R.I.P.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Romantic_and_Atmospheric_Graveyard_(World%E2%80%99s_Best_Music,_1900).jpg

Puzzling tombstones, quoted in Grave Humor, Alonzo C. Hall, 1961:

Yorkshire, England:

Miles

This tombstone is a milestone. Why so?
Because beneath lies Miles. He’s Miles below.
A little man was he, a dwarf in size,
Yet now stretched out, at least Miles long he lies.
This grave, though small, contains a space so wide.
There’s Miles in breadth and length and room beside.

Sheffield, England:

John Knott

Here lies a man that was Knott born,
His father was Knott before him,
He lived Knott and did Knott die,
Yet underneath this stone doth lie.

London:

Ann Mann

Here lies Ann Mann,
Who lived an old maid
But died an old Mann
Dec. 8, 1767

The young Charles Lamb, visiting a churchyard with this sister, asked, “Mary, where are all the naughty people buried?”

| Death

Misc

  • Holmes and Watson never address one another by their first names.
  • Until 1990, the banknote factory at Debden, England, was heated by burning old banknotes.
  • The vowels AEIOUY can be arranged to spell the synonyms AYE and OUI.
  • 741602 + 437762 = 7416043776
  • “In all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane.” — Mark Twain

Two trick questions:

Who played the title role in Bride of Frankenstein? Valerie Hobson — not Elsa Lanchester.

Did Adlai Stevenson ever win national office? Yes — Adlai Stevenson I served as vice president under Grover Cleveland in 1893.

| Language · Literature · Quotations · Science & Math · Trivia

Society News

On Thursday afternoon a large party of friends, who had been enjoying themselves at a picnic in the picturesque neighbourhood of Boscastle, Devonshire, were about to return home, when the hat of Mr. Dennis, a solicitor, who was assisting two ladies to the carriage, was blown off, and, in running hastily to recover it, the unfortunate gentleman fell over the cliffs, and was instantly dashed to pieces. The deceased gentleman was much respected.

— The Times, Sept. 1, 1853

| Oddities

The Dim Reaper

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Apotheosis.jpg

We live the time that a match flickers; we pop the cork of a ginger-beer bottle, and the earthquake swallows us on the instant. Is it not odd, is it not incongruous, is it not, in the highest sense of human speech, incredible, that we should think so highly of the ginger-beer, and regard so little the devouring earthquake?

— Robert Louis Stevenson, “Aes Triplex,” 1878

| Death

Round Numbers

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Novgorod_(1873)_a.jpg

The Russian navy undertook an odd experiment in 1871: circular warships. With their broad, flat bottoms, the Novgorod (above) and the Vice Admiral Popov (below) were intended to bear heavy guns into shallow coastal waters where more conventional warships could not go. But without keels they were slow and difficult to maneuver, and in cross currents they tended to spin. They served briefly in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78 but were relegated as storeships in 1903 and scrapped nine years later.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vice_Admiral_Popov_(1875).jpg

| Oddities · Technology

Outpourings

gedanken tank puzzle 1

A tank of water has two holes of equal area, one at top and one at bottom. The top one leads to a downspout, so that both holes discharge their water at the same level. Ignoring friction, which hole produces the faster flow of water?

You actually don’t need to know the physics in order to solve this — it yields to an insight.

Click for Answer
| Puzzles · Science & Math

Traveling Companions

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ellen_Craft_escaped_slave.jpg

In 1848, Ellen and William Craft resolved to flee slavery, but they needed a way to get from Macon, Ga., to the free states in the north. William could never travel such a distance alone, but Ellen’s skin was fair enough that she could pass for white. So she disguised herself as a white male cotton planter attended by William, her slave. (She had to pose as a man because a white woman would not have traveled alone with a male slave.) The two asked leave to be away for the holidays, the illiterate Ellen bound her arm in a sling to escape being asked to write, and they departed on Dec. 21. Over the next four days:

  • Ellen found herself sitting next to a friend of her master on the train to Savannah. She feigned deafness to discourage his attempts to engage her in conversation.
  • The captain of a steamer to Charleston complimented Ellen on her “very attentive boy” and warned him to shun the “cutthroat abolitionists” in the north.
  • During the voyage a slave trader offered to buy William, and a military officer scolded Ellen for saying “thank you” to her slave.
  • In South Carolina a ticket seller insisted on seeing proof that Ellen owned William. A passing captain intervened and sent them on their way.
  • In a Virginia railway station a white woman confronted William, mistaking him for her own runaway slave.
  • An officer in Baltimore threatened again to detain them without proof of ownership, but relented, telling a clerk, “He is not well, it is a pity to stop him.”

On Dec. 25, after a journey of more than 800 miles, they arrived in Philadelphia:

On leaving the station, my master — or rather my wife, as I may now say — who had from the commencement of the journey borne up in a manner that much surprised us both, grasped me by the hand, and said, ‘Thank God, William, we are safe!’ then burst into tears, leant upon me, and wept like a child. The reaction was fearful. So when we reached the house, she was in reality so weak and faint that she could scarcely stand alone. However, I got her into the apartments that were pointed out, and there we knelt down, on this Sabbath, and Christmas-day, — a day that will ever be memorable to us, — and poured out our heartfelt gratitude to God, for his goodness in enabling us to overcome so many perilous difficulties, in escaping out of the jaws of the wicked.

The Crafts went on a speaking tour of New England to share their story with abolitionists, then moved to England to evade recapture under the Fugitive Slave Act. They returned only in 1868, when they established a school in Georgia for newly freed slaves.

| History · Oddities