Charles Haddon Spurgeon, whom we met in yesterday’s post, tells the following “Spartan saying” (Plutarch 234D) better than Plutarch does:

I want you to be like the Spartan who painted on his shield a fly. “Your escutcheon is very small,” said one. “True,” said he, “but I hold it very close to the enemy.” (“#1531: On Whose Side are You?,” 1880)

Plutarch tells this one (235B) all right:

When Philip of Macedon sent some orders to the Spartans by letter, they wrote thus in reply: “As to what you wrote about: No.”

Fake Tweets
@fake tweets

Evangelicals: At long last we have created the Abomination of Desolation from classic religious text Beware Against the Abomination of Desolation

There’s a whole discourse on “what kind of monkey is Curious George” — Barbary macaque! Chimpanzee! — but surprisingly little on what kind of monkey the Lego “Brown Monkey with Yellow Hands and Feet” is supposed to be. Maybe a golden-handed tamarin (Saguinus midas), whose native range isn’t far from the Caribbean.

On the San Francisco Lamplighters’ Patreon this month: their 2017 Gala parody Patterday Night Live. It’s no Rosencrantz & Guildenstern’s Excellent Adventure (1995), but it has its moments. I particularly enjoyed the repeated appearance — what I serendipitously just heard is “called a runner” — of “Deep Notes with Jack Pointey.” (Solemnly, to the tune of “Tit-Willow.”)

If a tree’s in a forest and no one’s around—
♬   ♪♬   ♪♬
And the tree should fall down, does it still make a sound?
♬   ♪♬   ♪♬
If a cat in a box on a branch of that tree
Is both dead and alive simultaneously
Can I still claim the cat on my 1040-C?
♬   ♪♬   ♪♬

I told her that she was the light of my life—
♬   ♪♬   ♪♬
And I begged her allow me to take her to wife—
♬   ♪♬   ♪♬
As I ardently wooed her, reciting a list
Of the myriad ways she might like to be kissed,
She said— “Counsel requests Juror 5 be dismissed—”
♬   ♪♬   ♪♬

I’ll bet you that Heaven smells just like Febreze—
♬   ♪♬   ♪♬
And I’ll bet you the Lorax was paid by the trees—
♬   ♪♬   ♪♬
And I’ll bet gastropods prefer beans as a snack—
And I’ll bet turtles think Mitch McConnell is wack—
And I’ll bet you my gambling addiction is back—
♬   ♪♬   ♪♬

Dryden, Dramatic Poetry of the Last Age (1672):

Shakespeare shewed the best of his skill in his Mercutio; and he said himself, that he was forced to kill him in the third act, to prevent being killed by him. But, for my part, I cannot find he was so dangerous a person; I see nothing in him but what was so exceeding harmless, that he might have lived to the end of the play, and died in his bed, without offence to any man.

Donald Knuth once conjectured that any integer can be expressed by starting with a single “4” and repeatedly applying the factorial, square root, and floor functions. (“Representing Numbers Using Only One 4”, Mathematics Magazine 37(5), Nov–Dec 1964.) His article is reprinted in Selected Papers on Fun & Games (2011), where Knuth adds an addendum ending:

With the ceiling function we can of course do better. The best representation that I currently know for “64 with one 4,” eschewing exotic unary operations such as !! and ¡, is

64 = ⌈√√√√√⌈√√√√√√√√√√√√√√√√√√√√√√√√⌊√√⌊√⌈√√√√√(4!)!⌉!⌋!⌋!⌉!⌉.

I learned that !! stands for the “double factorial” function, OEIS A006882; and ¡ stands for the “subfactorial,” OEIS A000166. In this MathOverflow post from 2016, Fred Daniel Kline wisely suggests that in a computing context, if ! is pronounced “bang,” then ¡ should be pronounced “GNAB” — a recursive acronym for “GNAB’s Not A Bang.”

In INTERCAL (the Computer Language with No Pronounceable Acronym) ! is pronounced “wow.” In Spanish, ¡ is merely the “signo inicial de admiración”; when the Royal Academy invented it from whole cloth in 1754, they just called it the “nota de admiración [puesta] inversa.” If it has a slang nickname in Spanish, I haven’t heard.