Monkey See

http://books.google.com/books?id=oME9AAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

One day I paid him a visit [an orangutan at the Paris Zoological Gardens], accompanied by an illustrious old gentleman, who was a clever, shrewd observer. His somewhat peculiar costume, bent body, and slow, feeble walk at once attracted the attention of the young animal, who, while doing most complacently all that was required of him, kept his eyes fixed on the object of his curiosity. We were about leaving, when he approached his new visitor, and, with mingled gentleness and mischief, took the stick which he carried, and pretending to lean upon it, rounding his shoulders, and slackening his pace, walked round the room, imitating the figure and gait of my old friend. He then gave him back the stick of his own accord, and we took our leave, convinced that he also knew how to observe.

— M. Flourens, quoted in Ernest Menault, The Intelligence of Animals, 1869

| Oddities

Economical

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

A baseball pitcher played an entire game while throwing the minimum possible number of pitches. The game was not called before completion. How many pitches did he throw?

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| Puzzles

Mouth to Mouth

In 1855 the Western Lancet published a letter from an officer in the Crimea:

A curious thing occurred yesterday. A sapper was brought from the trenches with his jaw broken, and the doctor told me that there was a piece of it sticking out an inch and a half from his face. The man said it was done by a round shot, which the doctor disbelieved, but the poor fellow insisted, and said, ‘Yes, and it took off the head of the man next me.’ This was conclusive, and the surgeon proceeded to remove the bone: it came out easy, when the doctor said to the man, whose face appeared to preserve its form pretty well, ‘Can you move your jaw?’ ‘Oh, yes, sir,’ was the reply. The doctor then put his finger into the man’s mouth, and found the teeth were there, and at length assured the soldier that it was no jaw of his that was broken, but that of his headless comrade, inflicting a severe but not dangerous wound. Upon this, the man’s visage, which had been rather lengthened, rounded up most beautifully.

Reprinted in Paul Fitzsimmons Eve, A Collection of Remarkable Cases in Surgery, 1857.

| Oddities

Leg Room

bel geddes flying boat

Norman Bel Geddes announced big plans in 1932: Air Liner Number 4, a gigantic V-winged flying boat with a wingspan of 528 feet, more than twice that of today’s 777. Twenty 1900-horsepower engines would carry it through the air at 100 mph and an altitude of only 5,000 feet while 451 passengers ranged over nine decks containing 180 apartments, three kitchens, three private dining rooms, an orchestra platform, a gym, six shuffleboard courts, a dance floor, a library, separate solaria for men and women, a writing room, and a promenade deck. The 155-person crew included two telephone operators, 24 waiters, two masseuses, a manicurist, and a gymnast.

The plane was “not ‘big’ for the sake of being big,” Bel Geddes insisted, but he pointed out that

if it were possible to stand her upon one wing tip against the Washington Monument, she would lack only 23 feet of reaching the top. Or imagine that the Public Library was removed from its site in Bryant Park at Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue, New York. The plane could then settle comfortably in the park with a clearance of about 35 feet all around.

The craft had a range of 7,500 miles, and it would be supported on the water by two enormous pontoons, 60 feet high and designed “substantially as the hull of a yacht, in order to withstand tremendous pounding when the plane rests on a rough sea.” In the end it was never built, but it may have helped inspire Howard Hughes’ “Spruce Goose.”

| Oddities · Technology

Down at Heel

When actor Conrad Cantzen died in 1945, he left $226,608.34 in a special fund to enable performers to buy new shoes each year.

“I leave the Conrad Cantzen Shoe Fund for the people who can’t buy shoes, even if they are not paid-up members of Equity,” his will read. “Many times I have been on my uppers, and the thinner the soles of my shoes were, the less courage I had to face the managers in looking for a job.”

Remarkably, the fund is still running. If you work in entertainment, are currently unemployed, belong to a performing arts union, and haven’t already applied in the past year, the Actors Fund will reimburse you up to $40 toward a pair of shoes costing no more than $100. Details are here.

| Oddities

Bad Country

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

Yellowstone National Park doesn’t quite fit in Wyoming — small portions extend into Montana and Idaho. But Congress has placed the legal jurisdiction for the entire park in the District of Wyoming. At the same time, the Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution requires that a jury be “of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed.”

Suppose you lure me into the 50 square miles of Yellowstone that lie within Idaho, and suppose you kill me there. The Sixth Amendment requires that the jury be drawn from the state (Idaho) and the district (Wyoming) in which the crime occurred. But the only way to fulfill both those requirements is to draw the jury from the tiny part of Yellowstone that lies in Idaho — and its census population is zero. Without a jury, you can’t be tried. “Assuming that you do not feel like consenting to trial in Cheyenne,” writes Michigan State law professor Brian Kalt, “you should go free.”

