“A Sheep’s Taste for Music”

The Rev. T. Jackson says, in referring to sheep being fond of, and variously affected by, music, that the Highland breed of sheep carry off the palm for cleverness and for their partiality to sweet sounds. He knew one of them that would jump and skip about with considerable pleasure whenever a lively, quick tune was played; but the moment it heard the National Anthem, it would hang down its head, appear to be very sullen, annoyed, and much displeased until the music ceased.

— Vernon S. Morwood, Wonderful Animals, 1883

| Oddities

High-Class Forgery

In 1925, small-time criminal Alves Reis convinced the British firm that printed Portuguese currency to make some for him, and he passed some 5 million phony escudos into the Portuguese economy. Because the unauthorized bills came from official presses, the government at first could detect nothing wrong, but finally it found some duplicate serial numbers in Reis’ accounts and the game was up.

Reis argued that he had cheated no one, but he was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Lord Macmillan of Aberfeldy called the scheme “a crime for which, in the ingenuity and audacity of its conception, it would be difficult to find a parallel.”

And it raises an interesting legal question: If currency is produced by an official government printer, can it still be called counterfeit?

| Crime · Hoaxes

Art and Artifice

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:NautilusCutawayLogarithmicSpiral.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

Suppose … that a finely wrought object, one whose texture and proportions are highly pleasing in perception, has been believed to be the product of some primitive people. Then there is discovered evidence that proves it to be an accidental natural product. As an external thing, it is now precisely what it was before. Yet at once it ceases to be a work of art and becomes a natural ‘curiosity.’ It now belongs in a museum of natural history, not in a museum of art. And the extraordinary thing is that the difference that is thus made is not one of just intellectual classification. A difference is made in appreciative perception and in a direct way. The esthetic experience — in its limited sense — is thus seen to be inherently connected with the experience of making.

— John Dewey, Art as Experience, 1934

| Art

Lear in Limericks

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kinglearpainting.jpeg

GONERIL/REGAN: Pop’s tops!
LEAR: True Cordelia?
CORDELIA: Oh, Dad!
LEAR: I banish you!
KENT: Gad!
LEAR: Vanish!
FOOL: Mad!
Believe me, these sisters
Deceive you.
LEAR: The twisters!
GLOUCESTER: And my boy’s a bastard.
EDMUND: Too bad.
EDGAR: I’m disguised. Tom’s a fruitcake.
LEAR: Me too!
GONERIL/REGAN: Prise those eyes out.
GLOUCESTER: I’m blinded! Boo-hoo!
EDMUND: I fix my own odds.
GLOUCESTER: The gods are such sods.
EDGAR: No they’re not. Jump! All right!
GLOUCESTER: And that’s true.
REGAN: My hubby’s just snuffed it. To bed!
EDMUND: My lady?
GONERIL: He’s mine!
ALBANY: You’re still wed.
LEAR: The law is an ass;
Forgive me, my lass.
CORDELIA: Of course!
REGAN: Ugh!
GONERIL: Agh!
EDMUND: Oogh!
ALBANY: They’re all dead!
Good old gods! Three cheers!
KENT: I feel queer!
LEAR: She’s dead. Howl. Fool. Gurgle.
ALBANY: Oh dear!
KENT: He’s dead and I’m dying.
EDGAR: It’s time to start crying;
I’m king. That’s your lot. Shed a tear.

— Bill Greenwell

See GRKTRGDY.

| Literature · Poems

Fair Enough

The grave of Arthur Haine in the City Cemetery [of Portland, Oregon], between 10th and 13th Streets, is marked by a stone of his own design and the epitaph, ‘Haine Haint.’ Haine, who died in 1907, left a will saying, ‘Having lived as an atheist I want to be buried like one — without any monkey business.’

— Federal Writers’ Project, Oregon Trail: The Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean, 1939

| Death · Religion

Camera Ready

le serrec sea serpent

In December 1964, French photographer Robert Le Serrec, his wife, and his Australian friend Henk de Jong were crossing Stonehaven Bay, Hook Island, Queensland, when a gigantic tadpole-like creature appeared beneath them. Le Serrec and de Jong approached it underwater and had just begun filming when it opened its mouth and they retreated to the boat. The creature was 75 to 80 feet long.

That’s the story that Le Serrec published in Everyone magazine in March 1965; unfortunately, it quickly came to light that he was fleeing creditors in France and had boasted of money-making plans involving a sea serpent. Striking photo, though.

| Hoaxes

Dueling Ambushes

What’s unusual about this position, by Adamson?

adamson discovered checks 1

Ten discovered checks in a row:

1. Rb2+ Nd3+ 2. Nc4+ N7e5+ 3. Kg3+ gxh5+ 4. Bg5+ Nxb2+ 5. Ne3+ Ned3+

adamson discovered checks 2

Marcel Duchamp described chess as “the movement of pieces eating one another.”

| Entertainment

Clerihews

The Art of Biography
Is different from Geography.
Geography is about Maps,
But Biography is about Chaps.

John Stuart Mill
By a mighty effort of will,
Overcame his natural bonhomie
And wrote Principles of Political Economy.

The people of Spain think Cervantes
Equal to half-a-dozen Dantes:
An opinion resented most bitterly
By the people of Italy.

When Alexander Pope
Accidentally trod on the soap
And came down on the back of his head —
Never mind what he said.

The younger Van Eyck
Was christened Jan, not Mike.
The thought of this curious mistake
Often kept him awake.

“I quite realized,” said Columbus,
“That the Earth was not a rhombus,
But I am a little annoyed
To find it an oblate spheroid.”

— Edmund Clerihew Bentley (1875-1956) (More.)

| Poems