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 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
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.
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.
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
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
In 1922, Ernest Hemingway’s wife lost a suitcase full of his early manuscripts at the Gare de Lyons as she was traveling to meet him in Geneva. It was never recovered.
In 1919, T.E. Lawrence misplaced his briefcase while changing trains at Reading railway station. It had contained the first eight books of Seven Pillars of Wisdom. He, too, had to start again.
In 1835, when Thomas Carlyle had finished writing the first volume in his history of the French Revolution, he loaned the manuscript to John Stuart Mill, seeking his opinion. Mill’s maid mistook it for trash and burned it.
“I remember and can still remember less of it than of anything I ever wrote with such toil,” Carlyle wrote in his journal. After laboriously rewriting the volume, he said he felt like a man who had “nearly killed himself accomplishing zero.”
The cat on the left appeared in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge in October 1836. It’s difficult to tell from the drawing, but I think she’s missing her left front and right rear legs. “She was active, and would leap on a table, to the height three or four feet. Her gait is odd, as might be supposed, and often she leaps like a frog. … She frequently sits in the posture as given in the annexed drawing, especially when expecting to receive food; and her appearance very singular and rather ludicrous. Though destitute of claws, she is a good mouse-catcher. The tail is usually extended, and then she resembles somewhat that singular animal, the kangaroo.”
The other was featured in Arthur’s Home Magazine in July 1891, “a most cheerful, healthy, engaging little creature” whose “fashion of walking was queer, but lively.” She belonged to F.C. Hill, a professor at Princeton, who returned from a two-week trip in spring 1877 to find her dead. “Poor kitty was well and happy while I was with her,” he wrote. “I really think she pined and died as much from loneliness as anything else.” Her skeleton was displayed in the museum at Princeton College, “so that pussy remains as serviceable after death as it was her warm will to be in life.”
Sumer is icumen in,
Lhude sing cuccu!
Groweth sed, and bloweth med,
And springth the wude nu–
Sing cuccu!
— English round, 1260
Winter is icumen in,
Lhude sing Goddamm,
Raineth drop and staineth slop,
And how the wind doth ramm!
Sing: Goddamm.
— Ezra Pound, 1917
The names of the 12 months can be anagrammed into these lines:
Merry, durable, just grace
My every future month embrace;
No jars remain, joy bubble up apace.
But poet and journalist George Ellis (1753-1815) summed them up this way:
Snowy, Flowy, Blowy,
Showery, Flowery, Bowery,
Moppy, Croppy, Droppy,
Breezy, Sneezy, Freezy.