Chivalry

This is unexpected — in 1999 mathematician Mike Keith programmed a computer to generate knights’ tours using Warnsdorff’s rule and then labeled the successive squares A, B, C, etc. to see whether any 8-letter words emerged. After about a million tours, he found two, UNSHAVEN and ARCHIVAL:

M T Q B W D O F   E T W F G J Y H
R C L O P G X C   V E F Y X G T K
U N S H A V E N   S D U H U L I Z
D K P S H Y B U   D G Z K X M L S
Q V G J I T M Z   A R C H I V A L
H E R C F I L A   F C J W N I R M
W D G J Y J A L   Q B A D O P K B
F I X E B K Z K   B E P O J C N Q

After some further searching he also found PERORATE and EPIDURAL. See the link below for more results.

(Michael Keith, “Knight’s Tour Letter Squares,” Word Ways 32:3 [August 1999], 163-168.)

| Language

Procurement

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Frankenstein,_or_the_Modern_Prometheus_(Revised_Edition,_1831)_(page_6_crop).jpg

In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, we’re told explicitly that the creature is “gigantic”; at his birth at Ingolstadt he’s described as 8 feet tall. Where did Victor Frankenstein get a skeleton large enough for a giant?

For that matter, how does the creature clothe himself? He takes some “dress” of Victor’s to wear, yet he “exceeds the height of a man.” How is this possible?

(From John Sutherland, Frankenstein’s Brain, 2018. Dracula has his own puzzles.)

| Literature

The Warwick Lion Fight

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lion-baiting3.jpg

In 1825, impresario George Wombwell sponsored a fight between six bulldogs and a lion from his menagerie in the English market town of Warwick. Five hundred people assembled in a disused factory yard, and Wombwell arranged for the dogs to attack Nero three at a time, ignoring the pleas of a Quaker named Samuel Hoare, who asked “how thou wilt feel to see the noble animal thou hast so long protected, and which has been in part the means of supplying thee with the means of life, mangled and bleeding before thee?” The lion seemed indisposed to use its full strength against the first three dogs, swatting them away with his paws but never biting. After a 20-minute respite, Wombwell set the next three dogs upon him, and they pinned him to the floor. When a third round brought the same result, Wombwell conceded defeat for the lion, afraid that “the death of the animal must be the consequence of further punishment.”

In a second contest less than a week later, though, a Scottish-born lion known as Wallace fought back ferociously, holding one dog in his teeth and “deliberately walk[ing] around the stage with him as a cat would a mouse.” A second dog “died just a few seconds after he was taken out of the cage,” and a third remained in Wallace’s jaws until a keeper “threw a piece of raw flesh into the den.” A fourth was left in critical condition with “several of his ribs broken.”

The spectacle was widely condemned in the press and informed a new sensitivity regarding cruelty to animals. In 1838 one commentator remarked, “what dogs and lions can achieve in the arena of combat … having now been ascertained, let us hope that no closer approximation to the sanguinary games of the Roman amphitheatre may ever be attempted in Great Britain, nor her soil again polluted by a repetition of such spectacles.”

(Helen Cowie, “A Disgusting Exhibition of Brutality,” in Sarah Cockram and Andrew Wells, eds., Interspecies Interactions, 2018.)

| Oddities · Society

Tidings

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chateau_Wood_Ypres_1917.jpg

Due to a miscommunication, Lt. Jack Brewster of the 3rd Royal Fusiliers started forward with his men to attack a German position in Ypres before the proper order had been given. He was last seen rushing toward the German trenches and was feared lost. In May 1915 Brewster’s parents were desperately seeking more information when they received an unexpected letter from a German sergeant named Egbert Wagner:

Dear Sir

On 11th of this month, through God’s gracious guiding hand, I was led to discover your son, Lieutenant JA Brender [sic], 3rd Royal Fusiliers, in a shell hole, where he had been lying for two [three] days with a gun shot wound in the upper part of his thigh. Acting on the command of our Lord Jesus ‘Love your Enemies’ I bandaged him with the permission of our officer, and provided him with bread and wine. I had a lot of conversation with your dear son, whose condition visibly improved by evening. With eight of our brave Riflemen I arranged to get him conveyed, with the assistance of some medical staff, back from our front line position to the collecting center for wounded. There I handed over your dear son to the care of best and competent hands, and now carry out my promise given to your son, when we were lying so happily together in the shell-hole, in spite of the rain of bullets, that I would communicate his deliverance to his dear father. I offer you my earnest wish for peace and await your reply via Denmark.

Sergeant Egbert Wagner

He had forwarded it through his friend Axel Backhausen in Denmark. The family wrote back, asking Backhausen to convey their “great relief” to Wagner, who “must be a very good man. … We trust he may live to do other good work in the world for such men are badly needed in these terrible times.”

Brewster’s father added that friends had asked to see Wagner’s letter. “I hope you will forgive me for granting their requests,” he wrote. “I believe, in some cases, it will be used as a text for sermons next Sunday.”

(From Richard van Emden, Meeting the Enemy: The Human Face of the Great War, 2013.)

| History

Podcast Episode 260: The Rugged Road

florence blenkiron and theresa wallach

In 1934, two Englishwomen set out to do what no one had ever done before: travel the length of Africa on a motorcycle. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll follow Theresa Wallach and Florence Blenkiron from Algiers to Cape Town on a 14,000-mile adventure that many had told them was impossible.

We’ll also anticipate some earthquakes and puzzle over a daughter’s age.

See full show notes …

| History · Podcast

In a Word

https://www.flickr.com/photos/slgc/36564649132
Image: Flickr

belute
v. to cover with mud or dirt

lutose
adj. covered with mud

squage
v. to dirty with handling

Every regulation major league baseball, roughly 240,000 per season, is rubbed with “magic mud” from a single source, a tributary of the Delaware River. It’s harvested by a single man, 62-year-old Jim Bintliff, who keeps the precise location secret even from Major League Baseball.

“I know the mud,” he told Sports Illustrated. “I’m the only one on the planet who does.”

(Thanks, Peter.)

| Entertainment · Language · Trivia

Non-Starter

http://www.freestockphotos.biz/stockphoto/8980

A man decides to walk one mile from A to B. A god waits in readiness to throw up a wall blocking the man’s further advance when the man has travelled 1/2 mile. A second god (unknown to the first) waits in readiness to throw up a wall of his own blocking the man’s further advance when the man has travelled 1/4 mile. A third god … &c. ad infinitum. It is clear that this infinite sequence of mere intentions (assuming the contrary-to-fact conditional that each god would succeed in executing his intention if given the opportunity) logically entails the consequence that the man will be arrested at point A; he will not be able to pass beyond it, even though not a single wall will in fact be thrown down in his path. The before-effect here will be described by the man as a strange field of force blocking his passage forward.

— Jose Benardete, Infinity: An Essay in Metaphysics, 1964

| Oddities

Escalation

Back in 2005 I mentioned that Baldwin Street, in Dunedin, New Zealand, was the steepest street in the world.

Last month it was surpassed: Guinness World Records certified that Ffordd Pen Llech, in the Welsh seaside town of Harlech, has a gradient of 37.45%, more than 2 percentage points steeper.

Businessman and architectural historian Gwyn Headley told the Associated Press he felt “jubilation” at the news. He said he feels sorry for New Zealand, but “steeper is steeper.”

| Oddities