Lewis Carroll once wrote a story in which a poet is excited to discover this establishment:
He’s disappointed to learn that Mr. Lubkin actually deals in Roman cement.
Erratum
It’s important to acknowledge your mistakes. In a 1920 editorial, the New York Times attacked Robert Goddard’s claim that a rocket would work in space:
That Professor Goddard, with his ‘chair’ in Clark College and the countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution, does not know the relation of action to reaction, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react — to say that would be absurd. Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.
In 1969, days before Apollo 11 landed on the moon, it published this correction:
Further investigation and experimentation have confirmed the findings of Isaac Newton in the 17th century, and it is now definitely established that a rocket can function in a vacuum as well as in an atmosphere.
It added: “The Times regrets the error.”
Equivoque
An equivoque is a poem that can be read in two different ways. This one appeared in The Weekly Pacquet of Advice from Rome in 1679. Protestants were to read each line straight across, Catholics down each column:
The Jesuit’s Double-Faced Creed
| I hold for sound faith | What England’s church allows |
| What Rome’s faith saith | My conscience disavows |
| Where the king’s head | The flock can take no shame |
| The flock’s misled | Who hold the Pope supreme |
| Where th’altar’s dress’d | The worship’s scarce divine |
| The people’s bless’d | Whose table’s bread and wine |
| He’s but an ass | Who their communion flies |
| Who shuns the Mass | Is Catholic and wise. |
War Pigeon
Humans have no monopoly on valor. A pigeon won the French Croix de Guerre for heroic service delivering messages in Verdun during World War I.
Cher Ami, a Black Check cock, delivered 12 important messages for the U.S. Army Signal Corps.
On his final mission, during the battle of the Argonne in October 1918, he was shot through the breast and still delivered his message. It was found in a capsule hanging from his shattered leg, and helped saved around 200 U.S. soldiers of the 77th Infantry Division’s “Lost Battalion.”
Unlucky in Darts?
In 1908, Jim Garside, the landlord of Leeds’ Adelphi Inn, was called before the local magistrate. In places where alcohol is consumed, English law permits betting only on games of skill. Garside had been permitting bets on darts. Wasn’t that a game of chance?
Garside summoned a dartboard and local champion William “Bigfoot” Anakin, who proceeded to hit every number the court named.
Garside was discharged.
Ars Longa
In the 1840s, John Banvard painted a panorama of the Mississippi River valley — possibly the largest painting ever attempted. It was 12 feet high and 1,300 feet long.
He traveled with it through Europe, Asia, and Africa, and Queen Victoria even got a private viewing.
Improbably, it’s been lost. How do you misplace a painting that’s a quarter mile long?
The Peabody Hotel Ducks
You always know when it’s 11 a.m. at Memphis’ Peabody Hotel: Five ducks are escorted from their penthouse suite, down the elevator to the lobby, along a red carpet (accompanied by a Sousa march), and into the fountain, where they spend the day. At 5 p.m. they return, with equal ceremony.
This has happened every day since the 1930s.
Cats and Milk
Most adult cats are lactose-intolerant.
“Come Into the Arms of the Shoving Leopard”
The Rev. William Archibald Spooner (1844-1930) was famously reputed to swap consonants in his speech (“The weight of rages will press hard upon the employer”).
His legend has grown so popular that today it’s hard to known which “spoonerisms” really happened. For instance, Spooner might really have asked, “Is the bean dizzy?”, but he almost certainly never said, “You have hissed all my mystery lectures and were caught fighting a liar in the quad. Having tasted two worms, you will leave by the next town drain.”
But we can be fairly certain that when he proposed a toast to “The Boar’s Head” (a pub), it was not a spoonerism.
He was a priest, after all.
Seeing Stars
Copernicus, that learned wight,
The glory of his nation,
With draughts of wine refreshed his sight,
And saw the Earth’s rotation;
Each planet then its orb described,
The Moon got under way, sir;
These truths from nature he imbibed
For he drank his bottle a day, sir!
— From “The Astronomer’s Drinking Song,” in Augustus De Morgan’s Budget of Paradoxes, 1866