"To a Capricious Friend"

In all thy humors, whether grave or mellow,
Thou'rt such a touchy, testy, pleasant fellow,
Hast so much wit, and mirth, and spleen about thee,
There is no living with thee, nor without thee.

~Joseph Addison (translation)

The Beast of Gévaudan

The Beast of Gévaudan is a name given to man-eating wolf-like animals that terrorized the former province of Gévaudan (modern day département of Lozère), in the Margeride Mountains in south-central France from 1764 to 1767 over an area stretching 90 by 80 kilometres (56 mi × 50 mi). The beasts were consistently described by eyewitnesses as having formidable teeth and immense tails. Their fur had a reddish tinge, and was said to have emitted an unbearable odor. They killed their victims by tearing at their throats with their teeth. The number of victims claimed by the beasts differ according to source, however, de Beaufort (1987) estimated a toll of 210 attacks resulting in 113 deaths and 49 injuries. Ninety-eight of the victims killed were partially eaten. Author Brockis claims 25 women, 68 children, and 6 men were killed, with over 30 others injured. An enormous amount of manpower and resources was used in the hunting of the animals, including the army, conscripted civilians, several nobles and a number of royal huntsmen. All animals operated outside of ordinary wolf packs, though eyewitness accounts indicate that in some instances they were accompanied by a smaller female which did not take part in the attacks. Ultimately 2 of the beasts were killed, but none of their remains were preserved.

The Gévaudan attacks were not considered isolated events. A century earlier, similar killings occurred in 1693 at Benais, in which over 100 victims, almost all of them women and children, were claimed by a creature described as exactly resembling the Gévaudan Beasts. Four decades after the Gévaudan attacks, more attacks occurred between 1809 and 1813 in Vivarais, when at least 21 children and adolescents were killed by another beast. From 1875 to 1879, more attacks occurred in L'Indre. All these killings, including the Gévaudan attacks, seem to have occurred mostly in four year periods. Attacks by wolf-like creatures continued to be reported in France up until 1954.

These creatures have never been identified. Some think they were a kind of wolf while others think they were a punishment from God. What do you think?

Here is the wikipedia article where this information comes from.

Words of Wisdom

"It is well to know something of the manners of various peoples, in order to more sanely judge our own, and that we do not think that everything against our modes is ridiculous, and against reason, as those who have seen nothing are accustomed to think."

~Rene Descartes

Words of Wisdom

"I'm lost, but I'm making record time."

~Allan Lamport

Astonish Yourself

The following are from Roger-Pol Droit's book Astonish Yourself! 101 Experiments in the Philosophy of Everyday Life (2003).

1. Call yourself
2. Empty a word of its meaning
3. Look in vain for "I"
4. Make the world last twenty minutes
5. See the stars below you
6. See a landscape as a stretched canvas
7. Lose something and not know what
8. Recall where you were this morning
9. Hurt yourself briefly
10. Feel eternal
11. Telephone at random
12. Rediscover your room after a journey
13. Drink while urinating
14. Make a wall between your hands
15. Walk in the dark
16. Dream of all the places in the world
17. Peel an apple in your head
18. Visualize a pile of human organs
19. Imagine yourself high up
20. Imagine your imminent death
21. Try to measure existence
22. Count to a thousand
23. Dread the arrival of the bus
24. Run in a graveyard
25. Play the fool
26. Watch a woman at her window
27. Invent lives for yourself
28. Look at people from a moving car
29. Follow the movement of ants
30. Eat a nameless substance
31. Watch dust in the sun
32. Resist tiredness
33. Overeat
34. Play the animal
35. Contemplate a dead bird
36. Come across a childhood toy
37. Wait while doing nothing
38. Try not to think
39. Go to the hairdresser
40. Shower with your eyes closed
41. Sleep on your front in the sun
42. Go to the circus
43. Try on clothes
44. Calligraphize
45. Light a fire in the hearth
46. Be aware of yourself speaking
47. Weep at the cinema
48. Meet up with friends after several years
49. Browse at the bookseller's
50. Become music
51. Pull out a hair
52. Walk in an imaginary forest
53. Demonstrate on your own
54. Stay in the hammock
55. Invent headlines
56. Listen to short-wave radio
57. Turn off the sound on the TV
58. Redisover a childhood scene that seemed larger
59. Get used to eating something you don't like
60. Fast for a while
61. Rant for ten minutes
62. Drive through a forest
63. Give without thinking about it
64. Look for a blue food
65. Become a saint or sinner
66. Recover lost memories
67. Watch someone sleeping
68. Work on a holiday
69. Consider humanity to be an error
70. Inhabit the planet of small gestures
71. Disconnect the phone
72. Smile at a stranger
73. Enter the space of a painting
74. Leave the cinema in daytime
75. Plunge into cold water
76. Seek out immutable landscapes
77. Listen to a recording of your voice
78. Tell a stranger she is beautiful
79. Believe in the existence of a smell
80. Wake up without knowing where
81. Descend an interminable staircase
82. Swallow your emotion
83. Fix the ephemeral
84. Decorate a room
85. Laugh at an idea
86. Vanish at a pavement cafe
87. Row on a lake in your room
88. Prowl at night
89. Become attached to an object
90. Sing the praises of Santa Claus
91. Play with a child
92. Encounter pure chance
93. Recite the telephone directory on your knees
94. Think about what other people are doing
95. Practice make-believe everywhere
96. Kill people in your head
97. Take the subway without going anywhere
98. Remove your watch
99. Put up with a chatterbox
100. Clean up after the party
101. Find the infinitesimal caress

Try doing one a day.

A Father, Mother, and Son

I have been in a "puzzle mood" lately. Here is one more. This one is a bit more difficult than the last two.

The ages of a father, mother, and son add up to 70. The father is 6 times as old as the son. When the father is twice as old as the son, the combined age of the three is 140. How old is the mother?

Multiplication and Addition

We all know that 2 + 2 = 4 and 2 x 2 = 4. We also know that 0 + 0 = 0 and 0 x 0 = 0. Are there any other positive numbers A and B such that A + B = A x B = C?

[As before, please do not post an answer as a comment. Feel free to email me a response. To prevent redundancy, this applies to all puzzles and problems hereafter.

~Armando]