Sheba’s Just a Square on Cubes

--Sheba the mathematical dog was famous for a little while, but eventually someone figured out that her talents didn’t add up. Richard and Frances Morgan’s spitz-keeshond had been barking the answers to complicated math problems for the last two years. Sheba was begging for a cracker in their Knightstown, Ind., home one day when Mrs. Morgan told her: “I’m going to teach you to count for your crackers.” That afternoon, the dog learned to bark once when Mrs. Morgan said, “One,” and held up one finger, twice for two and three times for three. Soon, Sheba was counting to 10 and beyond. So Mrs. Morgan asked Sheba to add two and three. Sheba barked five times. The little brown dog went on to do subtraction, multiplication, division, square roots, even cube roots. Sheba soon became a celebrity, which added up to a visit from a reporter for the Indianapolis News. The reporter was a suspicious sort. He called in Erich Klinghammer, associate professor of psychology at Purdue University, who suspected that Sheba read body language--tiny movements of the eyes or head or body--to know when to stop barking, and would not know what to do if the questioner didn’t know the answer. So Mrs. Morgan put her Pythagorean dog to the test: “Sheba, what is the cube root of 216?” Sheba barked and barked and barked. She went past 6--the answer--and was in the 20s before giving up--well on her way to infinity.

--Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis will soon be $2.79 richer. Onassis, who owns a $344,000 estate in northern New Jersey, overpaid her 1984 property tax bill of $6,859 and is due a refund. The widow of President John F. Kennedy and Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis bought the 10-acre estate 10 years ago as a weekend retreat.

--Jim Mattson’s students call him the Johnny Carson of the classroom, but the Orange Park, Fla., English teacher owes it all to them. Socrates died from an overdose of wedlock, the students have written, and floods can be prevented by putting dames in the river. Mattson said he began keeping his students’ bloopers about four years ago for use as teaching tools. “I don’t think they really know what they’ve written,” he said. The classics include: “The death of Francis Macomber was a turning point in his life”; “The difference between a king and a President is that a king is the son of his father, but a President isn’t”; and “A virgin forest is a place where the hand of man has never set foot.” One of his all-time favorites is: “In 1957, Eugene O’Neill won the Pullett Surprise.” Perhaps if Mattson didn’t laugh, he’d cry.