My name is Matt Tsuki, and I am having fish and chips for dinner
Publicity stunts undertaken by press agent Jim Moran, 1938-1959:
•Sold a refrigerator to an Eskimo in Alaska
•Threw eggs at an electric fan
•Changed horses in midstream in a Nevada river
•Sought a needle in a haystack (for 10 days)
•Walked a bull through a New York china shop
•Hatched an ostrich egg (by sitting on it for 19 days)
•Opened a Washington embassy for a mythical country
By the 1950s the era of the flamboyant stunt was ending, and authorities put a stop to Moran’s more ambitious schemes. He said, “It’s a sad day for American capitalism when a man can’t fly a midget on a kite over Central Park.”
A whimsical traveler on one of the main trails in the State of Georgia painted, on a large rock, the words, ‘Turn Me Over.’ Other travelers heaved and struggled to turn the rock over. On the underside of it they found painted, ‘Now Turn Me Back That I May Fool Another.’
– H. Allen Smith, The Compleat Practical Joker, 1953
In the days before chess clocks, a player might wait for hours while his opponent decided on a move.
Morphy’s companion Frederick Milnes Edge remarked that “[József] Szén was so frightfully slow, even in ordinary games, that he would have worn out 200 francs’ worth of his opponent’s pantaloons before the match was half through.”
The most notorious slowpoke in England was Elijah “The Bristol Sloth” Williams: In the fourth game of his London match against Henry Thomas Buckle in 1851, Williams lavished such exquisite care on his 25th move that Buckle had time to write two chapters of his History of Civilization.
Buckle won. “The slowness of genius is hard to bear,” he said, “but the slowness of mediocrity is intolerable.”
Epitaph of the eminent barrister Sir John Strange:
Here lies an honest lawyer,–
that is Strange.
From Epitaphiana: or, The Curiosities of Churchyard Literature, 1873.
When German physicist Walther Nernst learned that his cowshed was warm because of the cows’ metabolic activity, he resolved to sell them and invest in carp. A thinking man, he said, cultivates animals that are in thermodynamic equilibrium with their surroundings and does not waste his money in heating the universe.
semiopathy
n. the tendency to read humorously inappropriate meanings into signs
