Archive for July 2009
Amusing headlines
Recently I’ve noticed a few newspaper headlines that are equal parts hilarious and intriguing. Maybe it’s because not much real news happens in the summer? Anyway, all of the following are genuine news stories, though I have neglected to record where I saw these actual headlines.
- Drunk badger disrupts traffic
- Ozzy Osbourne’s dog eaten by coyote
- Pablo Escobar’s fugitive hippo shot dead
- Man blows up apartment in attempt to repair bed
My favourite is that third one. It sounds like something straight out of The Day Today…
On the attribution of witty aphorisms
Hugh Pennington attributes the aphorism “Making predictions about the future is difficult, especially about the future” to Sam Goldwyn. (It’s in the second last paragraph) This is a phrase I’ve always thought was due to Neils Bohr, though a little digging shows that this phrase has been attributed to a number of other sources.
I’ve seen this happen with a couple of other pithy phrases. For example the phrase “The mere absurdity of a proposition is no guarantee that some philosopher will not endorse it” has been attributed to a number of people. The form of the sentence as it appears above is due to John Burgess. I’ve seen a similar sentiment attributed to Descartes and even to Cicero.
A third example is the idea of God as a circle whose centre is everywhere. I had it in my head that this was due to Spinoza, though it certainly seems to pop up in a variety of places…
I wonder what explains this multiple attribution? More examples or “canonical” attributions to any of these quotations are more than welcome!
