All Together Now

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Magia_universalis_naturae_et_artis_-_pag_373.jpg

German scientist Gaspar Schott’s 1657 Magia universalis naturæ et artis includes a description of “the music of donkeys”: “the trick, according to Schott, lay in using male donkeys of particular natural pitches and stimulating them to bray with the urine of a female donkey, which will induce the males to make ‘most contented’ noises that the generous might construe as a kind of music.” Schott had argued that “the excessively discordant singing” of men and animals becomes sweeter when encountered rarely.

From Mark A. Waddell, Jesuit Science and the End of Nature’s Secrets, 2015.

Related: the cat organ and the piganino.

| Oddities

In a Word

rarissima
n. extremely rare books, manuscripts, or prints

In The Book Hunter (1863), John Hill Burton identifies five types of “persons who meddle with books”:

  • “A bibliognoste, from the Greek, is one knowing in title-pages and colophons, and in editions; the place and year when printed; the presses whence issued; and all the minutiae of a book.”
  • “A bibliographe is a describer of books and other literary arrangements.”
  • “A bibliomane is an indiscriminate accumulator, who blunders faster than he buys, cock-brained and purse-heavy.”
  • “A bibliophile, the lover of books, is the only one in the class who appears to read them for his own pleasure.”
  • “A bibliotaphe buries his books, by keeping them under lock, or framing them in glass cases.”

These groups seem to have been proposed by French librarian Jean Joseph Rive. Bibliographer Gabriel Peignot added four more:

  • bibliolyte, a destroyer of books
  • bibliologue, one who discourses about books
  • bibliotacte, a classifier of books
  • bibliopée, “‘l’art d’écrire ou de composer des livres,’ or, as the unlearned would say, the function of an author.”
| Language · Literature

The Champ

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:(Portrait_of_Dizzy_Gillespie,_New_York,_N.Y.,_ca._May_1947)_(LOC)_(4843128953).jpg

Proposed cabinet of Dizzy Gillespie, who ran for president in 1964:

  • Secretary of State: Duke Ellington
  • Director of the CIA: Miles Davis
  • Secretary of Defense: Max Roach
  • Secretary of Peace: Charles Mingus
  • Librarian of Congress: Ray Charles
  • Secretary of Agriculture: Louis Armstrong
  • Ambassador to the Vatican: Mary Lou Williams
  • Travelling Ambassador: Thelonious Monk
  • Attorney General: Malcolm X

He said his running mate would be Phyllis Diller. When asked why he was running for president, he said, “Because we need one.”

| Art · Society

Dis-Connected

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Borromean-rings-BW.svg

These circles display an odd property — the three are linked, but no two are linked.

A.G. Smith exhibited this curious variant in Eureka in 1967:

https://www.archim.org.uk/eureka/archive/Eureka-30.pdf

“I leave it to the reader the problem of finding whether Knotung is knotted, and if so, whether it is equivalent to the Borromean Rings, with which it shares the property that cutting any one loop releases the other two completely.”

| Science & Math

Hunting

In 1975 British biologist Peter Scott proposed dubbing the Loch Ness Monster Nessiteras rhombopteryx after a blurry underwater photograph seemed to show one of the creature’s fins.

He’d intended the name to mean “monster of Ness with diamond-shaped fin,” but the Daily Telegraph pointed out that its letters could be rearranged to spell “Monster hoax by Sir Peter S.”

American lawyer Robert Rines, who led several expeditions to the loch, pointed out that they can also spell “Yes, both pix are monsters, R.”

08/09/2024 UPDATE: Reader Alan Mandel points out that they can also spell BY INEPTEST HOAXER, MR. ROSS — so now you’ll have to make up your own mind about this post. (Thanks, Alan.)

| Language

Footwork

Dion is a person, a whole man. Theon is that part of Dion that does not include the left foot. Theon is a “proper part” of Dion — he’s part of Dion but not identical with him.

Now suppose we remove Dion’s left foot. What has happened? Do we now have two numerically different objects composed of the same matter and occupying the same place? If not, then either Theon or Dion has ceased to exist. Which? How?

(From Chrysippus.)

| Oddities

“Jumpin’ Yuccy”

https://archive.org/details/sim_scientific-monthly_1952-10_75_4/page/250/mode/2up

The Scientific Monthly reported a startling discovery in October 1952: the Schuss-yucca, a rare desert plant whose stalk could grow 10 feet in 2 minutes.

Readers’ letters generally joined in the spirit of the hoax — including one that mentioned a boxer who “stopped hiking long enough to inspect a yucca at just the wrong time.”

The plant shot up 16 feet at that moment, dealing him an uppercut that ended his career. “All he would say of the unfortunate incident was ‘Any time a goddam bush can lay me out cold, I know prizefighting ain’t for me.'”

| Hoaxes