A very old Jewish man called his wife to his bed. ‘I am going to die. Please call a priest — I wish to convert to Catholicism.’ His wife responded with shock and disbelief, reminding her husband that they had been devout Jews all their lives. ‘I know, dear,’ he said, ‘but isn’t it better that one of them should die than one of us?’
— Anonymous epigraph to John Martin Fischer, The Metaphysics of Death, 1993
Henrietta wants a yacht. Her parents think she’s too young. Like all rich people, they settle disagreements by playing competitive lawn tennis.
Henrietta must play three singles matches against her parents. If she wins two matches in a row she gets the yacht. Her mother is a better player than her father. Should she play mother-father-mother or father-mother-father?
“A scholar is just a library’s way of making another library.” — Daniel Dennett
The high point of the Buckingham Palace switchboard operator’s day is when she puts the Queen through to the Queen Mother. ‘Your Majesty? Her Majesty, Your Majesty.’
— Jerrold M. Packard, The Queen & Her Court: A Guide to the British Monarchy Today, 1981
The name of any integer can be transformed into a number by setting A=1, B=2, C=3, etc.: ONE = 15145, TWO = 202315, THREE = 2081855, and so on.
Because every English number name ends in D (4), E (5), L (12), N (14), O (15), R (18), T (20), X (24), or Y (25), no such transformation will produce a prime number.
But in Spanish, which uses 27 letters, both SESENTA (60) = 20520514211 and MIL SETENTA (1070) = 1391220521514211 yield primes.
(Thanks, Claudio.)
A man was killed by a circular saw, and in his obituary notice it was stated that he was ‘a good citizen, an upright man and an ardent patriot, but of limited information with regard to circular saws.’
— James Baird McClure, ed., Entertaining Anecdotes From Every Available Source, 1879
In May 1892, the French newspaper La Petite Gironde sponsored a unique contest: The first man to travel on stilts the 302 miles from Bordeaux to Bayonne and Biarritz and back would win 1,000 francs.
Sometimes the stilts broke, although they were made of strong ash. The men would then halt for repairs and seize the opportunity of taking a meal–soup and fried eggs, perhaps, with coffee and white wine. … First arrivals at various control-posts were presented with bouquets, laurel wreaths, and more substantial tokens in the shape of free rations and money. Others frankly touted for contributions in the towns, and made a grand thing of it.
Of 69 starters, 32 covered the course in the allotted time of eight and a half days. The prize went to 31-year-old Pierre Deycard, who finished in 4 days 7 hours — after which he was treated to a banquet of 15 courses “and then made to parade the town with a bank note for 1,000 francs pinned on his chest.”
(From Strand, January 1898.)
En route to Antarctica in 1840, explorer James Clark Ross noticed something odd on the Kerguelen Islands in the southern Indian Ocean:
Captain Sir J.C. Ross’s party saw no land animals, and the only traces of there being any upon the island were the singular foot-prints of a pony or ass, about three inches in length and two and a half in breadth, having a small and deeper depression on each side and shaped like a horse shoe. The animal had probably been cast on shore from some wrecked vessel: its foot-prints were traced for some distance in the recently fallen snow in hopes of getting sight of it; but the tracks were lost on reaching a large space of rocky ground which was free from snow.
— John Nunn, Narrative of the Wreck of the “Favorite” on the Island of Desolation, 1850
rusticate
v. to spend time in the country
