On being introduced to Margot Asquith, Jean Harlow mispronounced her name Margut.
“My dear, the T is silent,” said Asquith, “as in Harlow.”
Breakable Golf Club
A breakable club for temperamental golfers, patented in 1963 by Ashley Pond III.
“[T]he shaft of the club is deliberately constructed to break when struck against the ground, a tree, or other inanimate elements when the anger of the golfer reaches a mercurial height.”
Here’s another solution.
Short Subjects
Unusual movie titles listed by Patrick Robertson in Film Facts (2001):
- Telephone Girl, Typist Girl or Why I Became a Christian (Indian, 1925)
- In My Time Boys Didn’t Use Hair Cream (Argentine, 1937)
- The Film That Rises to the Surface of Clarified Butter (U.S., 1968)
- How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired (Canadian/French, 1988)
- No Thanks, Coffee Makes Me Nervous (Italian, c. 1981)
- Recharge Grandmothers Exactly! (Czech, 1984)
- Beautiful Lady Without Neck (South Korea, 1966)
- Don’t Worry, We’ll Think of a Title (U.S., 1965)
For “most preposterous movie title ever conceived,” David McGillivray in Films and Filming nominates Betta, Betta in the Wall, Who’s the Fattest Fish of All (U.S., 1969) and She Ee Clit Soak (U.S., 1971).
See Light Reading.
Hidden Billing
It has been discovered that on the extreme left of the façade front of the new [Boston] Public Library building are chiseled in tablets the following names: Moses, Cicero, Kalidasa, Isocrates, Milton, Mozart, Euclid, Æschylus, Dante, Wren, Herrick, Irving, Titian, Erasmus. These names form an acrostic, the first letters spelling the names of the firm of architects which has furnished the plan for the building. A representative of the architects [McKim, Mead and White] says he can assign no reason for it except that it was ‘a prank of some of the boys in the office.’ Three of these names, Dante, Milton and Titian, appear on the other tablets and in their proper places. This duplication is another proof that the acrostic was intentional.
– The Critic, June 4, 1892
(After a public outcry, the inscription was removed.)
Stubborn
Write down any natural number, reverse its digits to form a new number, and add the two:
In most cases, repeating this procedure eventually yields a palindrome:
With 196, perversely, it does not — or, at least, it hasn’t in computer trials, which have repeated the process until it produced numbers 300 million digits long.
Is 196 somehow immune to producing palindromes? No one’s yet offered a conclusive proof — so we don’t know.
The Canals on Mars
From Sam Loyd:
Here is a map of the newly discovered cities and waterways on our nearest neighbor planet, Mars. Start at the city marked T, at the south pole, and see if you can spell a complete English sentence by making a tour of all the cities, visiting each city only once, and returning to the starting point.
When this puzzle originally appeared in a magazine, more than fifty thousand readers reported, ‘There is no possible way.’ Yet it is a very simple puzzle.
I’ll withhold the answer.
Strange Encounter
Passing south of the Canary Islands on Dec. 4, 1893, the S.S. Umfuli passed “a monster fish of the serpentine shape, about 80 feet long, with shining skin, and short fins, about 20 feet apart, on the back; in circumference, about the dimensions of a full-sized whale.”
Neither captain R.J. Cringle nor his crew had ever seen anything like it, but they were certain of what they saw. The sea was like a mirror, “and this thing, whatever it was, was in sight for over half an hour.”
Cringle said it was rushing through the water at great speed, throwing water from its breast, and he saw fully 15 feet of its head and neck on three separate occasions. The body, which was not scaly, showed three distinct humps and was much thicker than the neck: “I should not, therefore, call it a serpent.” The Umfuli’s log shows that the chief officer observed the creature through his glass and saw an enormous mouth with great rows of teeth.
“I have been so ridiculed about the thing that I have many times wished that anybody else had seen that sea-monster rather than me,” Cringle said. “I have been told that it was a string of porpoises, that it was an island of seaweed, and I do not know what besides. But if an island of seaweed can travel at the rate of fourteen knots an hour, or if a string of porpoises can stand 15 feet out of the water, then I give in, and confess myself deceived. Such, however, could not be.”
Fair Point
One threatening morning as Einstein was about to leave his house in Princeton, Mrs. Einstein advised him to take along a hat.
Einstein, who rarely used a hat, refused.
‘But it might rain!’ cautioned Mrs. Einstein.
‘So?’ replied the mathematician. ‘My hair will dry faster than my hat.’
– Howard Whitley Eves, In Mathematical Circles: Quadrants III and IV, 1969
Black and White
Marcel Duchamp, the French surrealist, was an accomplished chessplayer — in 1929 he defeated Belgian master George Koltanowski in 15 moves:
1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 e6 3.Nc3 d6 4.e4 b6 5.f4 Bb7 6.Bd3 Nbd7 7.Nf3 e5 8.d5 g6 9.O-O exf4 10.Bxf4 Bg7 11.e5 dxe5 12.Nxe5 O-O 13.Qd2 Nxd5 14.Nxd7 Nxf4 15.Nxf8 Bd4+ 0-1
Koltanowski resigned in light of 16. Rf2 Qg5 17. Kf1 Bxf2 18. Qxf2 Bxg2+ 19. Ke1 Nxd3+.
“I am still a victim of chess,” wrote Duchamp. “It has all the beauty of art — and much more.”
See Screen King.
A Room With a View
Sylvia Plath committed suicide in Yeats’ house.
She had taken a flat at 23 Fitzroy Road in London, where Yeats had lived from 1867 to 1874. She told her mother that she felt “Yeats’ spirit blessing me.”
See Noisy Neighbors.