Jackpot

A guaranteed way to win at roulette, from Eugene Northrop’s Riddles in Mathematics (1945):

  1. Bet $1 on red.
  2. If you win, go to step 6. If you lose, bet $2 on red.
  3. If you win, go to step 6. If you lose, bet $4 on red.
  4. If you win, go to step 6. If you lose, bet $8 on red.
  5. (And so on.)
  6. When you win, you’ll be $1 ahead. Go back to step 1.

“Theoretically, of course, it is possible for the bank to wipe you out financially. Actually, however, runs of more than 10 or 12 successive blacks or reds are extremely rare, and your stake at the twelfth play would be only $2048. When you do win you will, as before, be $1 ahead of the bank. You can then begin all over again. Simple, isn’t it?”

| Science & Math

The Tomahawk Story

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Grace_Kelly_arriving_at_the_28th_annual_Academy_Awards,_1956.jpg

When Alec Guinness was filming The Swan in North Carolina in 1955, someone gave him a tomahawk purchased at a local fairground. Guinness thought it too heavy to take with him, so as he was departing he paid a porter to slip it into Grace Kelly’s bed.

Years later, while performing in London, he found the tomahawk in his own bed.

This meant war. Guinness bided his time until the princess visited America on a poetry tour, then he contacted the English actor with whom she was traveling and persuaded him to leave the tomahawk in her bed. (“Do you know Alec Guinness?” she asked him the next day. “No, I’ve never met him,” he said.)

Guinness thought no more about it until 1980, when he visited Hollywood to accept an honorary Oscar and found the tomahawk in his hotel bed. He waited until Kelly’s next tour of England and arranged to have it left in her suitcase.

She died in 1982, so that was the last laugh. There was no one to share it with — in 25 years, neither of them had ever acknowledged that this was happening.

| Entertainment

Steady On

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cliffyoung1983.jpg

Australia’s Westfield ultramarathon had a surprise entrant in 1983: a 61-year-old potato farmer named Cliff Young arrived wearing overalls and gumboots and took a place among a field of 150 elite 20-somethings for the 543-mile run from Sydney to Melbourne.

Young ran with a peculiar shuffling gait that soon left him far behind the leaders, but as the race wore on he regained the ground rapidly. His strategy was simple: He didn’t sleep. He had routinely rounded up sheep on his family’s 2,000-acre ranch in Victoria, where he often ran two or three days without rest, and this preternatural endurance carried him easily into first place in the Westfield race, beating the record time by nearly two days.

At the finish Young said he’d been unaware there was a $10,000 prize; he gave it away to five other runners and returned quietly to his ranch. Asked what advice he’d give to other elderly runners, he said, “No matter what you do, you have to keep moving. If you don’t wear out, you rust out.”

| Oddities

Some Things Never Change

In 1720, the time of the South Sea Bubble, amongst the many mad schemes put forward, was one for ‘An undertaking which shall in due time be revealed.’ Each subscriber was to pay down two guineas, and there were actually 1,000 of these subscriptions paid in one morning, the promoter of the scheme decamping with the money the same afternoon.

— The World of Wonders, 1883

| Society

“The Boy Jones”

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Buckingham_Palace_ILN_1842.jpg

Curious doings at Buckingham Palace, 1838-1841:

  • In December 1838, a porter discovered 15-year-old Edward Jones in the marble hall. He had stolen linen and a regimental sword, but a jury acquitted him.
  • In November 1840, the same boy scaled the wall and entered the palace again, this time leaving undetected.
  • The following day a nurse found him under a sofa in the queen’s dressing room. “He said that he had sat upon the throne, that he saw the queen, and heard the princess royal cry.”
  • After three months in prison he returned immediately — in March 1841 he was found eating in one of the royal apartments.

This last earned him three more months’ correction, this time with hard labor, and this apparently cured him. But others would follow: In July 1982 Elizabeth II awoke to find 32-year-old Michael Fagan in her bedchamber. “He thinks so much of the Queen,” Fagan’s mother explained. “I can imagine him just wanting to simply talk and say hello and discuss his problems.”

| Oddities

Benardete’s Paradox

Prometheus angers Zeus, who dispatches an army of demons with these instructions:

  • Demon 1: If Prometheus is not dead in one hour, kill him.
  • Demon 2: If Prometheus is not dead in half an hour, kill him.
  • Demon 3: If Prometheus is not dead in quarter of an hour, kill him.

And so on. When Prometheus is found dead, the council of gods is displeased, but they find it impossible to identify the guilty demon — any suspect can point to an infinity of demons who must have acted before him. Must Zeus go free?

| Science & Math

“Prevalent Poetry”

A wandering tribe, called the Siouxs,
Wear moccasins, having no shiouxs.
They are made of buckskin,
With the fleshy side in,
Embroidered with beads of bright hyiouxs.

When out on the war-path, the Siouxs
March single file–never by tiouxs–
And by “blazing” the trees
Can return at their ease,
And their way through the forests ne’er liouxs.

All new-fashioned boats he eschiouxs,
And uses the birch-bark caniouxs;
These are handy and light,
And, inverted at night,
Give shelter from storms and from dyiouxs.

The principal food of the Siouxs
Is Indian maize, which they briouxs,
And hominy make,
Or mix in a cake,
And eat it with pork, as they chiouxs.

Now, doesn’t this spelling look cyiouxrious?
‘Tis enough to make any one fyiouxrious!
So a word to the wise!
Pray our language revise
With orthography not so injiouxrious.

— Charles Follen Adams

| Language · Poems

Happy Crabbing!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mk15.jpg

On Feb. 5, 1958, during a simulated combat mission near Savannah, Ga., a B-47 bomber collided with an F-86 fighter. The fighter crashed; the bomber, barely airworthy, needed to reduce weight to avoid an emergency landing.

So it dropped a 7,600-pound nuclear bomb.

The bomb contained 400 pounds of conventional explosives and highly enriched uranium. There’s some disagreement as to whether it included the plutonium capsule needed to start a nuclear reaction.

That’s rather important, because in 50 years of searching the Air Force still hasn’t found the bomb. It hit the water near Tybee Island off the Georgia coast and is presumably buried in 10 feet of silt somewhere in Wassaw Sound. But exactly where it is, and how dangerous it is, remain unknown.

| History · Oddities

Why Can’t I Find Amanda Hugginkiss?

Imaginary patrons of Jersey City’s Tube Bar paged by owner Louis “Red” Deutsch at the request of telephone pranksters John Elmo and Jim Davidson in the mid-1970s:

  • Al Coholic
  • Al Kaseltzer
  • Al Kykyoras
  • Ben Dover
  • Butchie Pantsdown
  • Frank Enstein
  • Holden McGroin
  • Imov Irgin
  • Jim Nasium
  • Joe Mama
  • Mike Ocksmall
  • Moe Ronn
  • Oliver Closeoff
  • Rufus Leakin

Elmo and Davidson recorded Deutsch’s earnest pages and the wild, vituperative threats that followed when he realized he’d been had. In the 1980s the tapes began to circulate among professional sports leagues and eventually found their way to animator Matt Groening … who turned them into a running gag on The Simpsons.

| Entertainment