Santa Suit

Oregon attorney general Dave Frohnmayer released this opinion letter on Dec. 23, 1982:

Mr. S.T. Nicholas
1225 N. Pole
Gnome, Alaska 90001

Dear Mr. Nicholas:

This letter is to inform you of our decision in the complaint of improper business practices brought against you by Mr. I.M. Grinch.

In his complaint, Mr. Grinch has requested that the Oregon Department of Justice immediately seek a temporary restraining order prohibiting you from any business-related activities because of the following alleged violations of state and federal antitrust laws:

  1. That by conspiring with parents you cause confusion or misunderstanding as to the source, sponsorship, and approval of your goods and services (ORS 646.608);
  2. That by consulting with parents on gifts for children you have furnished them with privileged customer information;
  3. That by inciting parents to whisper among themselves and hide presents during the month of December, and by compiling a list and checking it twice, you engage in conspiratorial practices (ORS 646.725);
  4. That by discriminating against naughty persons you have accorded special service to some customers in violation of ORS 646.080, which states that customers must be treated on proportionally equal terms;
  5. That by linking the receipt of your gifts to persons’ good behavior you violated Oregon law, which prohibits making product sales conditional upon other behavior;
  6. That by giving away presents you have violated federal minimum price regulations;
  7. That by claiming to deliver presents all over the world in only one night you are promising delivery of goods while knowing you are not able to fulfill that promise (ORS 646.607 and 646.608);
  8. That you have conspired with Saint Nick, Santa Claus, Père Noel, and others to engage in an illegal restraint of trade by allocating markets and customers and by fixing prices (ORS 646.725); and
  9. That you have received kickbacks from your reindeer.

Finally, Mr. Grinch has accused you of having violated ORS 646.730, which states:

Every person who shall monopolize, or attempt to monopolize, or combine or conspire with any other person or persons to monopolize, any part of trade or commerce, shall be in violation of ORS 136.617, 646.705 or 646.805, and 646.990.

We find that you have participated in monopoly, but only in the delivery of the game to children, a non-citable practice.

We conclude that the allegations are unfounded and see no reason to convene a special grand jury. We have, however, filed a counterclaim on your behalf against I.M. Grinch under state antitrust laws for contriving a shortage of good will. His action may also constitute the crime of malicious rottenness.

Further, I have instructed our Consumer Protection Section to pay close attention to enforcement of chimney cleaning regulations for the remainder of 1982.

Merry Christmas,

Dave Frohnmayer
Attorney General

| Humor

Limerick

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kir%C3%A1lytigris.jpg

A tiger, by taste anthropophagous,
Felt a yearning inside his oesophagus;
He spied a fat Brahmin
And growled, “What’s the harm in
A peripatetic sarcophagus?”

— Anonymous

| Poems

Good Company

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Black_Book_cover.jpg

During World War II, Germany prepared a list of 2,820 people to be arrested in a Nazi invasion of Britain. It included:

  • Robert Baden-Powell
  • Violet Bonham Carter
  • Neville Chamberlain
  • Winston Churchill
  • Noël Coward
  • E.M. Forster
  • J.B.S. Haldane
  • Aldous Huxley
  • Ignacy Jan Paderewski
  • J.B. Priestley
  • Paul Robeson
  • Bertrand Russell
  • C.P. Snow
  • Stephen Spender
  • H.G. Wells
  • Rebecca West
  • Virginia Woolf

When the list was published, Rebecca West cabled Noël Coward: MY DEAR, THE PEOPLE WE SHOULD HAVE BEEN SEEN DEAD WITH.

| History

The Devil’s Snare

In 1892 an alarming tale made the rounds of British magazines — the adventure of a Mr. Dunstan, a naturalist in Nicaragua:

