Joseph-Henri Flacon found the 1804 French Civil Code too dry, so he rewrote it in rhyming verse.
Support
In early 1919, under the headline “The Great Indian Rope Trick Photographed for the First Time,” the Strand published this image by Lieutenant F.W. Holmes, VC, MM. He said he’d taken it at Kirkee, near Poona, in 1917. An old man had begun “by unwinding from about his waist a long rope, which he threw upwards in the air, where it remained erect. The boy climbed to the top, where he balanced himself, as seen in the photograph, which I took at that moment. He then descended … I offer no explanation.”
London’s Magic Circle invited Holmes to present his photo at a special meeting open to the public, who were asked to wear evening dress “to give a good impression.” Holmes repeated his story, which seemed to challenge the position that the trick had never been performed or was the effect of hallucination or hypnosis.
The editor of the Magic Circular, S.W. Clarke, charged that the photo showed a boy “balanced on top of a rigid rope or pole.” Holmes had already stated that the juggler “had no pole — a thing that would have been impossible of concealment.” But under questioning he admitted that there had been no rope — he’d merely seen a boy balancing atop a bamboo pole and had taken a photo of it.
That should have disposed of the story. But, as often happens, news of the debunking was much less interesting than news of the “proof,” and few newspapers published it. “If the question of the rope trick’s existence arose, and it arose many times,” writes Peter Lamont in The Rise of the Indian Rope Trick, “somebody regularly pointed out that the camera never lied, but nobody ever suspected the photographer. As a result, the Holmes photograph remained for many definitive proof that the rope trick was real.”
Hope and Change
Just stumbled across this in an 1889 newspaper:
To those who love mathematics, here is a simple problem for you to figure out: A man purchased groceries to the amount of 34 cents. When he came to pay for the goods he found that he had only a $1 bill, a 3-cent piece and a 2-cent piece. The grocer, on his side, had only a 50-cent piece and a quarter. They appealed to a bystander for change, but he, although willing to oblige them, had only two dimes, a 5-cent piece, a 2-cent piece and a 1-cent piece. After some perplexity, however, change was made to the satisfaction of everyone concerned. What was the simplest way of accomplishing this?
($1 is worth 100 cents, a quarter 25 cents, and a dime 10 cents.)
Misc
- Ulysses Grant had a horse named Jeff Davis.
- PORTUGUESE MARINE CORPS is an anagram of SINGAPORE SUPREME COURT.
- 15613 = 1 + 56 – 13
- FOUR + SIX = TEN is the highest sum in English with no repeated letters.
- “It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend.” — William Blake
Figures
I think Jacques Jouet was the first to notice this. In the first few pages of the Tintin adventure The Secret of the Unicorn, as Tintin visits the Vossenplein antique market in Brussels, Snowy the dog keeps scratching himself. Why?
Apt
The letters in OVERSUFFICIENTLY can be rearranged to spell the English number names for 1, 4, 5, 7, 10, 14, 15, 40, 45, 47, 50, 51, 57, 70, and 74.
The letters in A PLACE FOR EVERYTHING AND EVERYTHING IN ITS PLACE can spell 1, 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 17, 18, 19, 30, 31, 33, 35, 37, 38, 39, 40, 43, 47, 48, 49, 70, 71, 73, 75, 78, 79, 80, 81, 83, 85, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 93, 95, 97, 98, and 99.
And the latter can also spell 26 numbers in the form “one-and-twenty,” from ONE-AND-THIRTY to EIGHT-AND-NINETY.
(Rex Gooch, “Number Names in Words and Phrases,” Word Ways 34:4 [November 2001], 254-258.)
Fair Play
“I understand that a computer has been invented that is so remarkably intelligent that if you put it into communication with either a computer or a human, it can’t tell the difference!” — Raymond Smullyan
Stop and Go
In the mid-1990s Jacques Jouet introduced “metro poems,” poems written on the Paris Métro according to a particular set of rules. He explained the rules in a poem:
There are as many lines in a metro poem as there are stations in your journey, minus one.
The first line is composed mentally between the first two stations of your journey (counting the station you got on at).
It is then written down when the train stops at the second station.
The second line is composed mentally between the second and the third stations of your journey.
It is then written down when the train stops at the third station.
And so on.
The poet mustn’t write anything down when the train is moving, and he mustn’t compose anything when the train is stopped. If he changes lines then he must start a new stanza. He writes down the poem’s last line on the platform of the final station.
Jouet’s poem was itself composed in the Métro, according to its own rules. Presumably this type of writing could be done in any subway, but Marc Lapprand notes that the Paris system supports it unusually well: It’s dense, with 368 different stations, including 87 connecting points (or 293 nominal stations, including 55 connecting points) and a fairly short distance between them (543 meters, on average). The average run between two stations in Paris is a minute and a half, which means the poet has to think quickly in order to keep up.
Levin Becker, who tried the technique for his book 2012 Many Subtle Channels, found it surprisingly challenging: “It constrains the space around your thoughts, not the letters or words in which you will eventually fit them: you have to work to think thoughts of the right size, to focus on the line at hand without workshopping the previous one or anticipating the next.”
In April 1996 Jouet wrote a 490-verse poem while passing through every station in the Métro, following an optimized map laid out for him by a graph theorist. “At the end of those fifteen and a half hours,” he wrote, “I was very tired.”
(Jacques Jouet and Ian Monk, “Metro Poems,” AA Files 45/46 [Winter 2001], 4-14.)
Intrepid
The only surviving exchange between Ulysses Grant and his wife is dated May 22, 1875.
She wrote, “How many years ago to day is that we were engaged? Just such a day as this too was it not?”
He responded, “Thirty-one years ago. I was so frightened however that I do not remember whether it was warm or snowing.”
In a Word
habile
adj. able or skillful
philobiblian
n. a book lover
tachydidaxy
n. a short method of teaching
telesis
n. the intelligent direction of effort toward the achievement of an end
Mathematician Theodor Molien was fluent in German, Estonian, French, Swedish, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, English, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and Norwegian.
“Read a hundred novels in a language,” he liked to say, “and you will know that language.”