Ten senators are about to enter Congress when a barrage of snowballs knocks off their tophats. Each retrieves a hat at random. What is the probability that exactly nine of them receive their own hats?
A Glass Darkly
Robert Browning spent seven years composing Sordello, a 40,000-word narrative poem about strife between Guelphs and Ghibellines in 13th-century Italy. It was not received well.
Tennyson said, “There were only two lines in it that I understood, and they were both lies: ‘Who will may hear Sordello’s story told’ and ‘Who would has heard Sordello’s story told.'”
Thomas Carlyle wrote, “My wife has read through ‘Sordello’ without being able to make out whether ‘Sordello’ was a man, or a city, or a book.”
Douglas Jerrold opened the book while convalescing from an illness and began to fear that his mind had been destroyed. “O God, I AM an idiot!” he cried, sinking back onto the sofa. He pressed the book on his wife and sister; when Mrs. Jerrold said, “I don’t understand what this man means; it is gibberish,” her husband exclaimed, “Thank God, I am NOT an idiot!”
In Walter Besant’s 1895 novel The Golden Butterfly, one character spends eight hours trying to penetrate Browning’s poetry. “His eyes were bloodshot, his hair was pushed in disorder about his head, his cheeks were flushed, his hands were trembling, the nerves in his face were twitching. He looked about him wildly, and tried to collect his faculties. Then he arose, and solemnly cursed Robert Browning. He cursed him eating, drinking, and sleeping. And then he took all his volumes, and disposing them carefully in the fireplace, set light to them. ‘I wish,’ he said, ‘that I could put the poet there too.'”
Another (apocryphal) story tells of a puzzled friend who asked Browning the meaning of one of his poems. “When I wrote it, only God and I knew,” the poet replied. “Now, God alone knows!”
In a Word
blaguer
n. one who talks pretentiously
blatteroon
n. a senseless babbler or boaster
perissology
n. needless abundance of words
Four in Three
The Rain Wizard
In August 1891, a man named Frank Melbourne arrived in drought-stricken Cheyenne, Wyo., and claimed that he could summon rain at will. He proposed to produce rain within three days in return for a sizable fee.
“He established himself in the loft of a barn in the suburbs of the city and has been there ever since, except when leaving it for his meals,” reported the Rocky Mountain News. “The only apparatus or chemicals he took into his retreat were contained in four ordinary gripsacks. The windows of the barn were carefully shaded with blankets, and the crevices in the floor of the barn loft covered to prevent any eye penetrating the mystery of the rain-making laboratory.”
At first his efforts seemed to have no effect, but on the third day the sky darkened. “Business was almost suspended and thousands of people were on the streets watching the clouds. At 2:40 o’clock there was a heavy peal of thunder and a vivid flash of lightning, and in a few moments the rain came down in torrents.” Melbourne emerged and claimed credit; to convince skeptics, he returned to the loft a few days later, and again showers fell.
This established his reputation, and he moved on to Salt Lake City and Kelton, Utah, and Goodland, Kan., which were also suffering dry spells. He returned to Cheyenne the following summer, promising to cover 5,000 square miles with rainfall, but this time he produced only a few scattered showers. The committee refused to pay him, and he left Cheyenne for good.
Scientific American noted that Melbourne spent the years 1892 to 1894 aboard a specially rigged railroad car, offering his services to any community along the route. “So long as frequent rains occurred,” the editors observed, “although they were natural and were predicted by the Weather Bureau …, yet the farmers of Iowa, Kansas, and Nebraska, ignoring this fact, were sure to accredit all success to Mr. Melbourne.”
The Iowa Weather and Crop Service was more blunt. Melbourne ought to emulate the rain dancers of the Winnebago Indians, it said: “When they begin operations they never let up until it rains, so they score a success every time.”
Good
“Terms of approbation and eulogy in American dialect speech,” compiled by Elsie Warnock for Dialect Notes, 1913:
- angeliferous
- cavascacious
- flambustious
- flippercanorious
- grandacious
- grandificent
- grandilious
- humgumptious
- magnolious
- rapteriferous
- roritorious
- scrumbotious
- sniptious
- spinortic
- spondiculous
- superumdifferous
- swellelegant
“The facetious terms ‘gobsloptious,’ ‘gobersloptious,’ ‘globsloptious’ and ‘supergobsloptious,’ ‘superglobsloptious,’ ‘superglobbersloptious,’ and ‘supergobosnoptious’ seem to be variant forms differing because of the desire of one person to outdo another in the force of his terms of eulogy.”
(Thanks, Owen.)
Black and White
Round Numbers
Letter to the Times, June 17, 1978:
Sir,
It is not only dates that make nice patterns of numbers. Some years ago I was bringing a Destroyer home from the Far East and was required to report my position twice a day.
One evening, I saw that we would be passing close to where the Greenwich Meridian cuts the Equator so arranged to arrive there dead on midnight. Once there I altered course to due North and stopped engines so my position signal read:
At 0000 my position Latitude 00°00’N, Longitude 00°00’E. Course 000°. Speed 0.
I had considered saying I was Nowhere but thought (probably correctly) that Their Lordships would not be amused.
Yours faithfully,
Claud Dickens
The St. Albans Raid
In October 1864, a score of young men drifted into St. Albans, a little Vermont town just south of the Canadian border. They arrived in small groups by train and coach, took rooms in local hotels, and began to pass time around town, observing the daily routines of the citizens.
On October 19, they simultaneously held up three local banks. There they revealed themselves to be Confederate soldiers, and as they collected the money they required the bank officers to take an oath of fealty to the South. Then they made off across the border. “They must have either had a guide who was acquainted with the road or had made a personal examination,” wrote one investigator, “because there were places in the road where strangers would have gone the wrong way, but they made no mistake.”
In all, the raiders made off with $208,000, about $3.2 million in today’s dollars. They were apprehended, but the Canadian authorities refused to extradite them, and their leader, Bennett Young, traveled in Europe until it was safe to return to Kentucky after the war. His exploit became the northernmost land action in the Civil War.
Transversal of Primes
Choose a prime number p, draw a p×p array, and fill it with integers like so:
Now: Can we always find p cells that contain prime numbers such that no two occupy the same row or column? (This is somewhat like arranging rooks on a chessboard so that every rank and file is occupied but no rook attacks another.)
The example above shows one solution for p=11. Does a solution exist for every prime number? No one knows.