Futility Closet - 003-Extreme Pedestrians, Kangaroo Stew, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Episode Date: March 31, 2014

In 1926, a woman named Lillian Alling grew disenchanted with her life as a maid in New York City and resolved to return to her native Russia. She lacked the funds to sail east, so instead she walked west -- trekking 6,000 miles alone across the breadth of Canada and into Alaska. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast, we'll consider Alling's lonely, determined journey, compare it to the efforts of other long-distance pedestrians, and suggest a tool to plot your own virtual journey across the United States.We'll also learn the truth about the balloon-borne messenger dogs of 1870 Paris, ponder the significance of October 4 to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and offer a chance to win a book in the next Futility Closet Challenge.

Welcome to Futility Closet, a celebration of the quirky and the curious, the thought-provoking and the simply amusing. This is the audio companion to the popular website that catalogs more than 7,000 curiosities in history, language, mathematics, literature, philosophy, and art. You can find us online at futilitycloset.com. Thanks for joining us. Welcome to episode three. I'm Greg Ross, the creator of Futility Closet, and with me is my wife and co-host Sharon. In today's show, we'll follow an enigmatic Russian woman's lonely trek across Canada in 1927, learn the facts about the balloon dogs of Paris, ponder the significance of October 4th to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and present a new Futility Closet challenge.

We heard from a few listeners about our discussion of the Y2K scare from our last episode. In that discussion, I messed up and said that the year 2000 was not a leap year when actually it was a leap year. That was a slip up on my part, but I really hadn't remembered how complicated that whole situation was until we got some really well-informed email from our listeners about it. Eric wrote in to say, certainly you were referring to the first exception to the leap year rule, which states that century years are not leap years. However, that century exception has a further exception. Century years that are divisible by 400 do include a leap year. So this is an exception to the exception.

Blaine explained further that the leap year issue So this is an exception to the exception. Okay. Blaine explained further that the leap year issue was one additional item that programmers needed to consider as they were correcting code. He said that if someone had coded for leap years, the concern was that the year 2000 might be interpreted as 1900, which was not a leap year, and thus caused the code to not consider February 29, 2000 as a valid date. Okay, that's complicated. I see. Yeah, so the Y2K issue where the years might be coded only by double digits was further complicating this whole leap year exception to the exception issue. Blaine describes himself as having been in the trenches working on Y2K issues in our code for a large bank, and

goes on to say that although there definitely were issues that needed correcting in preparation for January 1st, 2000, on the whole, he agrees that the media did over-hype the Y2K issue and turn it into what he called a doomsday event. Our thanks to everyone who wrote in on that, and if you have any

questions or comments, you can send them to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com or leave a comment in the show notes at blog.futilitycloset.com. This week, I've been thinking about Lillian Alling, this sad, enigmatic woman who walked across Canada in 1927, both because of what she did and because of her own attitude toward it. What happened was in British Columbia in late 1927, a provincial police constable named George Wyman encountered this woman who was walking through the province and asked her where she was going, and she told him Siberia. He told a journalist later, quote, I was so surprised to see that woman there. She was so scantily clad and had no firearms or anything to see her through

that country. She was about five foot five and thin as a wisp. When I first saw her, she was wearing running shoes. She had a knapsack with a half dozen sandwiches in it, some tea, and some other odds and ends, a comb and personal effects, but no makeup. I had time getting her name. She wasn't going to say anything to anybody, but I finally got it, and when she said she was going to Siberia, I couldn't say anything. I thought she was out of her mind. He was worried about her because she was planning, if she was really serious about going to Siberia, what that would entail would be going through the Yukon in the winter, which would probably kill her. As her story has become known through the 20th century, a number of journalists have tried to follow in her footsteps and have given up trying to get up that trail. It's just very rough country.

So his main concern was for her safety, but she wouldn't listen to him. And so he basically trumped up a charge of vagrancy. It wasn't really necessary, but it was the basically trumped up a charge of vagrancy. It wasn't really necessary, but it was the only thing he could think to do to stop her. And so that entailed bring her into the justice system. And that's where most of her story emerged. She said she was an immigrant to New York City from Russia and had found herself unhappy there. She felt the people were unfriendly and she didn't like the work she was doing. She was either a maid or a cook. But she didn't have any money.

