Alternative Music

Norwegian musician Terje Isungset plays a trumpet and xylophone made of ice. He calls them “the only instruments you can drink after you’ve finished playing.”

The xylophone’s bars are cut from a Norwegian lake with a chainsaw. Isungset explains to Trevor Cox in The Sound Book, “You can have 100 pieces of ice; they will all sound different. Perhaps three will sound fantastic.”

The First Vienna Vegetable Orchestra, below, carves its instruments an hour before each show and makes them into soup afterward. There must be some way to combine these two …

| Oddities

Whose Who’s

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Das_letzte_Abendmahl_von_Han_van_Meegeren_(1939).jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

What’s the difference between forgery and plagiarism?

“This has been answered clearly by Monroe C. Beardsley: In the case of plagiarism one concerns oneself in ‘passing off another’s work as one’s own’; in the case of forgery, in ‘passing off one’s own work as another’s.'”

— Sándor Radnóti, The Fake: Forgery and Its Place in Art, 1999

| Art · Crime

Orthography

There once was a ,cal fellow,
Who grew .ically mellow;
With a — he was gone
To the town of :
To write for a sheet that was yellow.

She was wooed by a handsome young Dr.,
Who one day in his arms tightly lr.;
But straightway he swore
He would do so no more,
Which the same, it was plain, greatly shr.

A boy at Sault Ste. Marie
Said, “To spell I will not agree
Till they learn to spell ‘Soo’
Without any u
Or an a or an l or a t.”

There was an old maid from Duquesne
Who the rigor of mortis did fuesne;
She came to with a shout,
Saying: “Please let me out;
This coffin will drive me insuesne.”

— Stanton Vaughn, ed., Limerick Lyrics, 1904

| Language · Poems

Thorough Enough

Seven ways to pronounce ough:

  • dough
  • tough
  • hiccough
  • bough
  • ought
  • cough
  • through

A letter to the London Times, Sept. 20, 1934:

Sir,

‘A rough-coated dough-faced ploughman strode coughing and hiccoughing through the streets of Scarborough’ used to be set as a spelling-test at my prep school at Crowborough in the middle nineties.

I am, Sir, your obedient servant,

H. Pirie-Gordon

“If the English language made any sense,” wrote Doug Larson, “lackadaisical would have something to do with a shortage of flowers.”

| Language

Catalog

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Entomologist Alexandre Girault expressed himself in his work. Of the 500 genera he named, many honored artists, poets, and writers whom he admired: Davincia, Shakespearia, Beethovena, Mozartella, Emersonia, Raphaelana, Ovidia, Goetheana, Thoreauella, Tennysoniana, Bachiana, Keatsia, Plutarchia, Schilleria, Aeschylia, Aligheria, Thalesanna, Rubensteina, Carlyleia, Herodotia, Cowperella, and Froudeana.

To mock his supervisor Johann Illingworth, he invented a parasitic mymarid wasp, Shillingsworthia shillingsworthi, which he described as an ephemeral creature lacking a head, abdomen, or mandibles and found only in “the chasms of Jupiter” — in other words, a nonentity. He called it “an airy species whose flight cannot be followed except by the winged mind.”

He understood even women through entomology — one of his privately printed works describes a new species of human, Homo perniciosus, known only from the female sex:

Abnormal female (loveless, without offspring); heart functionless; mammae aborted; psychology novel (as supposed) but artificial; gay, high-coloured, feral, brass-cheeked, shape lovely like Woman but nature hard (selfless, thoughtless, proud, unsympathetic, irresponsible, aggressive, irritant, insensible, luxurious, pugnacious, over-active, inquisitive, mischievous, voracious and even carnivorous; antagonistic, ungentle, immodest, critical, competitive, poisonous); conduct unstable (even inclined to treachery), the lips compressed, body strong. Everywhere but rare in natural habitat.

