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.
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.”
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
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.
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.
Stuck in a Honolulu jail in 1913, forger William Francis Mannix passed the time by writing a memoir. Unfortunately it wasn’t his own — he invented an autobiography of Chinese viceroy Li Hung Chang:
To-night I am to attend another banquet given by the Czar, which I hope will not continue as long as the one of last night. It is true they prepare foods especially for me, but they do not taste like the foods at home, or those of our own cooks which we have with us.
Mannix contrived the whole thing using books obtained from friends and a typewriter loaned to him by the territorial governor. The book fooled many who knew Li, including former secretary of state John W. Foster; when the hoax was exposed the publisher issued a “confessional” edition in 1923, but by then no one was laughing.
Nicholas Murray Butler presided over Columbia University for 43 years and won the Nobel Peace Prize; Teddy Roosevelt called him “Nicholas Miraculous.”
His students sometimes held a different opinion; when one of them, Rolfe Humphries, was invited to contribute an ode to Poetry in 1939, he sent this:
Niobe’s daughters yearn to the womb again,
Ionians bright and fair, to the chill stone;
Chaos in cry, Actaeon’s angry pack,
Hounds of Molussus, shaggy wolves driven
Over Ampsanctus’ vale and Pentheus’ glade,
Laelaps and Ladon, Dromas, Canace,–
As these in fury harry brake and hill
So the great dogs of evil bay the world.
Memory, Mother of Muses, be resigned
Until King Saturn comes to rule again!
Remember now no more the golden day
Remember now no more the fading gold,
Astraea fled, Proserpina in hell;
You searchers of the earth be reconciled!
Because, through all the blight of human woe,
Under Robigo’s rust, and Clotho’s shears,
The mind of man still keeps its argosies,
Lacedaemonian Helen wakes her tower,
Echo replies, and lamentation loud
Reverberates from Thrace to Delos Isle;
Itylus grieves, for whom the nightingale
Sweetly as ever tunes her Daulian strain.
And over Tenedos the flagship burns.
How shall men loiter when the great moon shines
Opaque upon the sail, and Argive seas
Rear like blue dolphins their cerulean curves?
Samos is fallen, Lesbos streams with fire,
Etna in rage, Canopus cold in hate,
Summon the Orphic bard to stranger dreams.
And so for us who raise Athene’s torch.
Sufficient to her message in this hour:
Sons of Columbia, awake, arise!
Read the first letter of each line.
More abusive acrostics: Poetic License, Thanks for Nothing, In Memoriam.
“It is a great nuisance that knowledge can be acquired only by hard work.” — W. Somerset Maugham
On March 19, 1886, over Oshkosh, Wis., the sun went out.
“The day was light, though cloudy, when suddenly darkness commenced settling down, and in five minutes it was as dark as midnight,” reported the Monthly Weather Review. “General consternation prevailed; people on the streets rushed to and fro; teams dashed along, and women and children ran in cellars; all business operations ceased until lights could be lighted. Not a breath of air was stirring on the surface of the earth. The darkness lasted from eight to ten minutes, when it passed off, seemingly from west to east, and brightness followed. … It seemed to be a wave of total darkness passing along without wind.”
No one knows the cause, but essentially the same thing had happened a century earlier.
In The City of God, Augustine raises a curious question: How did Methuselah survive the flood? According to the Septuagint, the patriarch was 355 years old when Noah was born, and the deluge occurred 600 years later. Thus Methuselah was 955 at the flood–yet he lived to be 969. He was not aboard the ark, and the deluge destroyed the rest of humanity. How did Methuselah survive?
“This is a celebrated question,” wrote Jerome, “and one which has been publicly aired in argument by all the churches.” It’s largely obviated today: Most modern editions of Genesis are translated from the Masoretic text, which has Methuselah dying in the year of the flood.