Alfred Clark patented a labor-saving brainstorm in 1913 — a churn operated by a rocking chair.
He was actually late to the party — Julius Restein had patented an even better solution 25 years earlier.
Math Notes
Declined With Thanks
When Hunter S. Thompson published Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, writers began to send him manuscripts, hoping he could help to get them published in Rolling Stone. Thompson sent a package of their poems to the magazine’s poetry editor, Charles Perry. “I don’t know about this stuff,” he wrote. “If you feel the same way, send it back to them with this” — and he included a prepared rejection letter:
You worthless, acid-sucking piece of illiterate shit! Don’t ever send this kind of brain-damaged swill in here again. If I had the time, I’d come out there and drive a fucking wooden stake into your forehead. Why don’t you get a job, germ? Maybe delivering advertising handouts door to door, or taking tickets for a wax museum. You drab South Bend cocksuckers are all the same; like those dope-addled dingbats at the Rolling Stone office. I’d like to kill those bastards for sending me your piece … and I’d just as soon kill you, too. Jam this morbid drivel up your ass where your readership will better appreciate it.
“We actually sent it out to a couple of people, thinking they would appreciate it,” Perry recalled later. “One person took it to a lawyer and asked whether he could sue us, and the lawyer said, ‘No, you don’t have a leg to stand on … but could I Xerox it?'”
“Hop, The Famous Sow”
This wonderful animal, of New Forest breed, early took a fancy to some pointer puppies that were being broken, and was ultimately trained as an invaluable pointer herself. She would often go out a little way with the puppies, and was gradually coaxed into doing as they did by means of a sort of pudding made of barley-meal. The puppies could be cuffed for misbehaviour, but a pocketful of stones was necessary in the case of the sow. She at length quartered her ground in grand style; backed other dogs when she came on game, and was so staunch as to remain five minutes or more on her point.
— Strand, December 1896
Wallflowers
Tiny Point Roberts, Wash., is built on a finger of land that extends south of the 49th parallel into Boundary Bay. This means that, though it’s part of the mainland United States, it can be reached by land only by traveling through Canada.
Similarly, Minnesota’s Northwest Angle extends from Manitoba into the Lake of the Woods, and Alburgh, Vt., resides on a peninsula that extends south from Quebec into Lake Champlain.
None of these places are islands; all are part of the 48 contiguous states but are not directly connected to them by land. Among other things, this makes life difficult for students in Point Roberts, whose primary school offers classes only through third grade. From fourth grade on, students must take a 40-minute bus ride through British Columbia to attend classes in Blaine, Wash.
Curtain Call
Reviewing a play in 1917, Heywood Broun wrote that Geoffrey Steyne’s performance was “the worst to be seen in the contemporary theater.” Steyne sued him for libel, but a judge threw out the case.
In reviewing the actor’s next production, Broun wrote, “Mr. Steyne’s performance was not up to his usual standard.”
Master Class
Writings of Sherlock Holmes, compiled by Vincent Starrett in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes:
- Upon the Distinction Between the Ashes of the Various Tobaccos
- Upon the Tracing of Footsteps
- Upon the Influence of a Trade Upon the Form of the Hand
- The Book of Life
- On the Typewriter and Its Relation to Crime
- Upon the Dating of Old Documents
- Of Tattoo Marks
- On Secret Writings
- On the Surface Anatomy of the Human Ear
- Early English Charters
- On the Polyphonic Motets of Lassus
- Chaldean Roots in the Ancient Cornish Language
- Malingering
- Upon the Uses of Dogs in the Work of the Detective
- Practical Handbook of Bee Culture, With Some Observations Upon the Segregation of the Queen
- The Blanched Soldier
- The Lion’s Mane
- Sigerson
- The Whole Art of Detection
- Translations
In June 1955, a document purporting to be Holmes’ last will and testament was published by Nathan L. Bengis in the London Mystery Magazine. In it, Holmes leaves “to the authorities of Scotland Yard, one copy of each of my trifling monographs on crime detection, unless happily they shall feel they have outgrown the need for the elementary suggestions of an amateur detective.”
Paint Scheme
How many colors are necessary to paint the squares of a chessboard so that no bishop can move between two squares of the same color?
Backward
“In the year 1500 Europe knew less than Archimedes, who died in the year 212 B.C.” — Alfred North Whitehead
Misc
- James Buchanan’s niece was his first lady.
- FIVE THOUSAND is the highest number name with no repeated letters.
- Ardmore, Tennessee, borders Ardmore, Alabama.
- 9306 × 2013 = 3102 × 6039
- “So that’s what hay looks like.” — Queen Mary
If God exists outside space and time, then how can he be omnipresent, present in all places at all times? If he exists within it, how could he have created it? How could a creation (or anything) take place outside time?