JOSIAH WHO?

My games at the card table on Bridge Base Online have helped kindle friendships with so many nice people.

One of them, I'll call him Frederick, recently dropped a name that had me both fascinated and amused. 

"As a graduate of Brown University of Providence, Rhode Island, I'm a follower of Josiah Carberry." he wrote in a friendly email. 

For a moment, I thought he was making reference to a bridge aficionado.

"Google him if you get a chance," he added cryptically.

What follows is a wonderful account of a fictional university legend who has endeared himself to many over the years. Just thought I'd share this story to brighten your day. 

We all need legends in our lives!

Josiah Stinkney Carberry is a fictional professor, created as a joke in 1929. He is said to still teach at Brown University and to be known for his work in "psychoceramics", the supposed study of "cracked pots" (a play on words of the term crackpot).

The joke originated when John William Spaeth, Jr. posted a false notice for a Carberry lecture on a bulletin board at Brown in 1929. The lecture, on "Archaic Greek Architectural Revetments in Connection with Ionian Philology" was, of course, never given, and when asked, Spaeth obligingly provided false details about the professor's (fictional) family and (non-existent) academic interests. 

The joke has been embraced since that time, at least at Brown, and Carberry has traditionally been scheduled to lecture every Friday the 13th and February 29 (he of course "misses" all of them), and a general mythology has grown around him and his family. Students have taken great delight in inserting references to him in otherwise serious journals, as any such reference which fails to point out his non-existence seriously undercuts the reputation of those works. 

Each Friday the 13th and leap day is "Josiah Carberry Day" at Brown. The year of Brown's founding, 1764, was a leap year starting on Sunday. Only these years and common years beginning on Thursday have three occurrences of Friday the 13th, in February, March and November. 2015 is the most recent example of such a year.

Often lectures are scheduled where Carberry fails to show up, and cracked pots are put outside the libraries for donations to the Josiah S. Carberry Fund, which Carberry set up "in memory of my future late wife, Laura," for the purchase of books "of which I might or might not approve." The bookplate bears a calendar for February with Friday the 13th and Sunday the 29th printed in red. Below this is the Latin motto "Dulce et Decorum Est Desipere in Loco", which translates as "It is pleasant and proper to be foolish once in a while."

I couldn't agree more!