Greg Ross's Blog

The creature from the Black Lagoon has the best possible pedigree. As director Jack Arnold was planning the iconic monster’s 1954 debut, his eye fell on his Academy Award nomination certificate for With These Hands, a documentary he’d worked on three years earlier.

“I said, ‘If we put a gilled head on [the Oscar statuette], plus fins and scales, that would look pretty much like the kind of creature we’re trying to get,'” he told Cinefantastique in 1975. “So they made a mold out of rubber, and gradually the costume took shape.”

Former Disney animator Milicent Patrick and makeup artist Bud Westmore collaborated on the creature. “They gave him some human characteristics, which helped to make him sympathetic,” Arnold said. Today the film is regarded as a classic of monster horror — but it didn’t earn an Oscar.

We have more respect for a man who robs boldly on the highway, than for a fellow who jumps out of a ditch, and knocks you down behind your back. Courage is a quality so necessary for maintaining virtue, that it is always respected, even when it is associated with vice.

— James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson, 1791

Andrzej Bartz offered these “doubly true” alphametics in the May 2017 issue of Word Ways. If the letters in each equation encode digits, what mathematical facts do these expressions represent?

CCCLVI + CCCI + CCLI = CMVIII

ONE + THIRTYNINE + NINETYONE = THREE + NINE + THIRTY + EIGHTYNINE

TWO × TWO + TEN × FIVE = SIX × NINE

555870 + 5550 + 5580 = 567000

974 + 3861307674 + 767430974 = 38144 + 7674 + 386130 + 4628307674

250 × 250 + 286 × 9378 = 431 × 6368

The story goes that one day when Cézanne was picknicking in the country with some friends and a collector, the latter suddenly realized that he had dropped his overcoat somewhere on the way. Cézanne raked the landscape with his gaze, then exclaimed: ‘I’ll swear that black over there doesn’t belong to nature!’ Sure enough, it was the overcoat.

— André Malraux, The Voices of Silence, 1978

1931 saw the publication of a remarkable detective novel. The Floating Admiral had been written by 12 members of the Detection Club, London’s society of mystery writers:

Victor WhitechurchG.D.H. Cole and Margaret ColeHenry WadeAgatha ChristieJohn RhodeMilward KennedyDorothy L. SayersRonald KnoxFreeman Wills CroftsEdgar JepsonClemence DaneAnthony Berkeley

They had written a chapter apiece, serially, without communicating. Each inherited the manuscript from the last and had to make some private sense of the story, including their own complications, before passing it on to the next contributor. To ensure fair play, each writer had to supply a satisfactory solution to the snowballing mystery when they turned in their own chapter.

Amazingly, it worked. Jacques Barzun wrote, “These members of the (London) Detection Club collaborate with skill in a piece of detection rather more tight-knit than one had a right to expect. There is enough to amuse and to stimulate detection; and the Introduction by Dorothy Sayers and supplements by critics and solvers give an insight into the writers’ thoughts and modes of work.”

Here it is.

On April 8, 1959, when keepers arrived at the Spectacle Reef lighthouse in Lake Huron to prepare it for a new season, they discovered a note:

To Whom It May Concern:

At 1705 hours my plane went down 400 kilometers out at 035 to 050 degrees. I was one mile northeast of here at 5000 feet when my engine went quite dead. I tried to make it in but landed in the water. At that time there were large open areas of water. I did not try to land on the ice as it did not look thick enough. Also I wanted to get as close to this light as possible.

The plane went down in about two minutes after it landed. Before it did it floated close enough to a floe for me to jump. The ice was not over two inches thick. Another large body of water separated me from the light so I waited.

Suddenly the wind shifted to the northeast. The ice I was on started to move. At the very last moment one quarter of the ice ground against the ice packed around the light. My ice floe broke up fast so I ran for the light. I got ashore but was wet from falling in. My clothes froze before I could get the door open.

Once inside I used your towels and overshoes to keep from freezing.

About 2100 I got your stove lit. I hooked up the batteries and lit your warning lamp. The radio receiver worked but the transmitter was dead. I didn’t know enough about it to make it work. I have used the batteries until they are going dead. I sat up last night sending out SOS calls by blinking the main light.

Right now I am deliberating whether to stay here or cross the ice. From the chart I will have eleven miles to travel. There are large water holes, thin ice which had been broken into pieces by the wind yesterday. There is hardly any wind today. We have had two freezing nights, so I ought to make it in about four hours. I want to go now because it is nice weather.

Also I did not file a flight plan so no one will look for me another two or three days. The weather may be bad again.

I have made a mess of your building. I hope you will forgive me. I am going to take some equipment with me, binoculars, coat, hat, blankets, etc. I will turn them into the United States Coast Guard as soon as I get ashore.

Signed,

M.Sgt. William J. Wyman
USAF

The note bore no date. Wyman had departed Saginaw in a Piper Super Cruiser on Feb. 22, headed for the former Kinross Air Force Base near Sault Ste. Marie. He had never arrived. No trace of him was ever found.

(Thanks, Charles.)

Reading books in one’s youth is like looking at the moon through a crevice; reading books in middle age is like looking at the moon in one’s courtyard; and reading books in old age is like looking at the moon on an open terrace. This is because the depth of benefits of reading varies in proportion to the depth of one’s own experience.

— Chang Ch’ao

Palmstroem, old, an aimless rover,
Walking in the wrong direction
At a busy intersection
Is run over.

“How,” he says, his life restoring
And with pluck his death ignoring,
“Can an accident like this
Ever happen? What’s amiss?

“Did the state administration
Fail in motor transportation?
Did police ignore the need
For reducing driving speed?

“Isn’t there a prohibition
Barring motorized transmission
Of the living to the dead?
Was the driver right who sped … ?”

Tightly swathed in dampened tissues
He explores the legal issues,
And it soon is clear as air:
Cars were not permitted there!

And he comes to the conclusion:
His mishap was an illusion,
For, he reasons pointedly,
That which must not, can not be.

— Christian Morgenstern (translated by Max Knight)

A striking oddity from Matthew Luckiesh’s Visual Illusions, 1922. The height of this silk hat appears much greater than its width, but the two are the same.

“A pole or a tree is generally appraised as of greater length when it is standing than when it lies on the ground. This illusion may be demonstrated by placing a black dot an inch or so above another on a white paper. Now, at right angles to the original dot place another at a horizontal distance which appears equal to the vertical distance of the first dot above the original. On turning the paper through ninety degrees or by actual measurement, the extent of the illusion will become apparent.”

At Nuremburg a wolf’s tooth was shown to travellers … on which an Abbé is represented lying dead in a meadow, with three lilies growing out of his posteriors. This is not only the worst pun that ever was carved upon a wolf’s tooth, but the worst that ever was or will be made. The Abbé is designed to express the Latin word Habe. He is lying dead in a meadow, … mort en pré; this is for mortem præ; and the three lilies in his posteriors are to be read oculis, … au cu lis. Thus, according to the annexed explanation, the whole pun, rebus, or hieroglyphic, is Habe mortem præ oculis.

— Robert Southey, Omniana, 1812

In other words, the French phrase Abbé mort en pré au cul lys (“Abbot died in a meadow with lilies in his rump”) sounds like the Latin phrase Habe mortem præ oculis (“Keep death before your eyes”). This joke appears to be referenced in Hieronymus Bosch’s 1504 triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights: