When a party of 13 dines at London’s Savoy Hotel, the management wards off bad luck by setting a place for Kaspar, a two-foot-tall statue of a black cat.

According to legend, when diamond magnate Woolf Joel held a dinner party for 14 guests at the hotel in 1898, one guest dropped out, and another predicted that the first person to leave the table would die. Joel left first and was shot dead a few weeks later.

To allay any further trouble, architect Basil Ionides sculpted Kaspar in 1927. When he joins a dining party, the cat has a napkin tied around his neck and is served like a regular diner, with a full place setting, champagne and wine.

Winston Churchill so admired Kaspar that he called for his attendance at every meeting of the Other Club, the political dining society that he founded with F.E. Smith. Kaspar has attended every fortnightly meeting for the last 88 years. Presumably he has a tell-all memoir in the works.

The Museum of English Rural Life got a surprise on Wednesday — a 155-year-old mousetrap there managed to catch a mouse:

So, this retired rodent had managed to sneak past University of Reading security, exterior doors and Museum staff, and clambered its way up into our Store. Upon finding itself there it would have found the promised land; a mouse paradise laid before it full of straw, wood and textiles. Then, out of thousands of objects, it chose for its home the very thing designed to kill it some 150 years ago: a mouse trap.

The trap was patented in 1861; it bills itself as a “perpetual mouse trap” that “will last a lifetime.” More at the museum’s blog.

(Thanks, Djerrid.)

The Austrian village of Jungholz is connected to the rest of the country by a single point, the summit of the mountain Sorgschrofen. The summit marks a “quadripoint,” a point that touches four distinct territories — here, Austria to the north and south and Germany to the east and west.

This raises some philosophical questions. Suppose a stubborn, infinitely skinny Austrian leaves Schattwald (in the south) to visit Jungholz at the same moment that an equally stubborn, infinitely skinny German leaves Bad Hindelang (in the west) to visit his grandmother in Pfronten (in the east). What happens? They can’t sidle past one another; the countries meet at a single, indivisible point. If neither will stand aside while the other passes, then the only solution I can see is for one to hop briefly onto the other’s shoulders.

Now suppose a border guard accosts them at this moment. The two occupy the same point on the Earth’s surface, yet one claims to be in Austria while the other is in Germany. Are they both right? And suppose that the lower man is killed by being jumped upon (he is very attenuated, after all). Which jurisdiction has authority over the crime scene? Who should judge the crime?

Further confusing borders: the Belgian town of Baarle-Hertog and, until recently, Cooch Behar in the Indian state of West Bengal.

(Thanks, Dan.)

Shortly after Pearl Harbor, a 12-year-old boy walked into an Arizona recruiting office and said, “I want to join the Army and shoot some Japs. Sure, I’m 17 years old. You enlist men 17 years old, don’t you? I don’t need my mother’s consent … I’m a midget.”

He didn’t get in, but other boys did. In 1942 the Marines issued an honorable discharge to William Holle of Eau Claire, Wis., who had enlisted the previous year at age 12. And 13-year-old Jackie MacInnes of Medford, Mass., took his older brother’s birth certificate to a Boston enlistment office, forged his parents’ signatures on the consent papers, and reported for duty at Newport, R.I. “Everything was going fine,” ran one news report, “until he wrote a letter home.” His parents came to pick him up.

At least one underage enlistee escaped detection — in 1988 Ronald Reagan signed a special bill granting disability benefits to Calvin L. Graham, above, a Marine veteran injured at Guadalcanal. The Navy had denied them because he’d lied about his age when enlisting. He was 12.

(From William M. Tuttle Jr., “Daddy’s Gone to War,” 1993.)

An attractive woman approaches Sylvester in a bar. She has a proposition: For a single payment of £50, he can have a passionate weeklong holiday with her in Nice. Everything else is covered: travel tickets, a first-class hotel, and her attentions. There’s one further condition. She’ll shortly say something important, which we’ll call the “key.” If the key is true, then she keeps the £50 and Sylvester gets the holiday at no further cost, as explained. If the key is false, then Sylvester must accept the £50 back, but he still gets the week’s holiday with her for free.

“How can he lose?” asks Peter Cave in How to Think Like a Bat (2011). “Either way, with regard to whether the key is true or not, he is bound to have the splendid trip and the passion. At worst, it costs him a mere £50.” He gives her the £50, and she gives him the key:

Either I shall return the £50 or you will pay me £1 million.

