When Sinclair Lewis won the Nobel Prize in 1930, he began to receive fan mail. One young woman proposed becoming his secretary. “I’ll do everything for you,” she wrote. “And when I say everything, I mean everything.”
Lewis’ wife, Dorothy, saw the letter and responded. “My dear Miss,” she wrote. “My husband already has a stenographer who handles his work for him. And, as for ‘everything,’ I take care of that myself — and when I say everything, I mean everything.”
A few miles to the northeast of Woodstock lies the village of Saugerties, and just before entering it, Routes 212 and 32 come together. We do not know who first gave this juncture the name of Fahrenheit Corners, but as a large IBM plant is in the vicinity, we may reasonably suspect one of its more whimsical employees.
— Journal of Recreational Mathematics, October 1981
“The greatest pleasure I know is to do a good action by stealth and have it found out by accident.” — Charles Lamb
“The work an unknown good man has done is like a vein of water flowing hidden underground, secretly making the ground green.” — Thomas Carlyle
“Do good by stealth, and blush to find it fame.” — Alexander Pope
In 1994, inventor Albert Cohen saw a peculiar opportunity:
During a televised sporting event, a ‘high five’ is commonly shared between fans to express the joy and excitement of a touchdown, home run, game-winning basket, birdie or other positive occurrence. Unfortunately, as known in the art, a ‘high five’ requires the mutual hand slapping of two participants, wherein a first participant slaps an upraised hand against the elevated hand of a second participant. As such, a solitary fan is unable to perform a ‘high five’ to express excitement during a televised sporting event.
His “apparatus for simulating a high five” can be mounted on a table, wall, or floor — and it even promotes physical fitness: “When the hand-arm configuration is mounted at a sufficient height above the normal reach of a user, the user must jump upwards to strike the simulated hand, thereby simulating many of the jumping drills commonly practiced by basketball players. As such, the leg strength and coordination of a user may be improved through the practice of the present invention.”
But Miss Cooper, the daughter of the novelist, tells a story which is well-nigh incredible. When in Paris, she saw a French translation of ‘The Spy,’ in which a man is represented as tying his horse to a locust. Not understanding that the locust-tree was meant, the intelligent Frenchman translated the word as ‘sauterelle,’ and, feeling that some explanation was due, he gravely explained in a note that grasshoppers grew to an enormous size in America, and that one of them, dead and stuffed, was placed at the door of the mansion for the convenience of visitors on horseback.
— William Shepard Walsh, Handy-Book of Literary Curiosities, 1892
The California Court of Appeal faced a curious philosophical question in 1989: Do you become a year older on your birthday, or on the preceding day?
Paul Johnson had committed a robbery in San Francisco on Aug. 12, 1988, one day before his 18th birthday. The prosecution had charged him as an adult, arguing that “A person is in existence on the day of his birth. On the first anniversary he or she has lived one year and one day.”
Is that so? The appeals court didn’t buy it — Justice William Channell overruled the prior decisions and had Johnson tried as a juvenile.
Amazon reviews of A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates (1955), by the RAND Corporation:
The average customer gives it four stars.
contrist
v. to make sad
dolorifuge
n. anything that drives away pain
dedolence
n. absence of sorrow
I’m not sure who originated this puzzle. Can the white queen force the black king onto square a1 of this 4 x 3 chessboard?
Conclusion of a letter from F. Scott Fitzgerald to his 12-year-old daughter Scottie, away at summer camp, Aug. 8, 1933:
Things to worry about:
Worry about courage
Worry about cleanliness
Worry about efficiency
Worry about horsemanship
Things not to worry about:
Don’t worry about popular opinion
Don’t worry about dolls
Don’t worry about the past
Don’t worry about the future
Don’t worry about growing up
Don’t worry about anybody getting ahead of you
Don’t worry about triumph
Don’t worry about failures unless it comes through your own fault
Don’t worry about mosquitoes
Don’t worry about flies
Don’t worry about insects in general
Don’t worry about parents
Don’t worry about boys
Don’t worry about disappointments
Don’t worry about pleasures
Don’t worry about satisfactions
Things to think about:
What am I really aiming at?
How good am I really in comparison to my contemporaries in regard to:
(a) Scholarship
(b) Do I really understand about people and am I able to get along with them?
(c) Am I trying to make my body a useful instrument or am I neglecting it?
“He didn’t want me to have the fun of making my own mistakes,” she wrote later. “He wanted to make them for me.”