Careful!

Before conductors used batons, they kept time by banging a long staff against the floor. In January 1687, Jean-Baptiste Lully was conducting a Te Deum in this way when he struck his toe. The wound turned gangrenous, the gangrene spread — and he died.

An Alarming Paradox

In 1735, an anonymous “lover of mathematicks” offered the following conundrum:

“‘Tis certainly Matter of Fact, that three certain Travellers went on a Journey, in which, tho’ their Heads travelled full twelve Yards more than their Feet, yet they all return’d alive, with their Heads on.”

How is this possible?

Click for Answer

“A Singular Coincidence”

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On the 13th of February 1746, as the records of the French criminal jurisprudence inform us, one Jean Marie Dunarry was brought to the scaffold for murdering his father; and, strangely enough, on the 13th of February, 1846, precisely one hundred years later, another Jean Marie Dunbarry, a great-grandson of the first-mentioned criminal, paid the same penalty for the same crime.

— Frank H. Stauffer, The Queer, the Quaint and the Quizzical, 1882

Work Smarter, Not Harder

On Dec. 10, 1968, a uniformed man pulled over a bank car in Tokyo. He explained that police had received a warning that dynamite had been planted in the vehicle, which was transporting bonuses for local Toshiba employees. The four passengers got out and watched as the officer crawled underneath.

After a moment he rolled out, shouting that the car was about to explode. When the passengers ran, he got in and drove off.

Thus one man stole 294,307,500 yen in broad daylight, working alone and without harming anyone. It remains the largest single heist in Japanese history. The thief was never caught.

“The Use of the Dictionary”

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The following message was composed for Bizarre Notes and Queries, July-August 1890, to show “that it would be possible to write a technically grammatical sentence, which would be almost unintelligible.” “The words below can all be found in the dictionary, and all are grammatically used: and yet the thing is as hopelessly dark as if written in Cherokee.” It purports to be a note from an author to a critic:

Sir:– You have behaved like an impetiginous-Croyle! like those inquinate, Crass-sciolists who envious of my moral celsitude, carry their nugacity to the height of creating symposically the facund words which my polymathic genius uses with uberty to abligate the tongues of the weetless! Sir–you have crassly parodied my own pet words, as though they were tangrams. I will not coacervate reproaches–I would abduce a veil over the atramental ingratitude which has chamferred even my undicerptible heart. I am silent on the foscillation, which my coadjivancy must have given you when I offered to become your fautor and admincle. I will not speak of the lippitude, the ablepsy, you have shown in exacerbating me–one whose genius you should have approached with mental discalceation. So I tell you sir syncophically, and without supervaceneous words, nothing will render ignoscible your conduct to me. I warn you that I would vellicate your nose, if I thought that any moral diathrosis could be thereby performed–if I thought that I should not impignorate my reputation by such a digtadiation.

“For an entire solution of the above highly interesting missive, the reader is invited to amuse himself an hour or two with Walker’s or Webster’s Unabridged.”

George Psalmanazar

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Anyone can lead a fascinating life if he’s willing to invent it out of whole cloth. Or at least that’s the lesson of George Psalmanazar, one of the stranger figures in European history.

Born in France in 1679, Psalmanazar traveled to Scandinavia in 1700 and perversely told everyone he was from Formosa. And he didn’t stint on details. In Formosa, he said:

  • Horses and camels were used for mass transportation.
  • Men walked naked, covering their privates with gold and silver plates.
  • The chief food was a serpent, hunted with branches.
  • A man could have many wives; if any was unfaithful he could eat her.
  • Murderers were hung upside down and shot full of arrows.
  • Formosans sacrificed 18,000 young boys to gods each year, and priests ate the bodies.

Psalmanazar eventually found he could make a career of this; he gave lectures and wrote a book that went through two English editions and was translated into French and German. To keep up “Formosan” appearances, he ate raw meat, slept upright in a chair, and claimed to worship the sun and moon. Eventually, though, he gave up the charade, confessing in 1706.

To this day, no one knows who he really was — he never gave his real name.