Do Your Best

Rules of the ill-understood East Anglian pub sport known as dwile flonking:

A “jobanowl,” or referee, is chosen (preferably a “dull-witted person”), and the two teams toss a sugar beet to decide who flonks first. The jobanowl begins play by shouting, “Here y’go t’gither!”

The flonker stands in the center with the “driveller,” a three-foot hazel pole topped with a dwile, or cloth. While the opposing team joins hands and dances in a circle around the flonker (“girting”), the flonker spins in the opposite direction and, at a chosen moment, flonks the dwile at them. He scores 3 points for a “wanton” (a direct hit on a girter’s head), 2 for a “morther” (a hit to the body), and 1 for a “ripper” (a hit to the leg). 1 point is deducted from either team for each person who remains sober at the end of the game.

If the dwile hits no one (known as a “swadge”), the girters (well, the opponents, who have now ceased girting) pass the dwile from hand to hand chanting “pot pot pot” while the flonker drinks from an ale-filled chamber pot.

The game ends when each team has had a chance at flonking the dwile (an interval known as a “snurd”). During play the jobanowl can choose to change the direction of the girters and can order any player to drink who is judged not to be taking the game seriously enough.

The Lewes Arms sponsors an annual match between its regulars and the thespians of the Lewes Operatic Society. “The rules of the game are impenetrable and the result is always contested.”

| Entertainment

Proof

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When inventor Guy Otis Brewster offered his Brewster Body Shield to the soldiers of World War I, he demonstrated its efficacy by standing before a Lewis machine gun firing bullets at full velocity, about 2,700 feet per second.

All that energy heated the breastplate, but Brewster said he felt “only about one tenth the shock which he experienced when struck by a sledge-hammer.”

Unfortunately the armor weighed 40 pounds, which made it cumbersome in the field.

(Bashford Dean, Helmets and Body Armor in Modern Warfare, 1920.)

| Technology

“Money Is Not Advice”

Proverbs of Latin America:

  • Of the doctor, the poet, and the fool we all have a small portion. (Mexico)
  • Each of us bears his friend and his enemy within himself. (Costa Rica)
  • The mother-in-law does not remember she was a daughter-in-law. (Venezuela)
  • Halfway is 12 miles when you have 14 miles to go. (Panama)
  • Diligence is the mother of good fortune. (Peru)
  • Face to face respect appears. (Ecuador)
  • You may believe every good report of a grateful man. (Guatemala)
  • Many go for wool and come back shorn themselves. (Dominican Republic)
  • He who marries prudence is the brother-in-law of peace. (Bolivia)
  • Nothing is so burdensome as a secret. (Colombia)
  • The vulgar keep no account of your hits, but of your misses. (Paraguay)
  • Grief shared is half grief; joy shared is double joy. (Honduras)
  • A “no” in time is better than a late “yes.” (Uruguay)
  • When you mourn, you cannot sing; when you sing, you cannot mourn. (Argentina)

(From Guy Zona, Eyes That See Do Not Grow Old, 1996.)

| Literature

Imagination

In particular it is what might be called ‘comparative originality’ that is so awful. If a man were to look over the fence on one side of his garden and observe that the neighbor on his left had laid his garden path round a central lawn; and were to look over the fence on the other side of his garden and observe that the neighbor on his right had laid his path down the middle of the lawn, and were then to lay his own garden path diagonally from one corner to the other, that man’s soul would be lost. Originality is only to be praised when not prefaced by the look to right and left.

— Quentin Crisp, “The Genius of Mervyn Peake,” 1946

| Art

A Simple Plan

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

You have three identical bricks and a ruler. How can you determine the length of a brick’s interior diagonal without any calculation?

Click for Answer
| Puzzles · Science & Math

Reversals

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The trio section of Mozart’s Serenade for Wind Octet in C, K. 388 (audible here at 14:30), is a double mirror canon: The second oboe introduces a line and after two bars the first oboe joins it playing the same line “upside down”; then the first bassoon starts its own line and the second bassoon enters playing that upside down. Now all four parts are exploring the same theme, but they’re offset by two bars apiece and two of them are inverted.

