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Thread: Anecdote of the day |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
While Calvin Coolidge was governor of Massachusetts, two of the state senators had an argument, which ended in one telling the other that he could "go to hell." The insulted politican went to see Coolidge to ask him to do something about it. Coolidge said calmly, "I have looked up the law, senator, and you don't have to go."
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Lunching in a pub before a matinee performance, Wilfrid Lawson met fellow-actor Richard Burton and invited him to the show that afternoon. As Lawson was not due to appear at the beginning of the play, he sat with Burton to watch the opening scenes. Some twenty minutes into the performance, however, Burton was a little concerned to find Lawson still sitting beside him, having made no move to leave and prepare for his entrance. A few moments later, Lawson tapped Burton on the arm. "You'll like this bit," he whispered excitedly. "This is where I come on."
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Poetry
In November 2002, Poetry, a modest Chicago monthly, learned that Ruth Lilly, the heir to the Eli Lilly pharmaceutical fortune, had bequeathed part of her fortune to the magazine (which, in its ninety years of existence, had published such poets as T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and Marianne Moore). "They could get very slick," said Pulitzer Prize-winning poet James Tate upon hearing the news. "Beautiful covers, beautiful offices, new hairdos for everyone..." The size of the bequest? One hundred million dollars. |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
In the 1780s a provincial German schoolmaster gave his class the tedious assignment of summing the first 100 integers. The teacher's aim was to keep the kids quiet for half an hour, but one young pupil almost immediately produced an answer: 1 + 2 + 3 + ... + 98 + 99 + 100 = 5,050. The smart aleck was Carl Friedrich Gauss, who would go on to join the short list of candidates for greatest mathematician ever. Gauss was not a calculating prodigy who added up all those numbers in his head. He had a deeper insight: If you "fold" the series of numbers in the middle and add them in pairs—1 + 100, 2 + 99, 3 + 98, and so on—all the pairs sum to 101. There are 50 such pairs, and so the grand total is simply 50×101. The more general formula, for a list of consecutive numbers from 1 through n, is n(n + 1)/2.
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
I remember blowing the mind of my maths teacher at a yound age, coming up with that exact same equation.
Of course, we weren't just adding up numbers. This being "new maths" or whatever they were calling it at the time, we were studying triangular numbers. I was unaware of the history of that little equation at the time. The teacher still dragged me and my bit of paper off to show it off to the headmaster, though. :-D |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Simple Question?
One day during a speaking tour, Albert Einstein's driver, who often sat at the back of the hall during his lectures, remarked that he could probably give the lecture himself, having heard it so many times. Sure enough, at the next stop on the tour, Einstein and the driver switched places, with Einstein sitting at the back in his driver's uniform. Having delivered a flawless lecture, the driver was asked a difficult question by a member of the audience. "Well, the answer to that question is quite simple," he casulally replied. "I bet my driver, sitting up at the back there, could answer it..." [Probably apocryphal.] [Trivia: What did reporter Steven Levy find in New Jersey pathologist Thomas Harvey's home inside a box labeled "Costa Cider"? Two large Mason jars, containing Einstein's brain. On occasion Harvey, who kept the jars under his sink for more than 40 years, doled out specimens to other researchers, one of whom kept his slice in his refigerator, in a jar labeled "Big Al's Brain."] |
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Carpet Rodent
Senior Cruncher Joined: Apr 29, 2007 Post Count: 437 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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Gladstone once said to Disraeli "I predict sir, that you will either die by hanging, or of some vile disease", to which Disraeli replied "That will depend upon whether I embrace your principles, or your mistress"
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
During the 1930s in a railway carriage Hilaire Belloc noticed a man in front of him reading a volume of his History of England. He leaned forward, asked him how much he had paid for it, was informed of the price, took a corresponding sum out of his pocket, gave it to the man, snatched the book from his hand, and tossed it out the window.
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Colette: the anecdote of the day
This is the best thing I learned today by far. It's from Colette's Sido (1929) by way of a scholarly book I'm reading for review. (The quote is the book's summation, not Colette's, btw.) It seems that Colette's father "passed his retirement in his study writing his memoirs and binding the volumes himself. While her father was alive, neither Colette nor any other member of the family was ever tempted to open one of the books, because of their unprepossessing titles: My Campaigns, the Lessons of '70, Marshal Mahon Seen by a Fellow-Soldier, and so forth. After her father died, however the library was converted into a bedroom and Colette's elder brother made a discovery:....Except for a dedicaition, the books contained all blank pages." (Victoria Rosner, Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life, Columbia UP, 2005, 91.) Amazing. As Victoria Rosner goes on to discuss, it's amazing, funny and sad how little, in the end, one has to do to set oneself up as a writer. Think of the solitary hours he passed, unmolested because he was writing. I wonder if they were spend in tortured writer's block or, instead, as I prefer to think, blissful dozing, confident in the knowledge that none would disturb l'auteur du famille. |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Louis Untermeyer once returned his speaker's fee to a small and impoverished group and told them to put the money to good use. A little while later, he inquired about what "good use" they had found for the money and was told that they had put it into a "fund to get better speakers next year."
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