He was prickly, but he was dedicated — he published much of his work at his own expense, and many of his type specimens are retained today by the Queensland Museum. “Research is a labour of love,” he wrote. “Strange then to find it all done nowadays as a labour of wages! Must love, too, be a matter of cash?”

| Oddities · Science & Math

Podcast Episode 66: Eighteen Holes in Vietnam

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In 1972, Air Force navigator Gene Hambleton was shot down over enemy territory in Vietnam, and a ferocious offensive beat back every attempt to rescue him. In today’s show we’ll learn how his lifelong passion for golf became the key to his escape.

We’ll also learn about a videogame based on the Dyatlov Pass incident and puzzle over why a military force drops bombs on its friends.

See full show notes …

| Oddities · Podcast

A Writer Below

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

While training as an engineer, Robert Louis Stevenson dove to the foundation of a breakwater at Wick, accompanied by a worker named Bob Bain. He remembered the day in memorable prose:

“Some twenty rounds below the platform twilight fell. Looking up, I saw a low green heaven mottled with vanishing bells of white; looking around, except for the weedy spokes and shafts of the ladder, nothing but a green gloaming, somewhat opaque but very restful and delicious.”

Bain took his hand and led him through “a world of tumbled stone … pillared with the weedy uprights of the staging; overhead, a flat roof of green; a little in front, the sea wall, like an unfinished rampart.”

Presently Bain motioned him to leap onto a stone six feet high. Stevenson was incredulous at this, encumbered as he was with a heavy helmet and lead boots. “I laughed aloud in my tomb; and to prove to Bob how far he was astray, I gave a little impulse from my toes. Up I soared like a bird, my companion soaring at my side. As high as to the stone, and then higher, I pursued my impotent and empty flight.”

Bain had to restrain him from rising higher, and Stevenson felt it bitter “to return to infancy, to be supported, and directed and perpetually set upon your feet, by the hand of someone else.” He was relieved when the time came to return to the surface. “Of a sudden, my ascending head passed into the trough of a swell. Out of the green, I shot at once into a glory of rosy, almost of sanguine light, the multitudinous seas incarnadined, the heaven above a vault of crimson. And then the glory faded into the hard, ugly daylight of a Caithness autumn, with a low sky, a gray sea, and a whistling wind.”

He called this “one of the best things I got from my education as an engineer.” The article appeared in Scribner’s in 1888.

| Literature

Tilt

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Image: Flickr

The wool-trading village of Lavenham, Suffolk, grew so quickly during its medieval heyday that many of its houses were built hastily with green timber, which has warped as it’s dried, pulling the buildings into memorably crooked shapes. It’s thought to be the inspiration for a familiar nursery rhyme:

There was a crooked man, and he walked a crooked mile.
He found a crooked sixpence upon a crooked stile.
He bought a crooked cat, which caught a crooked mouse,
And they all lived together in a little crooked house.

The Crooked House, below, a pub and restaurant in South Staffordshire, owes its shape to mining subsidence in the 19th century — one side of the building is now 4 feet lower than the other, which means that now coins roll up the bar and pints slide across seemingly flat surfaces.

“It can be really disorientating at first,” manager Dan Lewis told the Mirror. “When I first came in I didn’t have a drink because I felt so dizzy.”

https://www.flickr.com/photos/banksfam/8019002182/
Image: Flickr

(Thanks, Stefan.)

| Oddities

Clifford’s Circle Theorems

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

Let four circles (blue) pass through a single point, M. Each pair of these circles intersect at a second point (pink). Each three of the four blue circles will have three pink points among them; these trios of pink points define four new circles (brown), which intersect in a single point, P.

If we start with five circles passing through a single point M, then we can apply the procedure above to each subset of four of them. This will produce five points P that all lie on a single circle.

If we start with six circles that all pass through a single point M, then each subset of five of them defines a new circle, as we’ve just seen. These six new circles all pass through a single point.

Remarkably, this pattern continues forever. It was discovered by the English geometer William Kingdon Clifford.

| Science & Math