Two-Legged Cats

http://books.google.com/books?id=ymrXAAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&rview=1#v=onepage&q=&f=false

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.”

It Begins

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:AA_snowstorm.JPG

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.

Not Myself

In 1949, New Statesman challenged its readers to parody the style of any novelist named Green or Greene.

Under a pseudonym, Graham Greene submitted a parody of himself:

The child had an air of taking everything in and giving nothing away. At the Rome airport he was led across the tarmac by his aunt, but he seemed to hear nothing of her advice to himself or of the information she produced for the air hostess. He was too busy with his eyes: the hangars had his attention, every lane on the field except his own — that could wait.

‘My nephew,’ she said, ‘yes, that’s him on the list. Roger Court. You will look after him, won’t you? He’s never been quite on his own before,’ but when she made that statement the child’s eyes moved back plane by plane with what looked like contempt, back to the large breasts and the fat legs and the over-responsible mouth: how could she have known, he might have been thinking, how often I am alone?

He came in second.

Outside the Box

Tim Krabbé published an eye-opening problem in Schaakbulletin in 1972. White must mate in 2 from this position:

vertical castling

He does so with 1. e8=R! Kg2 2. O-O-O-O-O-O#:

vertical castling

O-O-O-O-O-O denotes “vertical castling” — the king castles with the new rook on e8. Amazingly, this was arguably legal at the time — here’s how the rules defined castling:

“The king is transferred from its original square, two squares toward the rook; then that rook toward which the king has moved is transferred over the king to the square immediately adjacent to the king.”

All other stipulations are met: Neither the king nor the rook has moved previously, and the king passes through no square guarded by Black.

So, legal, right? Alas, after much debate in Dutch and Belgian chess columns, FIDE revised its rules to refer to a rook “on the same rank.” Some people have no imagination.

01/30/2012 UPDATE: I find the same idea mentioned in the April 1970 issue of the Journal of Recreational Mathematics — David Silverman says he proposed an “impossible” two-move checkmate, “a problem that generated a lot of heat,” for the Litton Problematical Recreations series following Richard Epstein’s discovery of a similar loophole in Hoyle’s Book of Rules. This anticipates Krabbé’s publication by two years.

“A Fiery Wind”

Out in Cheatham county about noon on Wednesday — a remarkably hot day — on the farm of Ed. Sharp, five miles from Ashland, a sort of whirlwind came along over the neighbouring woods, taking up small branches and leaves of trees and burning them in a sort of flaming cylinder that travelled at the rate of about five miles an hour, developing size as it travelled. It passed directly over the spot where a team of horses were feeding and singed their manes and tails up to the roots; it then swept towards the house, taking a stack of hay in its course. It seemed to increase in heat as it went, and by the time it reached the house it immediately fired the shingles from end to end of the building, so that in ten minutes the whole dwelling was wrapped in flames. The tall column of travelling caloric then continued its course over a wheat field that had been recently cradled, setting fire to all the stacks that happened to be in its course. Passing from the field, its path lay over a stretch of woods which reached the river. The green leaves on the trees were crisped to a cinder for a breadth of 20 yards, in a straight line to the Cumberland. When the ‘pillar of fire’ reached the water, it suddenly changed its route down the river, raising a column of steam which went up to the clouds for about half-a-mile, when it finally died out. Not less than 200 people witnessed this strangest of strange phenomena, and all of them tell substantially the same story about it. The farmer, Sharp, was left houseless by the devouring element, and his two horses were so affected that no good is expected to be got out of them in future. Several withered trees in the woods through which it passed were set on fire, and continue burning still.

– Nashville, Tenn., Press, quoted in Symons’s Monthly Meteorological Magazine, September 1869

Red Menace

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

Ladies! Do you look like the loser of a tomato-eating contest? Do children mistake you for Bozo the Clown? Perhaps you’re incapable of applying lipstick properly!

Let’s face it, the task is practically impossible. That clumsy tube, those bewildering lips — where do you start? How do you finish? It’s a wonder you haven’t been injured or killed.

Marie Helehan’s lipstick stencil, patented in 1937, offers “a clean-cut accurate and symmetrical outline” in which to work. Now we just need a mascara gun …

Nature, Nurture

Identical twins Jack Yufe and Oskar Stohr were born in 1932 to a Jewish father and a Catholic mother. Their parents divorced when the boys were six months old; Oskar was raised by his grandmother in Czechoslovakia, where he learned to love Hitler and hate Jews, and Jack was raised in Trinidad by his father, who taught him loyalty to the Jews and hatred of Hitler.

At 47 they were reunited by scientists at the University of Minnesota. Oskar was a conservative who enjoyed leisure, Jack a liberal workaholic. But both read magazines from back to front, both wore tight bathing suits, both wrapped rubber bands around their wrists, both liked sweet liqueur and spicy foods, both had difficulty with math, both flushed the toilet before and after using it — and both enjoyed sneezing suddenly in elevators to startle other passengers.

See Doppelgangers.