For an either/or statement to be false, both elements must be false. So for the key above to be false, the woman must not return the £50. But under the agreement she must. So this yields a contradiction, whether or not Sylvester pays her £1 million; the key cannot be false. On the other hand, if the key is true, then the agreement requires that she keep the £50 … which means that he must pay her £1 million.

“Once we have contradictions involved in conditions,” writes Cave, “we may find ourselves trapped into all manner of things.”

In March 1999, fisherman Steve Gowan was fishing for cod off the coast of Essex when he dredged up a green ginger beer bottle with a screw-on rubber stopper. Inside he found a note:

Sir or madam, youth or maid,

Would you kindly forward the enclosed letter and earn the blessing of a poor British soldier on his way to the front this ninth day of September, 1914.

Signed

Private T. Hughes
Second Durham Light Infantry.
Third Army Corp Expeditionary Force.

The enclosed letter read:

Dear Wife,

I am writing this note on this boat and dropping it into the sea just to see if it will reach you. If it does, sign this envelope on the right hand bottom corner where it says receipt. Put the date and hour of receipt and your name where it says signature and look after it well. Ta ta sweet, for the present.

Your Hubby.

Private Thomas Hughes, 26, of Stockton-on-Tees, had dropped the bottle into the English Channel in 1914 as he left to fight in France. He was killed two days afterward. His wife Elizabeth and daughter moved to New Zealand, where Elizabeth died in 1979. Gowan delivered the letter to the daughter, Emily Crowhurst, in Auckland that May. Two years old when her father had left for the war, she was now 86. She said, “It touches me very deeply to know … that his passage reached a goal. I think he would be very proud it had been delivered. He was a very caring man.”

On June 15, 1875, physician Albert Childs was standing outside his office in Cedar Creek, Nebraska, when he saw the horizon darken. At first he was hopeful for some needed rain, but then he realized that the cloud was moving under its own power.

“And then suddenly it was on him, a trillion beating wings and biting jaws,” writes entomologist Steve Nicholls in Paradise Found (2009). It was an unusually huge swarm of Rocky Mountain locusts descended from the mountains. Stunned, Childs set about estimating its size:

Using the telegraph, he sent messages up and down the line and found the swarm front to be unbroken for 110 miles. With his telescope he estimated the swarm to be over half a mile deep, and he watched it pass for ‘five full days.’ He worked out that the locusts were traveling at around fifteen miles an hour and came up with the astonishing fact that the swarm was 1,800 miles long. This swarm covered 198,000 square miles, or, if it was transposed on to the east coast, it would have covered all the states of Connecticut, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont.

“Albert Childs had recorded the largest ever swarm — the biggest aggregation of animals ever seen on planet Earth,” Nicholls writes. University of Wyoming entomologist Jeffrey Lockwood calls it the “Perfect Swarm.”

Hollinwood, near Manchester, was the scene of a rather novel rat killing match the other day, between Mr. Benson’s fox terrier dog, Turk, and a Mr. Lewis’ monkey, for £5. The conditions of the match were that each one had to kill twelve rats, and the one that finished them the quickest to be declared the winner. You may guess what excitement this would cause in the ‘doggy’ circle. It was agreed that Turk was to finish his twelve rats first, which he did, and in good time, too, many bets being made on the dog after he had finished them. After a few minutes had elapsed it now came the monkey’s turn, and a commotion it caused. Time being called, the monkey was immediately put to his twelve rats, Mr. Lewis, the owner, at the same time putting his hand in his coat pocket and handing the monkey a peculiar hammer. This was a surprise to the onlookers; but the monkey was not long in getting to work with his hammer, and, once at work, he was not long in completing the task set before him. You may talk about a dog being quick at rat killing, but he is really not in it with the monkey and his hammer. Had the monkey been left in the ring much longer you could not have told that his victims had been rats at all — he was for leaving them in all shapes. Suffice it to say the monkey won with ease, having time to spare at the finish. Most persons present (including Mr. Benson, the owner of the dog) thought the monkey would worry the rats in the same manner as the dog does; but the conditions said to kill, and the monkey killed with a vengeance, and won the £5, beside a lot of bets for his owner.

— Illustrated Police News, Sept. 4, 1880