Moonshine?

http://www.sxc.hu/photo/601286

In 1954, a Chilean lawyer named Jenaro Gajardo Vera tried to join a local club but was rejected because he owned no real property. He was pondering how to overcome this problem when he looked into the night sky and found his solution.

He claimed the moon.

The local notary acknowleded that Gajardo’s claim met the technical requirements for real property, and no prior owner objected when he published a notice in Chile’s Diario Oficial. Gajardo was granted a deed, returned to the club, and received his membership.

This story is popular in Chile, but most of the sources are in Spanish, so I’m finding it hard to tell where the truth ends and the romance begins. It does appear that a lawyer named Jenaro Gajardo Vera was born in Chile and lived in Talca, as the story says. But you’ll have to decide how much of the rest to believe. It’s commonly said that:

  • In 1969, Gajardo received a dispatch from Richard Nixon asking permission for American astronauts to land on his property.
  • Gajardo failed to list the moon on his real property tax return, which led to trouble with the Chilean revenue office. When agents confronted him, he asked them to survey the property themselves, as the law required, and they dropped the action.
  • Minister of the Supreme Court Galecio Ruben Gomez once asked why, if Gajardo could register the moon, he could not register Mars using the same argument. Gajardo pointed out that Mars does not belong to the earth, and thus is not open to a civil law property claim.
  • In 2000, two years after Gajardo’s death, two strangers approached his family saying that NASA wanted to establish bases on the moon, which could bring them substantial revenue. The family paid them a large fee to “regularize Gajardo’s legacy,” and the strangers disappeared.

I’d be grateful to hear from anyone who can substantiate or debunk any of this. I’ll post any updates here. It’s certainly a wonderful story. (Thanks, Benito.)

03/17/2010 Update: Doubtful but intriguingly murky. It appears that Gajardo did publish a deed to the moon three times in Chile’s official record in 1953, but that in itself doesn’t carry much weight. Today the matter would be governed by the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, but (a) that appeared 14 years after Gajardo’s claim, and we don’t know whether it’s retroactive, (b) we don’t know whether Chile is a signatory, and (c) ironically, the very fact that the treaty denies nations jurisdiction over celestial objects may mean that no court would have jurisdiction to hear the case. Gajardo’s is one of at least four such claims made between 1950 and 1970 alone, including one by the “Elves, Gnomes and Little Men’s Science Fiction, Chowder and Marching Society” of Berkeley, Calif., who claimed part of the Sea of Tranquility in 1952. It will certainly be an interesting war.

Particular thanks to Kirk and John for help in researching this.

“Great Mass of Atmospheric Ice”

A curious phenomenon occurred at the farm of Balvullich, on the estate of Ord, occupied by Mr Moffat, on the evening of Monday last. Immediately after one of the loudest peals of thunder heard there, a large and irregular-shaped mass of ice, reckoned to be nearly 20 feet in circumference, and of a proportionate thickness, fell near the farm-house. It had a beautiful crystalline appearance, being nearly all quite transparent, if we except a small portion of it which consisted of hailstones of uncommon size, fixed together. It was principally composed of small squares, diamond-shaped, of from 1 to 3 inches in size, all firmly congealed together. The weight of this large piece of ice could not be ascertained; but it is a most fortunate circumstance, that it did not fall on Mr Moffat’s house, or it would have crushed it, and undoubtedly have caused the death of some of the inmates. No appearance whatever of either hail or snow was discernible in the surrounding district.

Scotsman, Aug. 11, 1849, quoted in The Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal, October 1849

A Curious Exchange

Census Taker: How old are your three daughters?

Mrs. Smith: The product of their ages is 36, and the sum of their ages is the address on our door here.

Census Taker: (after some figuring) I’m afraid I can’t determine their ages from that …

Mrs. Smith: My eldest daughter has red hair.

Census Taker: Oh, thanks, now I know.

How old are the three girls?

Click for Answer

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

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

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:

lychrel number example - 1

In most cases, repeating this procedure eventually yields a palindrome:

lychrel number example - 2
lychrel number example - 3

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

http://books.google.com/books?id=QCy6DzgqcI4C&pg=PA66&lpg=PA66&dq=loyd+mars+%22there+is+no+possible+way%22&source=bl&ots=IDuPPpyYDz&sig=9jj5lsIGw5__uPt-2tPXRd8ZgzM&hl=en&ei=YgxVS_WKDtGXtgf82MWtDA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CBQQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=&f=false

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.