“It bears emphasis that the flaw here is really with the District of Wyoming statute, not with the Sixth Amendment,” advises Kalt, whose full paper is here. “The solution is to fix the statute, not eviscerate the Constitution. If we do it quickly enough, no one will get hurt.”

Please don’t actually kill me. (Thanks, Ty.)

| Crime · Oddities

“To My Old Master”

In August 1865, Col. P.H. Anderson of Big Spring, Tenn., wrote to his former slave Jourdon Anderson, now emancipated in Ohio, and asked him to return to work on his farm. Anderson dictated this letter in response:

Sir: I got your letter, and was glad to find that you had not forgotten Jourdon, and that you wanted me to come back and live with you again, promising to do better for me than anybody else can. I have often felt uneasy about you. I thought the Yankees would have hung you long before this, for harboring Rebs they found at your house. I suppose they never heard about your going to Colonel Martin’s to kill the Union soldier that was left by his company in their stable. Although you shot at me twice before I left you, I did not want to hear of your being hurt, and am glad you are still living. It would do me good to go back to the dear old home again, and see Miss Mary and Miss Martha and Allen, Esther, Green, and Lee. Give my love to them all, and tell them I hope we will meet in the better world, if not in this. I would have gone back to see you all when I was working in the Nashville Hospital, but one of the neighbors told me that Henry intended to shoot me if he ever got a chance.

I want to know particularly what the good chance is you propose to give me. I am doing tolerably well here. I get twenty-five dollars a month, with victuals and clothing; have a comfortable home for Mandy, — the folks call her Mrs. Anderson, — and the children — Milly, Jane, and Grundy — go to school and are learning well. The teacher says Grundy has a head for a preacher. They go to Sunday school, and Mandy and me attend church regularly. We are kindly treated. Sometimes we overhear others saying, ‘Them colored people were slaves’ down in Tennessee. The children feel hurt when they hear such remarks; but I tell them it was no disgrace in Tennessee to belong to Colonel Anderson. Many darkeys would have been proud, as I used to be, to call you master. Now if you will write and say what wages you will give me, I will be better able to decide whether it would be to my advantage to move back again.

As to my freedom, which you say I can have, there is nothing to be gained on that score, as I got my free papers in 1864 from the Provost-Marshal-General of the Department of Nashville. Mandy says she would be afraid to go back without some proof that you were disposed to treat us justly and kindly; and we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you. This will make us forget and forgive old scores, and rely on your justice and friendship in the future. I served you faithfully for thirty-two years, and Mandy twenty years. At twenty-five dollars a month for me, and two dollars a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to eleven thousand six hundred and eighty dollars. Add to this the interest for the time our wages have been kept back, and deduct what you paid for our clothing, and three doctor’s visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to. Please send the money by Adams’s Express, in care of V. Winters, Esq., Dayton, Ohio. If you fail to pay us for faithful labors in the past, we can have little faith in your promises in the future. We trust the good Maker has opened your eyes to the wrongs which you and your fathers have done to me and my fathers, in making us toil for you for generations without recompense. Here I draw my wages every Saturday night; but in Tennessee there was never any pay-day for the negroes any more than for the horses and cows. Surely there will be a day of reckoning for those who defraud the laborer of his hire.

In answering this letter, please state if there would be any safety for my Milly and Jane, who are now grown up, and both good-looking girls. You know how it was with poor Matilda and Catherine. I would rather stay here and starve — and die, if it come to that — than have my girls brought to shame by the violence and wickedness of their young masters. You will also please state if there has been any schools opened for the colored children in your neighborhood. The great desire of my life now is to give my children an education, and have them form virtuous habits.

Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.

From your old servant,

Jourdon Anderson.

(Thanks, Simon.)

| History · Society

Next in Line

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:President_Reagan_waves_to_crowd_immediately_before_being_shot_1981.jpg

That’s Ronald Reagan, just before being shot by John Hinckley outside the Washington Hilton Hotel on March 30, 1981. The man in the white raincoat is Secret Service agent Jerry Parr; after the shooting, it was Parr who pushed Reagan into a limousine, noticed he was bleeding, and directed the driver to take them to a hospital, probably saving Reagan’s life.

Parr had been inspired to pursue his career by the 1939 film The Code of the Secret Service, in which dashing agent “Brass” Bancroft survives a shooting in Mexico. Bancroft was played by a 28-year-old Ronald Reagan.

(Thanks, Colin.)

| History · Oddities