Background on the Elocution Lesson

The sentence is from Elizabeth Von Arnim, The Enchanted April, originally published in the early 20s, lately revived by NYRB Paperbacks (but note that there is a free version on Kindle).  It's a period piece, its lyricism saved by an undercurrent of merry waspishness (Mrs. Buce reports that the film version is a good deal more anodyne).  I've been reading it aloud and I find it hard to catch her rhythm--can't make up her mind how much of it is my distance from the Edwardians, how much stylistic quirks of the author.  A few sentences--this one--strike me as downrighrt Proustian (though certainly not as elegant as Proust) in that they seem difficult to disentangle but which, once disentangled, yield up their meaning with perfect clarity.

Who Said All That Stuff About McCain and Obama?

The Trumpster.  Go here.

Kugler

az der kluger faylt, faylt er veyt. 

When a wise man makes a mistake, it's a lulu.

Butterfield Ate...

...BUtterfield 8-3000.  It's  Johny Carson Carnac joke, explained here:

"The ironic connection is the telephone number of New York‘s funeral home to the stars, Frank E. Campbell. For years the funeral directors that laid the likes of Judy Garland and Rudolph Valentino to rest used to advertise: ―In the event of death call BUtterfield 8-3000."

Who Said It? "Human Beings are not "Individuals"...

That would be the granddaddy of all Chicago economists, Frank H,. Knight, in "Fallacies in the Interpretation of Social Cost," reprinted in Frank Knight, The Ethics of Competition 209-28 at 227-8 (1977)/

The Wobbly Table

For the four-legged table: you take a matchbook; you get down on your hands and knees; you shove the match book under the wobbly leg until it is even.,

For the three-legged table.  If the three-legged table wobbles, you'd better quit drinking.  The three-legged table cannot wobble.  Indeed, an alternative correct solution to the four-legged table problem is to chop off the fourth leg; then you have a three-legged table which does not wobble.

Per BBC, men know this; women pull out another matchbook.  BBC says that men get it right because the conceptualize the problem, and women get it wrong because they go straight to the solution.  In my sample set of one (not Mrs. Buce), my subject firmly insisted that a three-legged table can wobble and that she was going right home to try.  Haven't heard back.

Who Bears the Loss?

The answer is: Roomie.  He pays 15 pounds to buy the right from Romeo, but he'll have to pay another 15 pounds to recover the 20--plus, probably, a transaction cost (Romeo is out only 5 pounds net).  But the real puzzle is: how could anyone have been puzzled by this puzzle?   Isn't it obvious?  Or am I speaking now, perhaps, as a commercial lawyer?