She wanted to go back to Russia, but she couldn't afford to save up for a steamer ticket. So what she did sounds incredible. She went to a public library and looked at a map of the world and reasoned that if you don't have enough money to go east to Russia, you can get there by going west, by basically trekking all the way through Canada, up through Alaska, and getting across the Bering Strait. And essentially that's what she did. She had been, left New York, we think in 1926, crossed into Canada, probably at Niagara Falls, and had spent the ensuing year walking all the way across Canada into British Columbia.

So Wyman, who was concerned for her safety, basically arranged to have her locked up for vagrancy charges, but only for a few months. And so she was out again by November 1927 and immediately started walking north again. So he had meant to have her have to spend the winter in jail, but couldn't manage to arrange that? Yeah, just for her own safety. She's a very difficult woman to understand. She was kept almost entirely to herself and was sometimes hostile and snappish to people who tried to talk to her. All she would say to anyone was, I go to Siberia.

All the way across Canada, that's all she would say to anyone. That's why we know so little about her. It's a tricky story to research because we know so few facts because she was so sort of jealous with them about telling people what had happened to her and why she was doing this. But yes, that was his reason. He wanted to sort of arrest her progress just for her own safety. But it sounds like he failed in that goal if he had to let her back out. Yeah. So she kept going, but she made it as far as Nome, Alaska.

That's what we know. She got as far as that, which is astonishing. That's 6,000 miles in less than three years. Just trudging across Canada and up into Alaska. And the thing about her is that she doesn't seem to have been impressed by the fact that she was doing this. It didn't seem to have any meaning to her. She was, she became known as she got into Western Canada

because this was such an odd thing and word spread. And a few journalists approached her and she would talk to them sometimes and answer their questions briefly. So she was known as the mystery woman. That's what they called her. So we have a few facts from there too. But she seems to have regarded this whole thing

as just a task she had elected to do. But not an impressive feat. Like, she didn't see this as anything amazing. No, and it didn't seem to have any personal significance to her. It was just, she just set out to do it and was doing it. Over the years on Futility Closet, I've written about a few other people who've walked unusual distances, and it has a different quality to it. Here are a few of those.

In 1908, a man named Jack Crone pushed a wheelbarrow around the perimeter of the United States unusual distances, and it has a different quality to it. Here are a few of those. In 1908, a man named Jack Crone pushed a wheelbarrow around the perimeter of the United States, a distance of 9,000 miles. He wore out 11 pairs of shoes and 119 pairs of socks, and he lost 17 pounds. And along the way, he exchanged salutations between the postmasters of Portland, Maine, and Portland, Oregon. In 1928, Otto Funk, for some reason these guys all have entertaining names, Otto Funk walked from New York City to San Francisco, about 4,000 miles, playing a fiddle the whole time. He said, quote, I have seen God's country every foot of it that I walked over. You can't see it right from a car or a train.

Soul Leather Express is the only way. In 1931, Plenty Wingo, another entertaining name, walked backward from Fort Worth, Texas to Istanbul. Backward the whole way, a distance of 8,000 miles. He was planning to walk around

the whole planet that way. Except what? In Istanbul, they... He got hung up. He needed a visa and he couldn't get one, so he gave up. But he got 8,000 miles,

which is pretty good. He had these special periscope glasses made that let him see where he was going, and he sold postcards along the way to defray his expenses. And the last one I have is in 1978, a Baptist minister named Hans Mulliken crawled from East Texas to the White House,

crawled the whole way. It took him 18 months to cover 1,600 miles. He would crawl for a few months. He'd crawl like eight months at a time, and then sort of mark his place and go back to Texas and work for a while to earn more money and then come back and pick up where he left off. So he crawled in installments.

