When Marshall Bean left the Army in 1965 after eight years’ service, he inverted his name to avoid his creditors. His new driver’s license and Social Security card read Naeb Llahsram.
Unfortunately, this fooled the Army, too, which drafted him back again in 1966. It took him more than a year to convince them he’d already served.
“All this is his own fault,” an Army spokesman told the Associated Press. “It would not have happened in the first place if he hadn’t spelled his name backwards.”
A puzzle by David Wells:
Every day I take the subway from Startville to Endville. Today I arrived at the Startville station to find that my train was just departing. I caught the next train to Endville, where I left the station at exactly the same time as if I had caught the first train. How did I manage this? The two trains traveled at the same speed, and I myself did not have to rush to make up the lost time.
How fast does time pass? We have no way to measure this. We can reply, helplessly, that it passes at one second per second, but this is not a rate of change — 1 second divided by 1 second is 1. Not 1 of anything, just 1.
“‘One’ can be an answer, right or wrong, to the questions ‘How many children had Lady Macbeth?’, ‘How many Gods are there?’, and ‘How many minutes do sixty seconds make?’,” writes Notre Dame philosopher Peter van Inwagen. “‘One’ can never be an answer, not even a wrong one, to any other sort of question — including those questions that ask ‘how fast?’ or ‘at what rate?’ Therefore, if time is moving, it is not moving at any rate or speed.”
(From his Metaphysics, 2002.)
One of the most eminent architects in the kingdom once showed the accompanying photograph to a number of his colleagues. Had they ever seen such an exquisitely carved capital? They had not; and they said so. Then arose disputes as to the precise nature of the architecture. Finally sundry big wagers were made, and then the architect gravely proceeded to explain the structure of the column and its capital. This he did by producing his Malacca walking-stick and a few sprigs of succulent broccoli, such as are seen in Fig. 19. Naturally enough, however, after many abstruse disquisitions on mediæval architecture had been given on the subject of the mysterious pillar, this explanation of the photograph was received in silent disgust.
— William G. FitzGerald, “Some Curiosities of Modern Photography,” Strand, January 1895
From Gaston Tissandier’s Popular Scientific Recreations (1882). This is even worse than the dog treadmill, where at least the animal has the option to stand still — here he’s confined to a box on the side of a wheel, where, finding himself sliding downward, he’s perpetually forced to climb.
Tissandier says that the machine’s inventor, M. Richard of Paris, employed a large number of women working on sewing machines and conceived the idea of “quadrupedal motors” when he noticed the work was injuring their health. That was generous. “There is very little trouble or expense connected with the working, so a great saving is effected, as the dogs cost little, and are cheaply fed.” Perhaps he found a suitably ironic fate in the afterlife.
(Thanks, Richard.)
“Most men employ the first part of life to make the rest miserable.” — Jean de la Bruyère
Mysterious Nothing! how shall I define
Thy shapeless, baseless, placeless emptiness?
Nor form, nor colour, sound, nor size is thine,
Nor words nor fingers can thy voice express;
But though we cannot thee to aught compare,
A thousand things to thee may likened be,
And though thou art with nobody nowhere,
Yet half mankind devote themselves to thee.
How many books thy history contain!
How many heads thy mighty plans pursue!
What labouring hands thy portion only gain!
What busy bodies thy doings only do!
To thee the great, the proud, the giddy bend,
And — like my sonnet — all in nothing end.
— Richard Porson, in Morning Chronicle, March 4, 1814
This tiling pattern is sometimes referred to as Pythagorean because it can be construed to prove the Pythagorean theorem.
The red area is a right triangle. The square of its shorter side is equivalent to a green square, and the square of its longer side is equivalent to a yellow square.
One green and one yellow square can be cut up and reassembled to fit into one of the canted white squares, which is equivalent to the square of the red triangle’s hypotenuse. Hence a2 + b2 = c2.
Bored and industrious in 1902, the citizens of the Yukon built a 32-foot snowman on the border between Canada and Alaska.
In the spirit of brotherhood, they gave it two faces — King Edward looked out over the British domain, and Uncle Sam surveyed the American.
‘Twas gilbert. The kchesterton
Did locke and bennett in the reed.
All meredith was the nicholson,
And harrison outqueed.
Beware the see-enn-william, son,
The londonjack with call that’s wild.
Beware the gertroo datherton
And richardwashburnchild.
He took his brady blade in hand;
Long time the partridge foe he sought.
Then stood a time by the oppenheim
In deep mcnaughton thought.
In warwick deeping thought he stood–
He poised on edithwharton brink;
He cried, “Ohbernardshaw! I could
If basilking would kink.”
Rexbeach! rexbeach!–and each on each
O. Henry’s mantles ferber fell.
It was the same’s if henryjames
Had wally eaton well.
“And hast thou writ the greatest book!
Come to thy birmingham, my boy!
Oh, beresford way! Oh, holman day!”
He kiplinged in his joy.
‘Twas gilbert. The kchesterton
Did locke and bennett in the reed.
All meredith was the nicholson,
And harrison outqueed.
— Harry Persons Taber, in Carolyn Wells, The Book of Humorous Verse, 1920