Saturday, September 30, 2017

Dr. Bean's puzzling headstone for his two wives

Samuel Bean's two wives died twenty months apart. Now that right there is just tragic. The first wife died from eating poison mushrooms and the second wife died from bludgeoning. She wouldn't eat her mushrooms.

Sorry. I got mixed up there a little bit with a joke my brother told me in the second grade. It's that LSD thing happening again.

Dr. Bean loved both his wives and he buried them side by side in Rushes Cemetery outside of Crosshill, Welles Township in Ontario with a single gravestone to honor their favorite pastime of solving puzzles.

Boy, did they ever have weird puzzles back then up there in Canada. Nothing at all like word finder. And neither crosswords nor acrostic puzzles were invented yet.

This article at Amusing Planet tells us this is a replica headstone in harder granite that replaces an earlier version that was worn out and contained an error. The writer at Amusing Planet believes this one has an error too, put there for misdirection and frustration, but the mistake Kaushick picks out is itself a mistake. Rather, what Kaushick thinks should be "so" near the end is actually correct. You can tell by the dots with the letters that they're intended as abbreviations for Samuel Bean.

The article has two more puzzle headstone examples but they are not so interesting or touching as this.




10 comments:

AllenS said...

How on earth did you figure that out?

edutcher said...

Before Lem went on sabbatical, Chip had lots of time.

PS In them thar days it was considered respectable to pop the question to a woman at the funeral of the first wife.

(I know, the Lefties keep saying how repressed they were...)

rcommal said...

The natural born, and naturalized, people of Puerto Rico, as well as of the U.S. Virgin Islands, are every bit as much American citizens as I am and the rest of you are.

To pay less attention to Puerto Rico than to Florida or Texas is to say: No, I really do not believe that our citizens are equal. Full stop.

rcommal said...

--- and, oh by the way,----

I had both friends and family in both Florida and Texas ...

rcommal said...

... and still have 'em, thanks be.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

Neat.

edutcher said...

rcommal said...

The natural born, and naturalized, people of Puerto Rico, as well as of the U.S. Virgin Islands, are every bit as much American citizens as I am and the rest of you are.

Some years ago, The Blonde, against my better judgment, insisted on having a smoothie in a little place in downtown San Juan. She slipped on a step and broke her foot. Since the tourist hospital was full, she had to go to the University hospital.

We're talking Third World, inner city. Except for a couple of residents from the US, no English. Conditions from the US in the 50s, when I broke my arm. Staff goes home at 6.

All of them.

If you don't have family to bring you blankets and food and look after you, you're out of luck.

They ain't us.

deborah said...

"PS In them thar days it was considered respectable to pop the question to a woman at the funeral of the first wife."

Link?

MamaM said...

Yet the reader is invited to the heavenly meet-up in a straightforward manner. What kind of mind comes up with something like this and why? Was it Dr Bean's way of dealing with the puzzlement and grief of losing two he loved to death?

With this from Frost offered at one of the links:

In a Disused Graveyard

by Robert Frost

The living come with grassy tread
To read the gravestones on the hill;
The graveyard draws the living still,
But never anymore the dead.
The verses in it say and say:
"The ones who living come today
To read the stones and go away
Tomorrow dead will come to stay."
So sure of death the marbles rhyme,
Yet can't help marking all the time
How no one dead will seem to come.
What is it men are shrinking from?
It would be easy to be clever
And tell the stones: Men hate to die
And have stopped dying now forever.
I think they would believe the lie.

rcommal said...

Some years ago, The Blonde, against my better judgment, insisted on having a smoothie in a little place in downtown San Juan. She slipped on a step and broke her foot. Since the tourist hospital was full, she had to go to the University hospital.

We're talking Third World, inner city. Except for a couple of residents from the US, no English. Conditions from the US in the 50s, when I broke my arm. Staff goes home at 6.

All of them.

If you don't have family to bring you blankets and food and look after you, you're out of luck.

They ain't us.


This speaks for itself in terms of so many details and in so many ways.