The Pudding Guy

In 1999, UC-Davis civil engineer David Phillips was grocery shopping when he noticed something peculiar. Healthy Choice Foods was offering frequent-flyer miles to customers who bought its products. But a 25-cent pudding would bring 100 miles — the reward was worth more than the product itself.

Recognizing a good thing, Phillips bought 12,150 servings of pudding for $3,140, claiming he was stocking up for Y2K. Then he enlisted the Salvation Army to help him peel off the UPC codes, in exchange for donating the pudding.

He mailed his submission to Healthy Choice, and to their credit they awarded him 1.25 million frequent-flyer miles, enough for 31 round trips to Europe, 42 to Hawaii, 21 to Australia, or 50 anywhere in the United States.

There’s no downside. Phillips also got Aadvantage Gold status for life with American Airlines, which brings a special reservations number, priority boarding, upgrades, and bonus miles. And he got an $815 tax writeoff for donating the pudding.

(Thanks, Brendan.)

| Oddities

Overtime

Line items in a bill received by an English lord from an artist in 1865, for repairs and retouchings to a gallery of paintings:

  • To filling up the chink in the Red Sea and repairing the damages of Pharaoh’s host.
  • To cleaning six of the Apostles and adding an entirely new Judas Iscariot.
  • To a pair of new hands for Daniel in the lions’ den and a set of teeth for the lioness.
  • To an alteration in the Belief, mending the Commandments, and making a new Lord’s Prayer.
  • To new varnishing Moses’s rod.
  • To repairing Nebuchadnezzar’s beard.
  • To mending the pitcher of Rebecca.
  • To a pair of ears for Balaam and a new tongue for the ass.
  • To planting a new city in the land of Nod.

From William Shepard Walsh, Handy-Book of Literary Curiosities, 1892.

| Oddities

Heated Basement

While drilling for natural gas near the Turkmen village of Derweze in 1971, geologists watched their rig fall through the surface into a huge underground cavern.

The opening was full of gas, so they ignited it, hoping it would burn off in a few days.

That was 39 years ago. Presumably it will still burn out eventually, but the locals have given up waiting — they now call it “the door to hell.”

See A Hot Town.

| Oddities

Knee Service

In 1978, Baptist minister Hans Mullikin arrived at the White House after crawling 1,600 miles from Marshall, Texas.

An aide told him that President Carter was too busy to see him.

“I just wanted to show America that we need to get on our knees and repent,” Mullikin told reporters. “This is something I had in my heart and wanted to do for my country.”

He added, “A lot of people tell me I’m crazy.”

| Religion

Still Waters

Gauss’ scientific diary was a great boon to mathematical historians, but his notes could be frustratingly cryptic. On July 10, 1796, he made this entry:

ΕΥΡΗΚΑ! num = Δ + Δ + Δ

He had discovered that every positive integer is the sum of at most three triangular numbers.

Among the 146 entries, two remain completely opaque. On Oct. 11, 1796, Gauss had written:

Vicimus GEGAN.

And on April 8, 1799:

gauss diary entry

No one knows what either of these means — if they had mathematical significance, it was lost with Gauss.

So it goes. Dirichlet was famously uncommunicative, not even informing his family that his wife had given birth. His father-in-law later complained that he “should at least have been able to write 2 + 1 = 3.”

| Science & Math

Barren

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Trinity College provost John Pentland Mahaffy was arguing with a women’s rights advocate when she asked him, “What is the difference between man and woman?”

He considered and said, “Madam, I can’t conceive.”

| Society

Typing in Tongues

A hoax which did not deceive the learned, but sorely puzzled them, was that known as the Dutch Mail hoax. Some fifty years ago, an article appeared in the Leicester Herald, an English provincial paper, under the title of ‘The Dutch Mail,’ with the announcement that it had arrived too late for translation, and so had been set up and printed in the original. Much attention was attracted to the article, and many Dutch scholars rushed into print to say that it was not in any dialect with which they were acquainted. Finally it was discovered to be a hoax. Sir Richard Phillips, the editor of the paper, recently told this story of how the jest was conceived and carried out: ‘One evening, before one of our publications, my men and a boy overturned two or three columns of the paper in type. We had to get ready someway for the coaches, which, at four in the morning, required four or five hundred papers. After every exertion, we were short nearly a column, but there stood a tempting column of ‘pi’ [a jumble of odd letters] on the galleys. It suddenly struck me that this might be thought Dutch. I made up the column, overcame the scruples of the foreman, and so away the country edition went with its philological puzzle to worry the honest agricultural readers’ heads. There was plenty of time to set up a column of plain English for the local edition.’ Sir Richard met one man in Nottingham who for thirty years preserved a copy of the Leicester Herald hoping that some day the letter would be explained.

— Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, September 1888

| Hoaxes

“Our Traveller”

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If thou would’st stand on Etna’s burning brow,
With smoke above, and roaring flame below;
And gaze adown that molten gulf reveal’d,
Till thy soul shudder’d and thy senses reel’d:
If thou wouldst beard Niag’ra in his pride,
Or stem the billows of Propontic tide;
Scale all alone some dizzy Alpine haut,
And shriek “Excelsior!” among the snow:
Wouldst tempt all deaths, all dangers that may be–
Perils by land, and perils on the sea;
This vast round world, I say, if thou would’st view it–
Then, why the dickens don’t you go and do it?

— Henry Cholmondeley-Pennell, Puck on Pegasus, 1861

| Poems