“Too hot to hoot!”
“Too hot to woo!”
“Too wot?”
“Too hot to hoot!”
“To woo!”
“Too wot?”
“To hoot! Too hot to hoot!”
– George Marvill, New Statesman weekend competition, May 5, 1967
In a Word
accismus
n. feigned disinterest in a desired object
“This Gift of Heaven”
William Beckford’s 1835 travel memoir Italy: With Sketches of Spain and Portugal contains a startling episode in the monastery El Escorial, near Madrid:
Forth stalked the prior, and drawing out from a remarkably large cabinet an equally capacious sliding shelf–(the source, I conjecture, of the potent odour I complained of)–displayed lying stretched out upon a quilted silken mattress, the most glorious specimen of plumage ever beheld in terrestrial regions–a feather from the wing of the Archangel Gabriel, full three feet long, and of a blushing hue more soft and delicate than that of the loveliest rose. I longed to ask at what precise moment this treasure beyond price had been dropped–whether from the air–on the open ground, or within the walls of the humble tenement at Nazareth; but I repressed all questions of an indiscreet tendency–the why and wherefore, the when and how, for what and to whom such a palpable manifestation of archangelic beauty and wingedness had been vouchsafed.
It should be noted that Beckford was something of an eccentric; his enormous country house had collapsed 10 years earlier, and perhaps his writings too were built on dreams. But the monks aren’t telling.
Thunder Dome
Readers of the Madison, Wis., Capital-Times had a scare on April 1, 1933 — a front-page photo showed that the state capitol had collapsed.
The words “April Fool” appeared in small type both in the caption and at the end of the accompanying article, but readers were not amused.
“There is such a thing as carrying a joke too far,” wrote one, “and this one was not only tactless and void of humor as well, but also a hideous jest.”
The Bodhisattva Paradox
The bodhisattva cannot pass over into Nirvana. He cannot because, were he to do so, he would exhibit a selfishness that a bodhisattva cannot have. If he has the selfishness, he is not a bodhisattva, and so cannot enter Nirvana. If he lacks the selfishness, again, he cannot enter Nirvana, for that would be a selfish act. So either way, the bodhisattva is impotent to enter Nirvana. … So no one can reach Nirvana; we cannot because we are not bodhisattvas and the bodhisattva cannot because he is a bodhisattva.
– Arthur Danto, Mysticism and Morality, 1972
His and Hers
Many masculine nouns can be converted to feminine with a suffix, as HERO-HEROINE and HOST-HOSTESS.
Name a feminine noun that can be converted to masculine with a suffix.
Shakespeare Gardens
1916 saw a poetic flowering across the United States — a series of public gardens cultivating the plants mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays, to commemorate the 300th anniversary of the Bard’s death. The one above is at Vassar, but similar installations appeared at Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Rockefeller Park in Cleveland, and Central Park.
New York’s garden filled two acres with violets, wind-flowers, bloodroot, hepatica, rock-dress, English daisies, spring beauties, shooting stars, candytuft, forget-me-nots, and moss pinks, as well as an oak transplanted from Stratford-on-Avon. But its participation is surprising: In 1890 a similarly romantic impulse there had led to much darker results.
Bonus factoid: Shakespeare and Cervantes died on the same date but on different days. How? Both died on April 23, 1616, but at the time England was following the Julian calendar and Spain the Gregorian — a source of oddities in itself.
FYI
One day last week a marvelous apparition was seen near Coney Island. At the height of at least a thousand feet in the air a strange object was in the act of flying toward the New Jersey coast. It was apparently a man with bat’s wings and improved frog’s legs. The face of the man could be distinctly seen, and it wore a cruel and determined expression. The movements made by the object closely resembled those of a frog in the act of swimming with his hind legs and flying with his front legs. … When we add that this monster waved his wings in answer to the whistle of a locomotive, and was of a deep black color, the alarming nature of the apparition can be imagined. The object was seen by many reputable persons, and they all agree that it was a man engaged in flying toward New Jersey.
– New York Times, Sept. 12, 1880
Math Notes
A Dress Rehearsal
Sir:–Among many strange coincidences which I have experienced in my time, one of the most singular which I can recall at the moment happened to me in connection with a play which I wrote some twenty years ago for the German Reed entertainment. One of my characters was named Robert Golding, and for the requirements of the plot I had made him the sole survivor of the crew of a ship called the Caroline, which had been lost at sea. A few days after the production of the play I read in a newspaper an account of the shipwreck of a vessel named the Caroline, which had gone down with all hands, with one exception, and this exception was a man of the name of Golding. Now Golding is not at all a common name, and the circumstance of his being, both in fact and fiction, the sole survivor of the shipwrecked Caroline, impressed me at the time as being a coincidence of a very peculiar nature. Yours faithfully, ARTHUR LAW.
– London Daily Graphic, Sept. 7, 1905, quoted in Experiments in Psychical Research at Leland Stanford Junior University, 1917