Yeah, he had to because he would just run out of money. He did the whole thing wearing knee pads. He crawled for eight hours a day at one half mile per hour. So he'd cover about four miles a day. And the sad part of that story is when he finally got to Washington,

an aide told him that President Carter was too busy to see him. He said, quote, I just want to show America that we need to get on our knees and repent. This is something I had in my heart and wanted to do for my country. So those four and some others I've read about, they all have the same quality that it meant something personally to the people who was doing it. I mean, pushing a wheelbarrow around the U.S., that doesn't need to be done. It's sort of entirely arbitrary he just came up with this task and did it so but you don't know whether they were doing it like for fame or

to set a record that's the thing i love about these particular stories i mean hans mulligan the guy who crawled from texas to he had a point he was doing it for god he had a reason but the other three jack crone autofunk and plenty wing... It was just like a whim? They weren't selling anything. They weren't promoting a cause. They didn't even seem interested in being famous. They just did it. They just decided, I'm going to do this. Yeah, I was kind of surprised that the reporters who interviewed them didn't apparently ask them, why are you doing this? They just did it. But it seems like, at least personally,

the difference between them and Lillian Olling is that it meant something to them. I mean, fiddling your way across the U.S. is an arbitrary thing to do, but it's difficult, and if you set out to do it and achieve it, then you might take some pride or a sense of accomplishment. I mean, if they put that on your tombstone, you'd think, all right, that seems like a reasonable thing. Well, but to me it seems like Lillian Olling meant something to her, but a different kind of something. She just wanted to go home and this was the only way she could. Yeah. But she didn't have, I had the

impression that if you had stopped her on the road in Canada and said, look, if this is, you don't have to do this, you don't have to go through this just because you decided to do it. If it's proving harder than you thought it would be, you can settle down here in Canada or just do something entirely different. She would have said, I'm going to to Russia that's what I'm doing if I stop doing that that I won't be doing it anymore and that doesn't make any sense you know it's like when she made the decision to do it she just flipped the switch and stopped reflecting about it at all and nothing would deter her but you don't think it was just that she just wanted to get home well she did but that's all there is that's the whole story I had the impression that if she'd made it we don't know whether she made it all the way into Siberia, but if she had,

I have the idea that she would have just sat down and looked about her. She wouldn't even have told anyone about it because it didn't strike her as a noteworthy thing. It didn't seem like a triumph or an achievement. She just would have been okay. Yeah. She wanted to be in Russia. So she went to Russia and then you just turn the page and go on to the next thing. So in thinking about that this week, that's what struck me about her story. That it's impressive and it's noteworthy, but it stops short, at least for me, of being inspiring because it didn't seem to mean something to her in the way that these others did. I think if to be inspired by someone, you have to sort of participate vicariously in their own satisfaction at having done it. You know what I mean? And she didn't take any satisfaction in it.

It was just a task that she was doing. I see it as almost more inspiring because it wasn't arbitrary. Like pushing a wheelbarrow around the U.S., that's almost sort of an arbitrary, you know, if you just come up with, I'm going to count toothpicks until I get to 100,000, that's just an arbitrary task without meaning. But I think hers has this personal meaning for her in that, you know, she decided she was going to get home no matter what, and maybe she did. Maybe she did.

The question everyone has about this, her story is so sort of iconic and mysterious that everyone wants to know whether she actually made it. Novels have been written about her. Movies have been made. There's even an opera about her story. And the short answer is no one knows. We know she got as far as Nome, Alaska and started marching west toward the Bering Strait, but no one knows if she actually made it across.

The best sort of guess we maybe have at that comes from Susan Smith Josephine wrote a monograph about her in 2011 and she says that in 1972 True West magazine published an article about her and that brought a letter from a man named Arthur Elmore in Lincoln, California. Elmore had grown up in western Alaska across the Bering Strait from Russia and had a friend from that area of Russia who had a childhood memory that in the autumn of 1930, he was in Russia on an errand for his mother and had noticed these three officials questioning a woman who was accompanied by three Eskimos. The letter goes, He remembered the woman telling the officials she had come from America

where she said she had been unable to make a living or make friends. She said she had had to walk, quote, a terrible long way because no one would lift as much as a finger to help me in any way because they didn't want to or couldn't understand my feelings. I tried to make friends at first, but everyone wanted no part of me as a foreigner, and that so deeply hurt me I couldn't bear it,

