Found Art

George Herrick notes this oddity in his 1997 commonplace book: The record of this U.S. congressional hearing on dirigible disasters contains an inadvertent poem — the encoded weather report for April 3, 1933:

Washington numoil nihilist radnell deadly wabash.
Titusville sanno reflect unripe turfs.
Harrington bonfire gecko unfold.
George felger naked neggins.
Pas roofage gedby gafol.
Havana sorrow mabin caramel.
Father safable oak barfee rogue.
Wichita nineveh mulberry somnific cupsail.
Doucet nightfall naked gargarize birds.
Galveston sirup gullish sacred cupsail.
Sound narford naked ungear seemly.
Antonio surrogate fabella sausage cunette.
Davenport ridgy reflow feugar needs consort.
Birmingham simulate subjoin formosa faints.
Buffalo nightfire ribard gummut gently.
Evansville romulus seahog femme mends control.
Memphis similar suburb gammon medlar wired catsup.
Detroit negative rabate fengone miley currency.
Indianapolis regent seabate formal gently catsup.
Nashville samuda sabula ginmill mexico congregate.
Columbus rugate mallet farmable feline.

Herrick writes, “This particular code has literary flair and one wants the rich prose to read on.”

| Oddities · Poems

Round and Square

This rank impossibility by Kokichi Sugihara won second prize in the Neural Correlate Society’s 2016 illusion of the year contest.

The key is that the top of each cylinder is not a planar curve. Dickinson College mathematician David Richeson has created an interactive applet that you can use to examine the shape, and see his paper below for an explanation of the math and the template of a paper model.

(David Richeson, “Do the Math!: Sugihara’s Impossible Cylinder,” Math Horizons 24:1 [September 2016], 18-19.)

| Oddities · Science & Math

The Sermon Game

In Ambrosia and Small Beer (1964), Edward Marsh describes a way of passing time during a long sermon:

[Y]ou look out for words beginning with each letter of the alphabet in succession, and if you get as far as Z (for which you may count a Z in the middle of a word) you cast a Bible on the ground and leave the building. It is palpitating. On this occasion we were held up by B, which seemed as if it would never come; and as the sermon was short neither of us got beyond M.

In Strong Drink, Strong Language (1990), John Espey writes,

Like most ministers’ children, I imagine, I early perfected several techniques for surviving sermons — counting games, making knight’s moves through the congregation using bald heads, or brown-haired, or ladies’ hats for jumps; betting my right hand against my left on which side of the center aisle the next cough would come from; or what the division would be in the Lord’s Prayer between ‘debts’ and ‘trespasses.’ I had, after all, heard everything, and more than once, by the time I turned ten.

P.G. Wodehouse’s 1922 story “The Great Sermon Handicap” describes a variation on a horse race: “Steggles is making the book. Each parson is to be clocked by a reliable steward of the course, and the one that preaches the longest sermon wins.” In 1930 a group of Cambridge undergraduates carried this out in real life — the winner, for the record, was the Rev. H.C. Read, “riding” the parish church of St Andrew-the-Great.

| Religion · Society

Observations

Pensées of Mauritian aphorist Malcolm de Chazal:

  • Birdsong is always in pitch. Birds sound wrong only when frightened.
  • The underbrush makes the light chubby.
  • A trotting dog: his hind legs knit and his forelegs crochet.
  • Night softens the mind’s irritations and inflames the body’s.
  • The mouth and eyes are each anagrams of the other.
  • An animal’s feet are as intelligent as a man’s hands.
  • Women make us poets, children make us philosophers.
  • A cat purrs himself to sleep, being the only creature who sings his own lullaby.
  • Shadows round everything out. The lacework of light is based on a circular pattern.
  • Good taste has no fixed rules, though fashion has. Taste amounts to being fashionable with a sense of style.
  • The eyes of the overly fearful stammer.
  • Servants eventually come to resemble their masters. “Professional” churchgoers end up looking like priests.
  • Suffering doesn’t ennoble unless there is greatness to begin with.

And “Number is the alphabet of form, which is why children always want to touch whatever they count.”

| Quotations

Homeward

Perhaps the most touching story is told by a Canadian, Flight-Commander R. Leckie, D.S.O., in a letter home, published in an American paper. After an engagement with hostile aircraft over the North Sea he came down, his seaplane riddled with shrapnel, over fifty miles from land, and then had to act as rescuer and host to the crew of an aeroplane, wrecked by engine failure. Six men were then adrift in a doomed machine, with no food and little water. The Commander had four pigeons; one was released at once, a second on the next day, a third on the third day. All failed to reach home, perishing over the waste of waters. The fourth, set free in a fog, hungry and thirsty, struggled over the fifty miles of sea without a landmark and without a rest. He could not reach his loft, but fluttered down in a coastguard station, and there fell dead from exhaustion. But his message was delivered, and six men were saved.

— Bird Notes and News, Winter 1918

| History

Reciprocity Redux

sallows reciprocity post

From Lee Sallows:

“The above three strips of ten numbers have an intriguing property. They record how many times each of the decimal digits (shown at left) occur in the other two strips. Hence the 6 in the left-hand strip identifies the number of 0’s in strips B and C, while the 2 in the centre strip counts the number of 3’s present in strips A and C. Moreover, the same property holds for every number in all three strips.”

See Reciprocation.

(Thanks, Lee.)

| Science & Math

In a Word

hippomaniacally
adv. in a manner reminiscent of a mad horse

frample
v. of a horse: to paw the ground

accoy
v. to quiet or soothe

tournure
n. graceful manner or bearing

In an 1884 letter, Augustus Hare noted that the Bishop of Lichfield drove horses named Pride and Prejudice. “He says people may consider it a terrible thing for a bishop to be drawn hither and thither by these passions, but then it is assuredly a fine thing to have them well under control.”

| Language · Literature

Plan A

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ste01945.jpg

The Greek architect Dinocrates proposed carving Mount Athos into a colossal man who held a city in one hand and with the other poured a river into the sea.

Alexander the Great rejected the proposal because (among other things!) it would have required importing grain by ship rather than growing it near the city.

| Art · History

Travel Literature

For decades, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. kept a record of the books he read. Pleasingly, the last entry is Thornton Wilder’s 1935 novel Heaven’s My Destination.

In Winter Rules, George Gardner Herrick claims that the book was not to be found in Holmes’ library in Washington or Massachusetts. I can’t confirm that, though.

Sort of related: The definition of confection in Samuel Johnson’s 1755 Dictionary of the English Language contains this quotation:

Of best things then, what world shall yield confection
To liken her?
Shakespeare.

In 1893 a correspondent to Notes and Queries pointed out that this passage appears nowhere in Shakespeare. “I have just now found it in [Sir Philip Sidney’s] ‘Arcadia,’ book i, the eclogue of Thyrsis and Dorus. Clearly he quoted from memory. What a memory the man had! — and how careless he sometimes was in trusting it.”

| Literature