Patented in 1992 by Celess Antoine. Some things don’t need a lot of explaining.
If you live in an arid climate there’s an alternate solution.
Breakup Music
Erik Satie’s 1893 composition Vexations bears an inscrutable inscription: “In order to play the theme 840 times in succession, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, and in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities.” This seems to mean that the piece should be repeated 840 times in performance, which would take 12-24 hours, depending on how you interpret the tempo marking “Très lent.”
“It is perhaps not surprising that few of the performances [Gavin] Bryars lists have been complete,” writes Robert Orledge in Satie the Composer, “for with the bass theme repeated between each 13-beat harmonization, it recurs 3,360 times.”
“It is probable that Satie’s vexations are those expressed in the latter part of his difficult relationship with Suzanne Valadon, that is to say, somewhere between April and early June 1893.”
“A Tradesman in a Difficulty”
A puzzle by Angelo Lewis, writing as “Professor Hoffman” in 1893:
A man went into a shop in New York and purchased goods to the amount of 34 cents. When he came to pay, he found that he had only a dollar, a three-cent piece, and a two-cent piece. The tradesman had only a half- and a quarter-dollar. A third man, who chanced to be in the shop, was asked if he could assist, but he proved to have only two dimes, a five-cent piece, a two-cent piece, and a one-cent piece. With this assistance, however, the shopkeeper managed to give change. How did he do it?
Moving Target
What is the smallest integer that’s not named on this blog?
Suppose that the smallest integer that’s not named (explicitly or by reference) elsewhere on the blog is 257. But now the phrase above refers to that number. And that instantly means that it doesn’t refer to 257, but presumably to 258.
But if it refers to 258 then actually it refers to 257 again. “If it ‘names’ 257 it doesn’t, so it doesn’t,” writes J.L. Mackie, “but if it doesn’t, then it does, so it does.”
(Adduced by Max Black of Cornell.)
Unquote
“Men do not desire merely to be rich, but to be richer than other men.” — John Stuart Mill
Shop Talk
“I’m glad you like adverbs,” wrote Henry James to a correspondent. “I adore them; they are the only qualifications I really much respect, and I agree with the fine author of your quotations in saying — or in thinking — that the sense for them is the literary sense. None other is much worth speaking of.”
As Somerset Maugham prepared to write Of Human Bondage, “I began with the impossible aim of using no adjectives at all. I thought that if you could find the exact term a qualifying epithet could be dispensed with. As I saw it in my mind’s eye my book would have the appearance of an immensely long telegram in which for economy’s sake you had left out every word that was not necessary to make the sense clear. I have not read it since I corrected the proofs and do not know how near I came to doing what I tried. My impression is that it is written at least more naturally than anything I had written before.”
Edgar Allan Poe bewailed the passing of the dash. “The Byronic poets were all dash,” he complained. “The dash gives the reader a choice between two, or among three or more expressions, one of which may be more forcible than another, but all of which help out the idea. It stands, in general, for these words — ‘or, to make my meaning more distinct’. This force it has — and this force no other point can have; since all other points have well-understood uses quite different from this. Therefore, the dash cannot be dispensed with.”
When a Boston girl took Mark Twain to task for splitting infinitives, he confessed that “I have certain instincts, and I wholly lack certain others. (Is that ‘wholly’ in the right place?) For instance, I am dead to adverbs; they cannot excite me. To misplace an adverb is a thing which I am able to do with frozen indifference; it can never give me a pang. … I know thoroughly well that I shall never be able to get it into my head. Mind, I do not say I shall not be able to make it stay there; I say and mean that I am not capable of getting it into my head. There are subtleties which I cannot master at all, — they confuse me, they mean absolutely nothing to me, — and this adverb plague is one of them.”
Testimony
From the 2000 Indiana College Mathematics Competition:
Four suspects, one of whom was known to have committed a murder, made the following statements when questioned by police. If only one of them is telling the truth, who did it?
Arby: Becky did it.
Becky: Ducky did it.
Cindy: I didn’t do it.
Ducky: Becky is lying.
Tableau
Mr. X, who thinks Mr. Y a complete idiot, walks along a corridor with Mr. Y just before 6 p.m. on a certain evening, and they separate into two adjacent rooms. Mr. X thinks that Mr. Y has gone into Room 7 and himself into Room 8, but owing to some piece of absent-mindedness Mr. Y has in fact entered Room 6 and Mr. X Room 7. Alone in Room 7 just before 6, Mr. X thinks of Mr. Y in Room 7 and of Mr. Y‘s idiocy, and at precisely 6 o’clock reflects that nothing that is thought by anyone in Room 7 at 6 o’clock is actually the case. But it has been rigorously proved, using only the most general and certain principles of logic, that under the circumstances supposed Mr. X just cannot be thinking anything of the sort.
— A.N. Prior, “On a Family of Paradoxes,” Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic, 1961
The Five Rooms
Here’s the floor plan of a house with five rooms. Can you draw a continuous line that passes through each of the 16 wall segments once and once only? If it’s possible, show how; if it’s not, explain why.
“Sonnet From the Brooklynese”
My heart is gayly purzed as if it wuy
Ra buyd about to dart in jeryous flight
To you; my darling, may it but alight
On vuygin surl. And may it not incuy
Your anger or disdain. ‘Tis but a fleuy
D’amour, and if you spuyn it you will blight
Its life as if some purzon in the night
Had been instilled into its depths. You stuy
My soul into a tuymurl. If you’ve turyed
With me, I fain would hie me to a clurster,
Wherein my heart would never be annuryed
By thoughts of love. My eyes grow murst and murster
At contemplating such an aching vurd —
O grant me, then, the sang-froid of an urster.
— Margaret Fishback, One to a Customer, 1937