and so I began to walk. I knew it was far and it would be hard, but I had to do it even if no one understood and I did it so that's the childhood memory of a friend of a magazine letter writer it's about as tenuous a source as you can get and who knows if it's true or whether it even actually happened but from having read as much as I could about Lillian I tend to think it if that actually happened that woman wasn't her because she sounds satisfied, you know proud of having accomplished something that she said to do and I don't have the sense that Lillian

would have done that. She didn't seem to take any sense of accomplishment out of what she was doing it was just something she said. I guess it's hard to know that because that was sort of a hearsay, sort of somebody remembered somebody else having said so you don't know what the tone exactly would have been. I think I prefer to think it was her, and she did it.

I think a lot of people do. I hope she did make it. I mean, she put in 6,000 miles. She deserved to get there, certainly. I hope she did. I used to be impressed by accounts of long walks like this. You read about them sort of abstractly, and I would think, I couldn't possibly do such a thing as walk all the way across the country.

But it turns out, actually actually that perhaps I have. Oh, perhaps we both have, right? Thanks to kind of a cool website at exercise.lbl.gov, which lets you virtually walk across the contiguous United States. It's plotted out the Transamerica Trail, which is sort of this back roads trail that was developed for bicyclists to go from Virginia on the East Coast all the way over to Oregon on the West Coast. Yeah. A little more than 4,000 miles. And the site lets you sort of virtually travel across the Transamerica Trail if you want to see if you can make it across the whole U.S. yourself. It was developed by the Lawrence Berkeley Labs, which is interesting in itself. For some research, they were doing, I guess, on exercise. Yeah, and then they decided

to make the site available to the general public, basically hoping to keep people more active or encourage people to be more active. And we've both done it. Yeah, we have both done it. Basically, what you do is you put in the miles that you walk or run or bicycle depending on your preference and every time you put in your new miles like if you did four miles today you put them in it shows you along a map of exactly where you would be in the country but it also shows you a photograph of what it would look like if you were there yeah some poor soul drove apparently across the whole United States. And the trail isn't, it's not just an interstate.

They deliberately chose the Transamerica Trail since it's frequented by bicyclists. These are all relatively small roads, and a lot of them are very scenic. So someone drove along this whole 4,000-mile trail and stopped and took a photograph every quarter mile, if you can believe that. So when you're crossing the country virtually, even if you've only, you know, if you want to go half a mile. Yeah, you get to see a new photo. You get a new photo of where you are virtually on this U.S. map. It is very motivating.

I found it very motivating to encourage you to be a little more active so you can sort of see your little dot move across the map, across the country. And every time you make it across a state border, you get a congratulatory email, you know, congratulations, you've now crossed into Idaho. Which is, it is surprisingly motivating. I was running, I was logging the miles I spent running, and Sharon was doing it walking. And she actually beat me because she walks more miles in a day than I run.

But yeah, those state lines, it doesn't sound like much, but it really is motivating to know you've crossed. Well, it's a feeling of progress, yeah. It's like, and you tell people, people would ask me, like, what state lines, it doesn't sound like much, but it really is motivating to know you've crossed. Well, it's a feeling of progress, yeah. It's like, and you tell people, people would ask me, like, what state are you in now? And I would tell them, well, you know, I'm in Kansas, you know. The other thing it teaches you is how big the western states are. Because in the beginning, you're going from, I think it's, what, Virginia into Kentucky and on from there. And you're making pretty good progress because you're crossing state lines pretty frequently.

But once you cross the Mississippi into Kansas, Kansas just goes on forever. Kansas went on forever. And Wyoming, you do sort of this diagonal from the lower corner up to the diagonal top corner. And that took forever. And unfortunately, the photographs don't all seem very different from each other during certain segments there. So it's like you walk four miles and it's like, wow, that looked like four miles ago. But anyway, this is free. Your tax dollars are paying for it. So it's like you walk four miles and it's like, wow, that looked like four miles ago. But anyway, this is free. It's your tax dollars paying for it.

