From the postscript to a 1737 letter by Jonathan Swift — “Here is a rhyme; it is a satire on an inconstant lover.”
You are as faithless as a Carthaginian,
To love at once Kate, Nell, Doll, Martha, Jenny, Anne.
Moving Pictures
In 1864 a photographer employed by Mathew Brady used a four-lens camera to record activity at a Union Army wharf along Potomac Creek in Virginia. The four images were taken in quick succession, so staggering them produces a crude time lapse of the events they record:
In effect they present a four-frame film, perhaps the closest we’ll come to a contemporary movie of life during the Civil War. Here are a few more, all taken in Virginia in 1864:
Union cavalry crossing a pontoon bridge over the James River:
Traffic in front of the Marshall House in Alexandria:
Union soldiers working on a bridge over the Pamunkey River near White House Landing:
There’s more information at the National Park Service’s Fredericksburg & Spotsylvania National Military Park blog.
Podcast Episode 103: Legislating Pi
In 1897, confused physician Edward J. Goodwin submitted a bill to the Indiana General Assembly declaring that he’d squared the circle — a mathematical feat that was known to be impossible. In today’s show we’ll examine the Indiana pi bill, its colorful and eccentric sponsor, and its celebrated course through a bewildered legislature and into mathematical history.
We’ll also marvel at the confusion wrought by turkeys and puzzle over a perplexing baseball game.
Pagan Island
Twenty-six villages are ranged around the coastline of an island. Their names, in order, are A, B, C, …, Z. At various times in its history, the island has been visited by 26 missionaries, who names are also A, B, C, …, Z. Each missionary landed first at the village that bore his name and began his work there. Each village was pagan to begin with but became converted when visited by a missionary. Whenever a missionary converted a village he would move along the coastline to the next village in the cycle A–B–C-…-Z–A. If a missionary arrived at an uncoverted village he’d convert it and continue along the cycle, but there was never more than one missionary in a village at a time. If a missionary arrived at a village that had already been converted, the villagers, feeling oppressed, would kill him and revert to a state of paganism; they would do this even to a missionary who had converted them himself and then traveled all the way around the island. There’s no restriction as to how many missionaries can be on the island at any given time. After all 26 missionaries have come and gone, how many villages remain converted?
“A Dialogue Between the Head and Heart”
Of course, she’s only a digestive tube, like all of us.
Yes, but look what it’s attached to!
— Gavin Ewart
“Sweet-Seasoned Showers”
Today marks the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death. To commemorate it, Craig Knecht has devised a 44 × 44 magic square (click to enlarge). Like the squares we featured in 2013, this one is topographical — if the number in each cell is taken to represent its altitude, and if water runs “downhill,” then a fall of rain will produce the pools shown in blue, recalling the words of Griffith in Henry VIII:
Noble madam,
Men’s evil manners live in brass; their virtues
We write in water.
The square includes cells (in light blue) that reflect the number of Shakespeare’s plays (38) and sonnets (154) and the year of his death (1616).
(Thanks, Craig.)
The Public Figure
In 1956 Macedonian poet Venko Markovski was imprisoned under a fictitious name for circulating a poem critical of Marshal Tito.
Among the guards were individuals who were taking correspondence courses in an attempt to earn a degree. One of these guards, knowing I was a writer, came up to me one day and said: ‘I was told you are a writer. You have knowledge of literature. I have a request …’
‘Please, what do you want to know about literature?’
‘Tell me about Macedonian literature.’
‘Whom are you interested in?’
‘Venko Markovski.’
‘Is it possible you don’t recognize Venko Markovski?’
‘I don’t know him.’
There was an unpleasant pause. I felt sorry for this man who was ordered to guard someone without knowing whom he was guarding. I spoke to him as follows:
‘The best way for you to learn about Venko Markovski is to read his poetry written in Croatian. In this way you will understand Markovski the poet, the Partisan, the public figure, and you will pass your exam easily. But if you rely on me to tell you about Venko Markovski, you will find yourself — after you fail your exam — in the very place where Markovski now finds himself.’
‘What do you mean by that?’ the guard asked. ‘Where is he in fact?’
‘Right in front of you, here on Goli Otok.’
‘Can it be that you are really he?’
‘Yes, I am here under another name.’
The guard walked away silent and confused.
“The warden obviously thought that since he had physical possession of his prisoners he disposed of their minds and souls as well,” Markovski wrote after gaining his freedom in 1961. “But he was mistaken; the body is one thing and the soul is another. There is no way to bribe the human conscience once it has committed itself to the struggle for the rights of its people.”
(From Geoffrey Bould, ed., Conscience Be My Guide: An Anthology of Prison Writings, 2005.)
Origins
A snob asked James McNeill Whistler, “Whatever possessed you to be born in a place like Lowell, Massachusetts?”
He said, “I wished to be near my mother.”
Leave-Taking
British infantry sergeant Harry Neale says goodbye to his 10-year-old daughter Lucy, April 4, 1917:
At about six o’clock in the evening, my father called me in and said he’d got to go back to Kidderminster, back to barracks. ‘Will you walk with me a little way, just up the hill, will you come with me?’ Of course I would. He said goodbye to my mother, who was crying, and we went off down the road and then up this long hill. It was a ten-minute walk, I suppose, but we didn’t hurry, we just walked slowly up the hill and I really can’t remember what we talked about. I held on to his hand so tight, and when we got to the top, he said, ‘I won’t take you any further, you must go back now, and I’ll stand here and watch you until you’re out of sight,’ and he put his arms round me and held me so close to him; I remember feeling how rough that khaki uniform was.
‘You must go now, wave to me at the bottom, won’t you?’ I went, I left him standing there and I went down the hill and I kept looking back and waving and he was still there, just standing there. I got to the bottom and then I’d got to turn off to go to where we lived, so I stopped and waved to him and he gestured as much as to say, ‘Go on, you must go home now,’ ever so gently gestured and then he waved and he was still waving when I went, and that was the last time I ever saw him.
Badly wounded in battle, he died of dysentery in East Africa that October.
(From Richard van Emden, The Quick and the Dead, 2011.)
In a Word
stirious
adj. like an icicle