In 1868, Scottish sailor Jack Renton found himself the captive of a native people in the Solomon Islands, but through luck and skill he rose to become a respected warrior among them. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll tell the story of Renton’s life among the saltwater people and his return to the Western world.
We’ll also catch some more speeders and puzzle over a regrettable book.
In a March 1963 appearance on the The Tonight Show, Richard Nixon played a piano piece of his own composition. As a child he’d pursued the instrument intensively, moving 100 miles from home at age 12 to stay with his aunt Jane Beeson, who’d studied at the Indianapolis Conservatory of Music. She taught him every day. (I think his reference here to “another piano player in the White House” is a dig at Harry Truman.)
In their 1991 book From the President’s Pen, Larry F. Vrzalik and Michael Minor list a few more Nixon curiosities:
One interesting characteristic of Nixon is that all his life he has had a difficult time coordinating his body. Although he played college football for four years, he warmed the bench because he had ‘two left feet.’ One teammate recalled that anytime Nixon was put in a game ‘we knew a five-yard penalty was coming up’ because in his eagerness Nixon would invariably rush ahead before the play started. In later years Nixon’s habit of clumsily banging into car doors led to a serious knee injury that slowed down his campaigning in 1960, and as president his coordination problems surprised and shocked observers. He was patently incapable of getting the tops off either pill bottles or ceremonial pens and would often resort to trying to bite and gnaw them off. On one occasion, after unsuccessfully attempting to bite off the top of a pill bottle, he finally resorted to stomping on it. At one press conference he raised his hands with the classic gesture for those in the room to stand, but told them ‘would you please be seated.’ On still another and even more embarrassing occasion, while deliver a major speech he pointed to the audience and said ‘I,’ then pointed to himself and said ‘you.’ Nixon was often so physically tense that if anyone happened to touch him on the arm he would jump as if he had been struck by a heavy blow.
(Thanks, Charlie.)
In 2018, “GeoWizard” Tom Davies set out to cross the width of Wales, 33 miles, in a straight line. Part 1 is above, and the rest followed in four parts (2, 3, 4, 5).
It looks incredibly difficult.
(Via MetaFilter.)
Money was so worthless during the Weimar hyperinflation of 1922 that these boys literally made a kite out of banknotes.
More at Rare Historical Photos.
In 1627 a group of sailors wanted to communicate a grievance to the captain of one of the King’s ships. Technically this amounted to mutiny, which was punishable by death, so they needed a way to express their solidarity without revealing any one of them as the leader and inviting retribution against him.
The answer was to arrange their 76 signatures in a circle, demanding that their allowances be distributed and the ship be victualed before they would weigh anchor. (I don’t know whether the captain agreed.)
From the U.K. National Archives.
In 1860 Manchester layman J. Gill wrote “a sermon in words of one syllable only”:
He who wrote the Psalm in which our text is found, had great cause to both bless and praise God; for he had been brought from a low state to be a great king in a great land; had been made wise to rule the land in the fear and truth of God; and all his foes were, at the time he wrote, at peace with him. Though he had been poor, he was now rich in this world’s goods; though his youth had been spent in the care of sheep, he now wore a crown; and though it had been his lot for a long time to hear the din of war and strife, peace now dwelt round the throne, and the land had rest.
The whole thing is here. “This Sermon … is offered to the public with the view of showing that at least big words are not necessary for the conveyance of great truths to the minds of the people,” he wrote in a preface. “[I have] an ambition to prove that, in the advocacy of religious truth, very plain, simple, and old-fashioned words have not yet lost their original force and significance.”
For a 1929 airport design competition, H. Altvater of New York proposed a huge wheel of interlocking runways set atop a ring of skyscrapers.
The judges ruled it “beyond the expressed purpose of the competition” but noted that “it is quite possible that in the future some of the features considered objectionable today will prove entirely practical.”
“Those who speak know nothing;
Those who know are silent.”
These words, as I am told,
Were spoken by Laozi.
If we are to believe that Laozi
Was himself one who knew,
How comes it that he wrote a book
Of five thousand words?
— Bai Juyi
Michael Snow’s 1967 experimental film Wavelength consists essentially of an extraordinarily slow 45-minute zoom on a photograph on the wall of a room. William C. Wees of McGill University points out that this raises a philosophical question: What visual event does this zoom create? In a tracking shot, the camera moves physically forward, and its viewpoint changes as a person’s would as she advanced toward the photo. In Wavelength (or any zoom) the camera doesn’t move, and yet something is taking place, something with no analogue in ordinary experience.
“If I actually walk toward a photograph pinned on a wall, I find that the photograph does, indeed, get larger in my visual field, and that things around it slip out of view at the peripheries of my vision. The zoom produces equivalent effects, hence the tendency to describe it as ‘moving forward.’ But I am really imitating a tracking shot, not a zoom. … I think it is safe to say that no perceptual experience in the every-day world can prepare us for the kind of vision produced by the zoom.”
“What, in a word, happens during a viewing of that forty-five minute zoom? And what does it mean?”
(From Nick Hall, The Zoom: Drama at the Touch of a Lever, 2018.)
hyetal
adj. of or belonging to rain