And it's available now to anyone who wants to use it. So if you're looking for some way to motivate yourself to walk or run or bike, we'd recommend it. We'll have a link to our posts about extreme pedestrians and to the Transamerica site in our show notes at blog.futilitycloset.com. Okay, I have a sheepdog update, or a dog update, I suppose. We still don't know if they're sheepdogs.

In the last episode, we've been talking about the role of dogs and balloons as messengers during the siege of Paris. During the Franco-Prussian War, the Prussian army surrounded Paris in 1870 and cut off all communication with the rest of France. And they were using all kinds of clever expedients to get around this, the people of Paris. And one of those was the so-called pigeon post, where they would use balloons to float out of Paris carrying homing pigeons. And that way, the people outside the city had a way to communicate with them. They could just tie a message, usually microfilm, to the leg of a pigeon and let it go.

And since it's a homing pigeon, it would fly back into Paris. And I had read passing references that the same thing had been tried with dogs, which seemed very unlikely to me. And I was asking if anyone had heard about that. But I've done some research further this week at UNC and found out that it actually is true. This really did happen. There was a man named Hurel, who I mentioned last week, who, it turns out, even before the war, was a trainer of dogs, and he would each day take his dogs. He lived in Paris, but he would take his five dogs out of Paris to the northwest where they would herd cattle during the day.

And at the end of the day, he would take a train back into town and had trained the dogs to just find their way back to the city. So it occurred to him when this pigeon post business started that essentially he had trained homing dogs. So instead of using homing pigeons, they could accomplish the same thing with dogs. They take them out of the city by balloon in this case, and then if someone had information to communicate back to Paris, they could put a piece of microfilm into the collar of one of these dogs and release it,

and the dog was trained now to find its way back to the city. So he proposed this to the director of the Paris post office who went for it. So actually, we have the details. He left Paris in a balloon in the early hours of January 13th, 1871, with five dogs in sacks. They put them in sacks to keep them from causing some kind of commotion during the flight. And hours later, they got safely over the heads of the besieging Prussians and came down southwest of town, actually, as it happens. If you're in a balloon, you go where the wind takes you. But they got out safely.

His plan was to release the dogs 25 to 30 miles from Paris, and they did that. But that's where things kind of fell apart. And sieges are just awful in general. This siege, the siege of Paris lasted for four months. An even worse one is the siege of Leningrad in World War II, which lasted for two years. We've been talking about how a siege prevents people from communicating, but even worse than that, it stops food from getting into the city.

So civilization starts to fall apart pretty quickly. If the siege of Paris is famous for anything, it's famous for the citizens of Paris eating zoo animals, which happened pretty quickly as they became desperate for food. I have a copy of a Christmas menu from about three months into the siege, which includes dishes like elephant consomme, bear ribs, kangaroo stew, stuffed donkey's head. And there's a British journalist named Henry Labouchere who happened to be in Paris when the siege was laid, and he kept a careful diary of his experiences there, which is a great book. But at one point, he seemed willing to eat anything, or he was very hungry.

And so he would eat a lot of these animals and carefully record his impressions of each one of them. So he said, horse, for example, eaten in the place of beef, a little sweeter, but in other respects, much like it. Cat, he said, is something between rabbit and squirrel with a flavor all its own. Donkey, he said, is delicious, in color like mutton, firm and savory. Kittens, he's not kidding, he ate kittens, either smothered in onions or in a ragu, they are excellent. Rat is excellent, he says it's something between frog and rabbit, and the only thing that seemed to give him any qualms at all is spaniel.

