From Lee Sallows:
(Thanks, Lee!)
Agreed
Another example of Horace Greeley’s terrible handwriting: According to biographer Lurton Dunham Ingersoll, in 1870 the town of Sandwich, Illinois, invited Greeley to address its lecture association. He responded:
Dear Sir. — I am overworked and growing old. I shall be 60 next Feb. 3. On the whole, it seems I must decline to lecture henceforth, except in this immediate vicinity, if I do at all. I cannot promise to visit Illinois on that errand — certainly not now.
The town replied:
Dear Sir. — Your acceptance to lecture before our association next winter came to hand this morning. Your penmanship not being the plainest, it took some time to translate it; but we succeeded; and would say your time ‘3d of February,’ and terms ‘$60,’ are entirely satisfactory.
They added, “As you suggest, we may be able to get you other engagements in this immediate vicinity; if so, we will advise you.”
Black and White
An old puzzle by Paul Hoffman from Science Digest. Dr. Crypton is playing chess with his boss. Crypton has the white pieces. What move can he play that will not checkmate Black? There’s no funny business; the problem is just what it seems, except that Crypton has promised never to put a knight on any square adjacent to the black king, so 1. Ne6 doesn’t count as a solution.
Rebuke
When Joseph Addison lent a sum of money to his friend Temple Stanyan, Stanyan became meekly agreeable, unwilling to argue with Addison as he used to.
At last Addison told him, “Sir, either contradict me or pay me my money.”
Biographer Peter Smithers calls this “a salvo of which Johnson himself might have been proud.”
Made to Order
Dismissing art dealer Leo Castelli in the late 1950s, Willem de Kooning said, “You could give that son of a bitch two beer cans and he could sell them.”
“I heard this and thought, ‘What a sculpture — two beer cans,'” noted Jasper Johns. “It seemed to fit in perfectly with what I was doing, so I did them and Leo sold them.”
Robert and Ethel Scull bought Painted Bronze (Ale Cans) for $960.
(Fred Orton, Figuring Jasper Johns, 1994.)
The Electra Paradox
From Eubulides:
Electra doesn’t know that the man approaching is her brother, Orestes.
Electra knows her brother.
Does Electra know the man who is approaching?
Good for the Gander
In the early days of Dada I received for review a book which contained the following ‘poem’:
'A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z.'On which I commented:
'1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10.'I still think that was the most snappy review I ever wrote; but unfortunately The Times refused to print it.
— Richard Aldington, Life for Life’s Sake, 1941
Fore!
Obscure but entertaining: In 1123 David I of Scotland established that the Saint Andrews Links was common land that belonged to the townspeople of St Andrews.
David was the grandson of Duncan I, who’d been murdered by Macbeth — the man who was determined to “fight the course.”
See Out, Out!
Unquote
“A sleeping child gives me the impression of a traveller in a very far country.” — Emerson
Outcry
A curious observation by a British ornithologist during World War I:
The Zeppelin raids … were nearly always heralded in this country by the crowing of pheasants, and the sensitiveness of this species to distant sounds was frequently a subject of comment. There seems no reason to suppose that pheasants have keener powers of hearing than men; it appears more probable that these birds are alarmed by the sudden quivering of the trees, on which they happen to be perched, at the time of an explosion … During the first Zeppelin raid in January 1915, pheasants … thirty-five to forty miles from the area over which the Zeppelins flew, shrieked themselves hoarse. In one of the early battles in the North Sea … Gamekeepers on the east coast used to say that they always knew when enemy raids had commenced, ‘for the pheasants call us day and night’.
On the Western Front, a starling learned to imitate the whistle that warned of enemy aeroplanes. One artillery officer wrote, “It was great fun to see everyone diving for cover, and I was nearly deceived myself one day.” A gun commander wrote of an owl, “The beastly bird learnt to imitate the alarm whistle to a nicety; on several occasions he turned me out in pyjamas and, when the crew had manned the gun, gave vent to a decided chuckle.” See Onlookers.
(Joy Damousi, Deborah Tout-Smith, and Bart Ziino, eds., Museums, History and the Intimate Experience of the Great War, 2020.)