Author: Gem

One morning in August 1955, Eppie found herself reading and rereading the lovelorn column, called “Your Problems,” in the Chicago Sun-Times. And she suddenly realized exactly what she wanted to do: she would assist the lovelorn columnist! Eppie immediately phoned Wilbur Munnecke, a Sun-Times executive whom she had befriended years before. Might the columnist Ann Landers need help answering her mail? “Funny you should ask,” Munnecke responded. “It is odd that you are calling me now. Ruth Crowley, our Ann Landers, died suddenly last week.” The newspaper was, in fact, seeking a replacement for Crowley. When Eppie suggested that she could be the new Ann Landers, Munnecke laughed out loud. Crowley had been a journalist and a nurse. Her column was syndicated in more than two dozen newspapers. Eppie Lederer was a housewife without a college degree, and more than 25 other women, many of whom were experienced journalists, had applied for the position.

It’s awful to write to you because, even though I love writing to you, it brings you so near me I could almost touch you and I know at the same time that I cannot touch you, you are so far away in cold, unkind Ringwood and I am in stale Barnet in a roadhouse pub with nothing but your absence and your distance, to keep my heart company.

Madame Godin [Isabel Godin des Odonais] was the wife of one of the French mathematicians who were sent to Peru, in South America, about the middle of the last century [1769], for the purpose of making some observations there, which should improve our knowledge of geography. She set out from Rio-bamba, the place of her residence, with the design of joining her husband at Cayenne, a distance of thirteen or fourteen hundred leagues.

An interesting example of a mathematical pattern found in the real world is the arrangement of petals and florets (the small rudimentary flowers that are found, easily visible, in the center of some flowers such as sunflowers). In some species these florets are distributed in groups of spirals that curl in different directions and intercept each other. Often the number of elements that curl in one direction is 34, while the number of elements curling in the opposite direction is 55….

“Bad language” was a relatively accepted aspect of English even in Shakespeare’s day — not that he actually used the most forbidden words, but he clearly alluded to them (“Do you think I meant country matters?”), and he revelled in vigorous insults. In King Lear, when Oswald asks the Earl of Kent, “What dost thou know me for?” the latter replies, “A knave; a rascal; an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave; a lily-liver’d, action-taking, whoreson, glass-gazing superserviceable, finical rogue; one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a bawd in way of good service, and art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pander, and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch; one whom I will beat into clamorous whining, if thou deny the least syllable of thy addition.” He follows that up with “Draw, you whoreson cullionly barbermonger! Draw!”…

“‘When on board the ship,’ said Edison, as we sat down to déjeuner on the terrace of the Eiffel Tower, première étage, ‘they put rolls and coffee on the table for breakfast. I thought that that was a very poor breakfast for a man to do any work upon. But I suppose one gets used to it. I would like one American meal for a change — plenty of pie for a change.’ He then smashed the roll with his fist.”

True or false, the public airing of this dirty washing might have harmed Onassis’s reputation irretrievably had the whole affair not suddenly taken a fantastic twist….

“Left Padua at twelve, and arrived at Lord Byron’s country house, La Mira, near Lusina, at two. He was but just up and in his bath; soon came down to me; first time we have met these five years; grown fat, which spoils the picturesqueness of his head….”

About eight o’clock I strolled in very jauntily. In my mind I had the whole programme mapped out. I would stay at the hospital for, say, two days following the operation — or, at most, three. Then I must be up and away. I had a good deal of work to do and a number of people to see on important business, and I could not really afford to waste more than a weekend on the staff of St Germicide’s. After Monday they must look to their own devices for social entertainment. That was my idea….

As the means to his end Poniatowski seemed specially suited. Williams had heard enough of Catherine to infer that she was not averse to an intrigue, and great though her devotion might be to the banished Soltykof — was it not the gossip of the ante-chambers that she had once waited for him till three in the morning at a rendezvous to which he never came? — the wily diplomatist was too much of a cynic to believe in the deathlessness of any passion. Broken hearts could always be mended, and who was more likely to patch together deftly the shattered fragments of the Grand Duchess’s than his charming young Pole?…

The “Fejee Mermaid” was by many supposed to be a curiosity manufactured by myself or made to my order. This is not the fact. I certainly had much to do in bringing it before the public, and as I am now in the confessional mood, I will “make a clean breast” of the ways and means I adopted for that purpose. I must first, however, relate how it came into my possession and its alleged history.

I shall never forget the first time I ever saw a pickpocket at work. It was when I was about thirteen years old. A boy of my own age, Zack, a great pal of mine, was with me. Zack and I understood one another thoroughly and well knew how to get theatre money by petty pilfering, but of real graft we were as yet ignorant, although we had heard many stories about the operations of actual, professional thieves. We used to steal rides in the cars which ran to and from the Grand Street ferries — and run off with overcoats and satchels when we had a chance. One day we were standing on the rear platform when a woman boarded the car, and immediately behind her a gentlemanly looking man with a high hat….