“Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is thought necessary.” — Robert Louis Stevenson
An Exercise in Analysis
Gertrude Stein’s writing could be impenetrable:
“Out of kindness comes redness and out of rudeness comes rapid same question, out of an eye comes research, out of selection comes painful cattle.”
Editor A.J. Fifield once sent her this rejection slip:
I am only one, only one, only one. Only one being, one at the same time. Not two, not three, only one. Only one life to live, only sixty minutes in one hour. Only one pair of eyes. Only one brain. Only one being. Being only one, having only one pair of eyes, having only one time, having only one life, I cannot read your MS three or four times. Not even one time. Only one look, only one look is enough. Hardly one copy would sell here. Hardly one. Hardly one.
Same Difference
Freaks of the Storm
On May 27, 1896, an F4 tornado walked through St. Louis, leaving a mile-wide path of devastation and playing some violent pranks along the way.
Above, wheat straws were forced half an inch into the body of one tree.
Below, a gardener’s shovel was driven 6 inches into another tree, and a 2×4 pine scantling was shot through 5/8″ of solid iron on the Eads Bridge, “the pine stick protruding several feet through the iron side of the roadway, exemplifying the old principle of shooting a candle through a board.”
George Washington University meteorologist Willis Moore also saw “a six by eight piece of timber driven four feet almost straight down into the hard compact soil.” The confirmed death toll is 255, but additional bodies may have floated off down the Mississippi.
Music in the Millennium
[T]he professional [musician] himself will cease, like the actor, to rank as a sort of superior harlequin or performing animal, exhibiting his powers for the diversion of an assembled public. What he has once played can, if he choose, be constantly repeated. … Instead of the executant or singer being judged by his performance on an occasion when fatigue, illness or unfavourable circumstances may militate against his perfect success, when the nerve-shattering conditions of the platform probably in any case offend his susceptibilities and detract from the perfection of his performance, he will be able to found his reputation upon the very best performance he is capable of. He will be able to try and try again in the privacy of his study. When he has satisfied himself, and then alone, will he publish his artistic effort to the world. He can destroy as many unsatisfactory records as he pleases, just as the sculptor can break up his clay when he has not succeeded, just as the painter can paint out his picture when it has not pleased him, and be judged only by his best.
— T. Baron Russell, A Hundred Years Hence, 1906
Trivium
The highest point in the contiguous United States is less than 80 miles from the lowest point.
Mount Whitney, in California’s Sequoia National Park, rises 14,505 feet above sea level.
It’s 76 miles west of Badwater, in Death Valley National Park, which is 282 feet below sea level.
Sisyphus Released
Kokichi Sugihara of Japan’s Meiji Institute for Advanced Study of Mathematical Sciences has won first prize in the Neural Correlate Society’s sixth annual “Best Illusion of the Year” contest:
The top 10 finalists are here.
Another’s Plate
Honest Jack Fuller, who is buried in a pyramidal mausoleum in Brightling churchyard, in Sussex, gave as his reason for being thus disposed of, his unwillingness to be eaten by his relations after this fashion: ‘The worms would eat me, the ducks would eat the worms, and my relations would eat the ducks.’
— John Timbs, English Eccentrics and Eccentricities, 1875
In a Word
babery
n. finery to please a baby
scarebabe
n. a thing that frightens a baby
“The Caged Bird”
Very little is known about Theophilus Thompson, a chess problemist who was born a slave in Maryland in 1855. That’s a pity, because his work is often beautiful. Here’s a sample:
White to mate in two.
