Sales Squib

Advertisement in a Manchester paper, 1829:

SPANKER:

The Property of O— D—.

Saturday, the 16th September next, will be sold, or set up for sale, at Skibbereen:

A strong, staunch, steady, sound, stout, safe, sinewy, serviceable, strapping, supple, swift, smart, sightly, sprightly, spirited, sturdy, shining, sure-footed, sleek, smooth, spunky, well-skinned, sized, and shaped sorrel steed, of superlative symmetry, styled SPANKER; with small star and snip, square-sided, slender-shouldered, sharp-sighted, and steps singularly stately; free from strain, spavin, spasms, stringhalt, staggers, strangles, surfeit, seams, strumous swellings, scratches, splint, squint, scurf, sores, scattering, shuffling, shambling-gait, or sickness of any sort. He is neither stiff-mouthed, shabby-coated, sinew-shrunk saddlebacked, shell-toothed, skin-scabbed, short-winded, splay-footed, or shoulder-slipped; and is sound in the sword-point and stifle-joint. Has neither sick-spleen, sleeping-evil, snaggle-teeth, subcutaneous sores, or shattered hoofs; nor is he sour, sulky, surly, stubborn, or sullen in temper. Neither shy nor skittish, slow, sluggish, or stupid. He never slips, strips, strays, starts, stalks, stops, shakes, snivels, snaffles, snorts, stumbles, or stocks in his stall or stable, and scarcely or seldom sweats. Has a showy, stylish switch-tail, or stern, and a safe set of shoes on; can feed on stubble, sainfoin, sheaf-oats, straw, sedge, or Scotch grass. Carries sixteen stone with surprising speed in his stroke over a six-foot sod or a stone wall. His sire was the Sly Sobbersides, on a sister of Spindleshanks by Sampson, a sporting son of Sparkler, who won the sweepstakes and subscription plate last session at Sligo. His selling price is sixty-seven pounds, sixteen shillings and sixpence sterling.

Quoted in William T. Dobson, Literary Frivolities, Fancies, Follies and Frolics, 1880.

| Language

A Side Project

http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=_v5tAAAAEBAJ

In 1959, John Dos Passos took a break from writing to invent a bubble gun, presumably for his 9-year-old daughter, Lucy:

The primary object of this invention is to provide a bubble toy in the nature of a pistol … upon squeezing the hand grip air is forced … toward the ring, causing bubbles to be formed from a film held by the ring, and the bubbles projected forwardly as bullets from a gun.

After this he went back to the typewriter — Prospects of a Golden Age was published in the same year.

| Literature · Technology

Hope and Change

One dollar and eighty-seven cents. That was all. And sixty cents of it was in pennies. Pennies saved one and two at a time by bulldozing the grocer and the vegetable man and the butcher until one’s cheeks burned with the silent imputation of parsimony that such close dealing implied. Three times Della counted it. One dollar and eighty-seven cents. And the next day would be Christmas.

That’s the first paragraph of “The Gift of the Magi.” Does it contain a blunder? If Della has $1.87, and pennies make up 60 cents of it, what constitutes the remaining $1.27?

There are two possibilities. The story doesn’t say that only 60 cents of the total was in pennies; possibly 62 cents was, though this makes Della’s observation seem pointless. The second possibility is that the story is set in the late 19th century, when the United States was still minting two- and three-cent pieces — though there’s no other indication that this is the case.

So is it a blunder? Only O. Henry knows for sure.

| Literature

The Brightest Heaven of Invention

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

Shakespeare said everything. Brain to belly; every mood and minute of a man’s season. His language is starlight and fireflies and the sun and moon. He wrote it with tears and blood and beer, and his words march like heartbeats. He speaks to everyone and we all claim him but it’s wise to remember, if we would really appreciate him, that he doesn’t properly belong to us but to another world; a florid and entirely remarkable world that smelled assertively of columbine and gun powder and printer’s ink, and was vigorously dominated by Elisabeth.

— Orson Welles, Everybody’s Shakespeare, 1934

Thornton Wilder called this “the greatest thumbnail summation of Shakespeare’s genius ever written.”

| Literature · Quotations

Car Code

In a 1999 quiz, the Washington Post asked its readers, “What automobile is referred to in a license plate that reads 1 DIV 0?”

The winning answer came from Supreme Court chief justice William Rehnquist, of all people. What was it?

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

Oops

http://books.google.com/books?id=cVAJAAAAQAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_navlinks_s#v=onepage&q=&f=false

In Collectanea de Rebus Hibernicus, his 1791 disquisition on Irish antiquities, Charles Vallancey describes a group of sepulchral stones on the Hill of Tara, one of which is inscribed BELI DIVOSE, “To Belus, God of Fire.”

Vallancey goes into some detail interpreting this as an altar to Baal. It turned out later that a wanderer had lain upon the stone and idly carved his name and the date upside down: E. CONID 1731.

Vallancey’s reaction is not recorded.

| History · Language

Skyward

In 1907, Massachusetts physician Duncan MacDougall conceived a singular experiment. When he observed that a patient at his Haverhill hospital was nearing death, he installed him in a specially constructed bed in his office and measured his weight both before and after death. With six such weighings he determined that humans lose between 0.5 and 1.5 ounces at death.

“Is the soul substance?” he wrote. “It would seem to me to be so. … Here we have experimental demonstration that a substance capable of being weighed does leave the human body at death.”

Similar experiments with 15 dogs showed no change in mass, proving, he decided, that dogs have no souls. MacDougall’s findings were written up briefly in the New York Times and occasioned a flurry of correspondence in American Medicine, but after that they were largely forgotten. But who knows? Perhaps he was right.

| Death · Oddities · Science & Math