Immortalized

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Calvin_Coolidge.jpg

Ambassador Richard Washburn Child once dined with Calvin Coolidge at the White House.

After dinner, the president said he had something to show him. He led Child to one of the smaller rooms in the mansion, opened the door, and turned on the light.

“On the opposite wall hung a portrait of himself,” Child later recalled. “I thought it so very bad I could think of nothing to say.”

For a long moment the two men stood on the threshold. Then Coolidge snapped off the light and closed the door.

“So do I,” he said.

| Art · History

Peace and Quiet

Once upon a time, Master Hobson, who was a rich haberdasher in the Poultry, lying in St Alban’s, there came certain musicians to play at his chamber door, hoping that, as they filled his ears with their music, he would fill their purses with money; whereupon he told one of the servants of the inn (that waited upon him) to go and tell them that he did not then want to hear their music, for he mourned for the death of his mother. So the musicians, disappointed of their purpose, went away. The fellow that heard him speak of mourning, asked him how long it was since he buried his mother. ‘Truly,’ quoth Master Hobson, ‘it is now very nearly forty years ago.’

— William Carew Hazlitt, The New London Jest Book, 1871

| Humor

Dotty

Each point in an infinite plane is colored either red or blue. Prove that there are two points of the same color that are exactly 1 meter apart.

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

“Lovers’ Signals”

At Southsea, Portsmouth, and other places off which our warships are accustomed to anchor, many of the better-educated servant-maids with sailor sweethearts have learnt to be such experts in the way of heliographing that, with ordinary small mirrors, they frequently flash messages to the men on the ships. A naval officer told the present writer that he had often, when on deck, been both amused and surprised at the accuracy with which some of these girls used this form of signalling out of pure fun.

— Tit Bits, quoted in Strand, May 1907

| Technology

Thump

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New England got unexpectedly clobbered in March 1888 when 40 inches of snow fell in a day and a half. Businesses were closed and streetcars abandoned as screaming winds whipped the drifts into house-devouring hills as deep as 50 feet. Thirty trains were paralyzed near New York City, their passengers taken in by nearby residents, and the city’s fire engines lay mired in the streets, unable to respond to calls. “Despatches between Boston and New York were sent by way of London” due to downed lines, reported the Albany Cultivator & Country Gentlemen, and “for two hours on Tuesday people crossed the East river on an ice floe brought up by the tide.”

The forecast had been “clearing and colder, preceded by light snow.”

| Oddities

Syllogismus Crocodilus

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Here is a curious old story that is something like a puzzle: A crocodile stole a baby, ‘in the days when animals could talk,’ and was about to make a dinner of it. The poor mother begged piteously for her child. ‘Tell me one truth,’ said the crocodile, ‘and you shall have your baby again.’ The mother thought it over, and at last said: ‘You will not give it back.’ ‘Is that the truth you mean to tell?’ asked the crocodile. ‘Yes,’ replied the mother. ‘Then by our agreement I keep him,’ added the crocodile; ‘for if you told the truth I am not going to give him back, and if it is a falsehood, then I have also won.’ Said she: ‘No, you are wrong. If I told the truth you are bound by your promise; and, if a falsehood, it is not a falsehood, until after you have given me my child.’ Now, the question is, who won?

— Pennsylvania School Journal, March 1887

| Science & Math