beyond the Call

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Dubious but entertaining: After the Battle of Wauhatchie on the night of October 29, 1863, rumors circulated that Confederate troops had retreated in the darkness because they’d mistaken a stampede of mules for a cavalry charge. Someone wrote a “Charge of the Mule Brigade,” and the Union quartermaster reportedly asked that the gallant mules “have conferred upon them the brevet rank of horses.”

But there are no Southern reports of a mule attack at Wauhatchie, and one Confederate combatant categorically denied the story when it appeared in Grant’s memoir. At best, it appears, some mules broke loose and caused enough confusion to permit the 137th New York Infantry to arrive and oppose the rebels.

“The exact details of whatever the mules did at Wauhatchie will never be precisely known,” writes historian Gene C. Armistead in Horses and Mules in the Civil War (2013), “but the story is too humorous and too good to abandon.”

| History · Oddities

Dead End

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

Hong Kong contains a street named Rednaxela Terrace. It’s hard not to notice that this is Alexander spelled backward, but the origin of the name is uncertain.

In Signs of a Colonial Era (2009), Andrew Yanne and Gillis Heller claim that the street had been named Alexander Terrace after its original owner but that a clerk recorded the name backward, as the Chinese language was written right to left at the time.

Another possibility is that the name is linked to New York abolitionist Robert Alexander Young’s 1829 pamphlet Ethiopian Manifesto, which contains the name Rednaxela.

| Language · Oddities

Fancy That

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

In 2005 Yale psychologists Deena Skolnick and Paul Bloom asked children and adults about the beliefs of fictional characters regarding other characters — both those that exist in the same world, such as Batman and Robin, and those that inhabit different worlds, such as Batman and SpongeBob SquarePants.

They found that while both adults and young children distinguish these two types of relationships, young children “often claim that Batman thinks that Robin is make-believe.”

“This is a surprising result; it seems unlikely that children really believe that Batman thinks Robin is not real,” they wrote. “If they did, they should find stories with these characters incomprehensible.”

One possible explanation is that young children can find it hard to take a character’s perspective, and so might have been answering from their own point of view rather than Batman’s. In a second study, kids acknowledged that characters from the same world can act on each other.

But this is a complex topic even for grownups. “James Bond inhabits a world quite similar to our own, and so his beliefs should resemble those of a real person. Like us, he should think Cinderella is make-believe. On the other hand, Cinderella inhabits a world that is sufficiently dissimilar to our own that its inhabitants should not share many of our beliefs. Our intuition, then, is that Cinderella should not believe that James Bond is make-believe; she should have no views about him at all.”

(Deena Skolnick and Paul Bloom, “What Does Batman Think About Spongebob? Children’s Understanding of the Fantasy/Fantasy Distinction,” Cognition 101:1 [2006], B9-B18. See Author!, Truth and Fiction, and Split Decision.)

| Literature · Oddities · Science & Math

Head Start

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

Does the green dot above flash before, as, or after the red dot reaches it? Most people say after, but in fact the flash occurs before the red dot arrives (below). This anomaly is known as the flash-lag effect, and its cause is unclear. Possibly it’s a sign that the visual system extrapolates the position of a moving object more readily than that of an unpredictably flashing one.

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Image: Wikimedia Commons
| Oddities · Science & Math

The Chapel Oak

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In 1696 lightning struck an oak in Normandy, and the resulting fire hollowed out the tree. Villagers filled the space with two chapels, reached by a spiral staircase that circles the trunk. Now perhaps a thousand years old, the Chêne chapelle is still in use today.

See Al Fresco.

| Oddities

Endless Love

Joe invents a time machine. He travels back in time and meets Emily, and they have a child, Bill. Bill grows up, meets Carol, and has a child, Joe. Joe grows up and invents a time machine, and so on.

Joe and Bill are each the other’s father and son, and each man is his own grandfather.

From Dave Morice’s Alphabet Avenue, 1997. See “Proof That a Man Can Be His Own Grandfather” and Oedipus Wrecked. Robert Heinlein’s 1959 story “‘–All You Zombies–‘” is even more confusing.

| Oddities

The Great Michigan Pizza Funeral

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When the FDA ordered Ilario Fabbrini to recall 29,188 frozen cheese and mushroom pizzas in 1973, fearing a botulism outbreak, the Michigan pizza magnate went them one better: He buried the pies ceremonially in an 18-foot hole before a crowd of hundreds, including Michigan governor William Milliken.

“I admire your spunk and your spirit,” Milliken told him. “You are an example for businessmen all over the country who are facing tough problems. You are fighting back and I’m sure you will succeed.”

Fabbrini had hoped to make a virtue of necessity, giving up the pizzas but gaining at least some publicity and goodwill in the process. The recall was the largest of its kind to date in American history.

Unfortunately the FDA later ruled out botulism, which meant that the whole escapade had been needless.

Fabbrini sued his suppliers and eventually won the case, but Papa Fabbrini Pizzas went out of business in the early 1980s.

| Oddities

Protocol

New Mexico’s state senate took up a startling amendment in 1995 — it would have required psychologists to dress up as wizards when providing expert testimony on a defendant’s competency:

When a psychologist or psychiatrist testifies during a defendant’s competency hearing, the psychologist or psychiatrist shall wear a cone-shaped hat that is not less than two feet tall. The surface of the hat shall be imprinted with stars and lightning bolts. Additionally, a psychologist or psychiatrist shall be required to don a white beard that is not less than 18 inches in length and shall punctuate crucial elements of his testimony by stabbing the air with a wand. Whenever a psychologist or psychiatrist provides expert testimony regarding a defendant’s competency, the bailiff shall contemporaneously dim the courtroom lights and administer two strikes to a Chinese gong.

The measure had received unanimous approval in the senate and was headed for the house of representatives when sponsor Duncan Scott explained that he’d intended it as satire — he felt that too many mental health practitioners had been acting as expert witnesses. It was withdrawn and never signed into law.

| Oddities