Pianist Erik Smith called this “the visual image of two swans reflected in the still water,” “a perfect example of Mozart’s use of academic means, canon, inverted canon and mirror canon, to a purely musical and emotional end.”

| Art

Bang!

A curious puzzle from Pi Mu Epsilon Journal, Fall 1968 [Volume 4, Issue 9]:

Where must a man stand so as to hear simultaneously the report of a rifle and the impact of the bullet on the target?

Click for Answer
| Science & Math

Imagining the Worst

Holders of lottery tickets are reluctant to trade them in for different tickets, even though they know that all tickets are equally likely to win. Why? Possibly it’s because of “anticipated regret” — I’ll feel like a fool if I discover I’ve traded away a winning ticket; I’d rather hold on to my ticket even if it means that my inaction costs me a fortune.

But in a series of experiments in 2007, Cornell psychologists Jane Risen and Thomas Gilovich found that people have a gut feeling that an exchanged lottery ticket is more likely to win than an unexchanged one, and are even willing to back up that belief with cash. We seem to find it easy to imagine that possibility, and that ease makes that outcome seem more likely.

“As these results indicate, the tendency to imagine a negative outcome and therefore to believe that it is especially likely to occur manifests itself in many other circumstances beyond the decision of whether to exchange lottery tickets.” For example, we think we’re more likely to be pulled over by police when we’ve borrowed a car without permission, and we think we’re more likely to be called on in class when we haven’t done the reading.

For similar reasons, people are reluctant to switch checkout lanes at the grocery store or to change answers on a multiple-choice test. “Although one might think that in most situations the rational system would hold the upper hand, it is often the intuitive system that people obey.”

(Jane L. Risen and Thomas Gilovich, “Another Look at Why People Are Reluctant to Exchange Lottery Tickets,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 93:1 [2007], 12.)

| Oddities

Toynbee Tiles

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

What is this? No one quite knows. Plaques such as this have been found embedded in the streets of 24 major American cities since the late 1980s. Typically they read:

TOYNBEE IDEA
IN MOViE `2001
RESURRECT DEAD
ON PLANET JUPITER

But what that means, and who’s been placing them, are unknown. TOYNBEE may be British historian Arnold J. Toynbee, and MOViE `2001 is likely Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film. What do these have in common? One possibility is Ray Bradbury’s 1984 short story “The Toynbee Convector,” which appeals to Toynbee’s idea that humans must adopt ambitious goals in order to advance even slightly (colonizing Jupiter might be such a goal). But that’s just a guess, and even if it’s right it’s not clear how someone thought that impressing it in asphalt would advance this cause. Maybe some sort of Phase 2 is coming.

| Oddities

Homage

In the spring of 1908, Max Beerbohm and Edmund Gosse sent a message back and forth, each adding a line until they had composed a sonnet to Henry James, whose incomprehensible novels they both admired. The odd-numbered lines are Beerbohm’s, the even-numbered Gosse’s:

To Henry James

Say, indefatigable alchemist,
Melts not the very moral of your scene,
Curls it not off in vapour from between
Those lips that labour with conspicuous twist?

Your fine eyes, blurred like arc-lamps in a mist
Immensely glare, yet glimmering intervene,
So that your May-Be and your Might-Have-Been
Leave us still plunging for the genuine gist.

How different from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, —
As clear as water and as smooth as oil,
And no jot knowing of what Maisie knew!
Flushed with the sunset air of roseate Rye

You stand, marmoreal darling of the Few,
Lord of the troubled speech and single Eye.

“The sonnet was never shown to James himself,” writes J.G. Riewald in Max Beerbohm’s Mischievous Wit, “because, according to Max, ‘he would be too complex to understand our special brand of sincere reverence.'”

| Literature