‘He was engaged in hunting for botanical and entomological specimens, when he heard his dog cry out, as if in agony, from a distance. Running to the spot whence the animal’s cries came, Mr. Dunstan found him enveloped in a perfect network of what seemed to be a fine, rope-like tissue of roots and fibres. The plant or vine seemed composed entirely of bare, interlacing stems, resembling, more than anything else, the branches of the weeping-willow denuded of its foliage, but of a dark, nearly black hue, and covered with a thick, viscid gum that exuded from the pores.’ Drawing his knife, Mr. Dunstan attempted to cut the poor beast free; but it was with the very greatest difficulty that he managed to sever the fleshy muscular fibres of the plant. When the dog was extricated from the coils of the plant, Mr. Dunstan saw, to his horror and amazement, that the dog’s body was bloodstained, ‘while the skin appeared to have been actually sucked or puckered in spots,’ and the animal staggered as if from exhaustion. In cutting the vine, the twigs curled like living, sinuous fingers about Mr. Dunstan’s hand, and it required no slight force to free the member from its clinging grasp, which left the flesh red and blistered. The gum exuding from the vine was of a greyish-dark tinge, remarkably adhesive, and of a disagreeable animal odor, powerful and nauseating to inhale. The natives, we are told, showed the greatest horror of the plant, which, as we have noted above, they called the ‘devil’s snare,’ and they recounted to the naturalist many stories of its death-dealing powers. Mr. Dunstan, we are told, was able to discover very little about the nature of the plant, owing to the difficulty of handling it, for its grasp can only be shaken off with the loss of skin, and even of flesh. As near as he could ascertain, however, its power of suction is contained ‘in a number of infinitesimal mouths or little suckers, which, ordinarily closed, open for the reception of food.’ ‘If the substance is animal, the blood is drawn off and the carcass or refuse then dropped. A lump of raw meat being thrown it, in the short space of five minutes the blood will be thoroughly drunk off and the mass thrown aside. Its voracity is almost beyond belief.’

None could quite agree on the piece’s source or author, but they were surprisingly open-minded as to its truth. “It must be admitted to be circumstantial enough in all its details to be possible,” wrote the editors of the Spectator. “The story is unquestionably a very curious one, and we may rely upon it, that if the plant really does exist, we shall soon have a specimen at Kew. The digging of the Nicaragua Canal will bring plenty of Americans and Englishmen into the very country where the ‘vampire vine’ is said to exist, and the question whether the whole thing is or is not a hoax may very soon be tested.” Indeed, they said, this argued in favor of the story’s truth: A hoaxer would have placed his plant in a more obscure location.

| Hoaxes

Striking Oils

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rembrandt_-_The_Polish_Rider.jpg

Imagine that we learned that the object before us [that] looks like a painting that would spontaneously move us if we believed it had been painted — say the Polish Rider of Rembrandt, in which an isolated mounted figure is shown midjourney to an uncertain destiny — was not painted at all but is the result of someone’s having dumped lots of paint in a centrifuge, giving the contrivance a spin, and having the result splat onto canvas, ‘just to see what would happen.’ … Now the question is whether, knowing this fact, we are prepared to consider this randomly generated object a work of art.

— Arthur Coleman Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, 1981

| Art

Looking Out

Write out the numbers ONE through NINE and alphabetize them.

ONE appears in the center.

Do the same for ONE through NINETEEN and ONE through NINETY-NINE.

In each case, ONE remains in the center.

(Discovered by Edward Wolpow.)

| Language

Prime Target

What constitutes a name? In 1976, North Dakota short-order cook Michael Dengler sued for the right to change his name to 1069. He said that each digit reflected an aspect of his identity; 6, for example, symbolized his “relationship with the universe in my understanding of my spatial occupancy through this life.” He insisted that “the only way that this identity can be expressed is 1069.”

The state supreme court wrestled with the implications:

If the proposed change is written or printed it would simply appear in Arabic symbols, 1069; but if it is verbalized would it be ‘one thousand sixty-nine,’ ‘one naught six nine,’ ‘one zero six nine,’ or would it be ‘ten sixty-nine’? Petitioner, during the oral argument, stated how he would verbalize it, but this would not eliminate the problem because other persons will not know this.

Some observers joked that he could go by “Juan.” But in the end the court refused the request altogether. “Innovative ideas, even though bordering on the bizarre, are frequently encouraged and may be protected by the law and the courts, but to use the court or law to impose or force a number in lieu of a name upon society is another matter.”

| Society

À La Carte

Suppose there were an experience machine that would give you any experience you desired. Superduper neuropsychologists could stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel you were writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book. All the time you would be floating in a tank, with electrodes attached to your brain. Should you plug into this machine for life, preprogramming your life’s experiences? If you are worried about missing out on desirable experiences, we can suppose that business enterprises have researched thoroughly the lives of many others. You can pick and choose from their large library or smorgasbord of such experiences, selecting your life’s experiences for, say, the next two years. After two years have passed, you will have ten minutes or ten hours out of the tank, to select the experiences of your next two years. Of course, while in the tank you won’t know that you’re there; you’ll think it’s all actually happening. … Would you plug in?

— Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 1974

| Science & Math

A Chess Maze

nelson chess maze

Harry L. Nelson offered this puzzle in the Journal of Recreational Mathematics in 1983. The black king’s favorite square is c8, but he finds it is under attack by a white pawn. In how few moves can he correct this problem and return to a peaceful c8? White never moves. The black king can capture white pieces, but he may not visit any square more than once and may not enter check.

Click for Answer
| Puzzles