A Crowded Verse

The names of 13 Jane Austen characters are hidden in the following lines as anagrams of complete consecutive words. For example, “was ill” yields WALLIS. (The names to be found are women’s first names and men’s surnames, as in Austen.) In most cases the anagrams are hidden in two words, but twice they’re in three, once in four, and once in a single word. What are they?

The other day when I was ill
And not a soul I knew came nigh,
Jane Austen was my daily fare —
I rather liked to be laid by.
Each line or page enthralls me quite,
I there can let no man deride;
I may be ill as a wight can be,
But, Jane with me, am satisfied.
In bed my ease is nil, yet I’ll
Be lying therein at any rate
Content. With Jane to chortle at
How can I rail at Fate?

Click for Answer
| Language · Literature · Poems · Puzzles

Comparative Biology

https://books.google.com/books?id=JDglAAAAMAAJ

The Antelope and Cantelope
Lie side by side upon the slope,
And careless persons might, I fear,
Mistake the melon for the deer.
If you will tap the Cantelope, reposing on the ground,
It does not move, but just emits a melon-choly sound;
But should you try, however, to apply a stethoscope,
And attempt this auscultation on the antlered Antelope,
And should see an imitation of a very rapid flight,
And should say, “It is the Antelope!” I think you would be right.

From Animal Analogues (1908), by Robert W. Wood, author of How to Tell the Birds From the Flowers.

| Poems

A Literary Effort

Byron swam the Hellespont. On May 3, 1810, the 22-year-old poet and a Lieutenant Ekenhead of the frigate Salsette swam the breaststroke from Sestos to Abydos, crossing from Europe to Asia in an hour and 10 minutes as they sought to emulate Leander’s nightly swims to Hero. “The whole distance … including the length we were carried by the current, was computed by those on board the frigate at upwards of four English miles.”

“I plume myself on this achievement more than I could possibly do on any kind of glory, political, poetical, or rhetorical,” Byron wrote. He commemorated the feat in Don Juan:

A better swimmer you could scarce see ever,
He could, perhaps, have pass’d the Hellespont,
As once (a feat on which ourselves we prided)
Leander, Mr. Ekenhead, and I did.

The feat is often regarded as a founding achievement in open-water swimming, and an event is held each year in its memory.

| Literature

Edwardian Fashion

https://archive.org/details/Strand23/page/n475/mode/2up?view=theater

The cat I am seen wearing as a hat in the photo, is very much alive and absolutely free. If I place her in this head-dress attitude she will remain quite still until I take her off.

— Mr. T.S. Cunningham, Chirton, Devizes, to the Strand, April 1902

| Oddities

Road Trip

A problem from the qualification round of the 2004/2005 Swedish Mathematical Contest, via the April 2009 issue of Crux Mathematicorum:

The cities A, B, C, D, and E are connected by straight roads (more than two cities may lie on the same road). The distance from A to B, and from C to D, is 3 km. The distance from B to D is 1 km, from A to C it is 5 km, from D to E it is 4 km, and finally, from A to E it is 8 km. Determine the distance from C to E.

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

The Epolenep Principle

A volunteer deals cards from an ordinary deck into two piles, stopping whenever he likes. He tosses aside one of the piles and peeks at the top card of the other pile. Then he drops the remainder of the cards on top of this pile and deals everything again into two piles. The magician, who has never touched the cards, now divines which of the two piles contains the memorized card and indeed discovers the card itself.

This trick is based on the Penelope principle, a mathematical idea worked out by Scottish magician and computer programmer Alex Elmsley. Elmsley’s technique required a perfect faro shuffle, so David Rutter revised it into a simpler version that’s entirely self-working. It was presented at the 15th Gathering for Gardner conference last year.

(Thanks, Joe.)

| Science & Math

Mix and Match

In Strictly Speaking (1974), Edwin Newman points out that the names of American college presidents are strangely interchangeable: Columbia’s Nicholas Murray Butler would have projected the same impressive dignity if he’d been Nicholas Butler Murray or Butler Nicholas Murray. Kingman Brewster, president of Yale, might as well have been Brewster Kingman. Newman gives five pages of examples, drawn from the 1973 Yearbook of Higher Education:

Brage Golding, California State University
Harris L. Wofford, Jr., Bryn Mawr College
Thurston E. Manning, University of Bridgeport
Gibb Madsen, Hartnell College
Rexer Berndt, Fort Lewis College
Dumont Kenny, Temple Buell College
Woodfin P. Patterson, Jefferson Davis State Junior College
Imon E. Bruce, Southern State College
Cleveland Dennard, Washington Technical Institute
Culbreth Y. Melton, Emmanuel College
Pope A. Duncan, Georgia Southern College
Hudson T. Armerding, Wheaton College
Landrum R. Bolling, Earlham College
Mahlon A. Miller, Union College
Dero G. Downing, Western Kentucky University
Wheeler G. Merriam, Franklin Pierce College
Placidus H. Riley, St. Anselm’s College
Ferrel Heady, University of New Mexico
Lane D. Kilburn, King’s College
Hilton M. Briggs, South Dakota State University
Granville M. Sawyer, Texas Southern University

“Note also that the names are interchangeable up, down, diagonally, taking every other name, every third, fourth, fifth, and so on, at random, and — for parlor game purposes — any other way you can think of. In mixed clusters of three, especially when read or sung aloud, they are often enchanting.”

| Language