Finis

Stanley Kubrick was an avid chess player, and the game in 2001: A Space Odyssey, though it’s incidental, makes sense and seems to have been planned with care. In fact it seems to have been based on an actual game, played between A. Roesch and Willi Schlage in Hamburg in 1910. That game started with the moves 1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bb5 a6 4. Ba4 Nf6 5. Qe2 b5 6. Bb3 Be7 7. c3 0-0 8. 0-0 d5 9. exd5 Nxd5 10. Nxe5 Nf4 11. Qe4 Nxe5 12. Qxa8? Qd3! 13. Bd1 Bh3!:

2001 chess game

Here Roesch (and astronaut Frank Poole) played 14. Qxa6?, picking up a pawn but recklessly abandoning the long diagonal. Schlage (and supercomputer HAL 9000) pounced with 14. … Bxg2. When Poole withdraws the threatened rook, HAL says, “I’m sorry, Frank, I think you missed it: queen to bishop three [threatening 16. … Nh3#], bishop takes queen, knight takes bishop, mate.”

Technically White can hold out a bit longer with 16. Qc8 Rxc8 17. h3 Nxh3+ 18. Kh2, but then the ax falls with 18. … Ng4#. Poole, and Roesch, resigned.

| Entertainment

The Last Ditch

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A few months ago I read in The Guinness Book of Music Facts and Feats that Henry Bishop’s “Home! Sweet Home!” is the only song known to have been sung in a court of law — specifically, sung to a jury by a defense attorney. I had my doubts about this, but I’ve just gone scrounging around and lo it is true. From the New York Times, Sept. 28, 1935:

An attorney sang ‘Home, Sweet Home’ to a jury today in a vain attempt to save his client from prison. After listening to the rendition by John Brett, the lawyer, the jury convicted Lloyd Grable, Oklahoma city motor-car mechanic, of attempted bank robbery and specified life imprisonment.

The story is headlined “Lawyer Sings, Client Gets Life.” The defendant’s thoughts are not recorded.

| Art · Crime

The Dustman’s Compliment

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When Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire, was stepping out of her carriage one day, an Irish dustman exclaimed, “Love and bless you, my lady, let me light my pipe in your eyes!”

Afterward, whenever others would praise her, she would reply, “After the dustman’s compliment, all others are insipid.”

| Quotations

The Forgotten Winchester

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In 2014, archaeologists conducting surveys in Nevada’s Great Basin National Park found a .44-40 Winchester rifle propped against a juniper tree. Manufactured in 1882, apparently it had stood there for a century.

“It looked like someone propped it up there, sat down to have their lunch and got up to walk off without it,” Nichole Andler, the park’s chief of interpretation, told the Washington Post.

Possibly it had belonged to a miner, a rancher, or a hunter. Winchester manufactured 25,000 of this model in 1882, so its presence isn’t exactly surprising. But why did the owner abandon a $25 rifle?

“It probably has a very good and interesting story,” Andler said, “but it probably is a story that could have happened to almost anyone living this sort of extraordinary existence out here in the Great Basin Desert.”

It’s now on permanent display at the park’s Lehman Caves Visitors Center.

| Oddities

Podcast Episode 212: The Lost Treasure of Cocos Island

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

Cocos Island, in the eastern Pacific, was rumored to hold buried treasure worth millions of dollars, but centuries of treasure seekers had failed to find it. That didn’t deter August Gissler, who arrived in 1889 with a borrowed map and an iron determination. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll follow Gissler’s obsessive hunt for the Treasure of Lima.

We’ll also marvel at the complexity of names and puzzle over an undead corpse.

See full show notes …

| History · Podcast

In a Word

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longevous
adj. long-lived; living or having lived to a great age

alieniloquy
n. rambling talk

comessation
n. feasting, banqueting

ephectic
adj. suspending judgment

The Scythians always ate their grandfathers; they behaved very respectfully to them for a long time, but as soon as their grandfathers became old and troublesome, and began to tell long stories, they immediately ate them. Nothing could be more improper, and even disrespectful, than dining off such near and venerable relations; yet we could not with any propriety accuse them of bad taste in morals.

— Sydney Smith, “On Taste,” 1805

| Language · Society

Precocious

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Christian Heinrich Heineken, “the infant scholar of Lübeck,” was so supernaturally gifted that it’s hard even to believe the stories that are told about him. Born in 1721 to a pair of German artists, as a baby he could recite several Biblical stories from memory, and he read the Old and New Testament in Latin before the age of 2.

After he was fourteen months of age the child began the history of the world and could answer any question asked. In his fourth year he could read printed and written matter, although he never learned to write. The multiplication table was learned and recited in order or skipping about. He could relate whole stories in French and knew fourteen hundred sentences from good Latin authors; in geography he knew all the important places on the map.

During a storm at sea he quoted John Trapp: Qui nescit orare, discat navigare (“He that cannot pray, let him go to sea [and there he will learn]”). Introduced to the Danish king at age 3, he said, “Permit me, sir, to kiss the hand of Your Majesty and the hem of your royal garment” and recited his own history of Denmark.

There’s no telling what sort of life lay in store for him, but he passed away after only 4 years and 4 months, apparently of celiac disease, leaving his tutor to proclaim him “a wonder for all time.”

(Jennifer L. Jolly and Justin Bruno, “The Public’s Fascination With Prodigious Youth,” Gifted Child Today, 33:2 [March 2010], 61-65.)

| Oddities

Chapter One

Ludwig Boltzmann, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on the work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics. Perhaps it will be wise to approach the subject cautiously.

— David Goodstein, States of Matter, 1985

| Literature · Science & Math