He said it's something like lamb, he said, but I felt like a cannibal. Oh, so he draws the line at dogs specifically. Right, he'll eat kittens, but he doesn't like eating dogs. So he wrote, So, by Christmas, pretty much anything on four legs was getting eaten in Paris, and this balloon went up in January. So fortunately, the engineers of this whole dog experiment saw that that would be a problem, that if this happy, well-fed dog came trotting into the town,

he could wind up in a stew pot before they could retrieve him. So the only way they could think to avoid that would be to publish in the newspaper for other Parisians saying, look, if a dog shows up, don't eat him. He's carrying a message that we need to retrieve. But that was published in a newspaper, and because it was published, the Prussians got wind of it, and so they were on the lookout for incoming dogs. This is a very dramatic story. So the bottom line is the dogs never arrived if they got close to paris they

were intercepted by the prussians they are either killed or captured or who knows they may have spent some happy life in germany as adopted dogs somewhere but they never did make it back to paris um and it just i mean if anything tells you how horrible the siege was. The fact that you have to warn people if you see dogs on the street, don't eat them. Yeah. The whole thing is kind of an awful story. But the thing is, it turns out this thing with the dogs is true. I think that was, I think there were, from what I can tell, there were only two instances of people trying this with dogs. The one I just talked about was the biggest one.

There was another man who tried the same thing with the same idea with a single dog earlier, and he was actually shot down. That was the only balloon in the whole stage that was actually shot out of the sky. I don't know for sure what happened to that dog, but I imagine it was shot. Oh, so we don't know what happened to any of the dogs. Okay. No. So we can imagine something more hopeful than that they were killed by Prussians. If anyone's interested, I'm getting this from a book, a 1965 book by John Fisher called Airlift 1870,

which mentions the dogs which spent a lot of time. It's all about mostly the pigeon post and about all these balloons and these dramatic happenings involving balloons during the siege of Paris. The other thing that's impressive is that despite all this chaos and misery in Paris at the time, they kept very careful records of the balloons that went up, including who the passengers were, who the pilot was, how long the flight time was, how many pounds of mail each was carrying. I mean, it's impressive. Someone was really doing a careful job there. So that's how I know so many details finally about Hurel's flight is that they're recorded in those records.

I found them in a book by Frederick Luther called Microfilm, a history from 1959. But I think in other records of the siege of Paris, you can find them too, that there are whole careful records of all the balloons that went up and what happened to them. We'll have an image of the Christmas menu and a link to Henri Labouchere's diary in our show notes. Henry LaBouchere's diary in our show notes. For some time now, I've been interested in an odd pattern in the life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the author of Kublai Khan and the Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The date October 4th seems to have been important to him in some odd way, but I can't find any record that he ever articulated what it was.

But he would arrange to have significant events in his life take place on that date whenever he could. He married his wife on October 4th, 1795. He and William Wordsworth published The Lyrical Ballads, which is a landmark book in the history of English literature. It marks the start of the Romantic movement. That was originally published in 1798 on September 18th, but they transferred it to another firm, and Coleridge arranged for it to come out on October 4th. He, in 1800, arranged to read to Wordsworth his unfinished poem Christabel. He arranged to have that specifically happen,

that conversation happen on October 4th. He persuaded Wordsworth himself to get married on October 4th, and persuaded Wordsworth himself to get married on October 4th and he published the poem Dejection on that same day, on Wordsworth's wedding day. So this comes up over and over, that date. Far too much to be coincidence. He arranges to have significant publications

occur on that date and other events in his life with his friends and his wedding and so forth. But as I say, I can't find any record of what it meant to him. The best I can find is that there are two events in his childhood, traumatic events, that both took place by coincidence on that date. And I figure there must be a link there, but I can't find anyone explicitly. The first one was a fight with his brother, Frank, that took place when Coleridge was seven years old. This was in 1779. Coleridge had asked their mother to prepare some cheese for him to toast, and Frank had come into the room and cut up the cheese, and there was a violent quarrel between them where

Samuel took up a knife, actually, and went after him, and their mother separated them, and Samuel ran out of the house and down to the river that ran through their village and spent the whole night there, a stormy night that was just awful for him, while his mother was beside herself and called out the whole village to search for him. He spent the whole night there, finally fell asleep, but practically froze to death. He said, I saw the shepherds and workmen at a distance and cried, but so faintly that it was impossible to hear me thirty yards off. And there I might have lain and died, for now I was almost given over.

According to his account, it was only just by chance that a friend of the family who was out searching for him came back one last time, and spotted him there. By good luck, Sir Stafford Northcote, who had been out all night, resolved to make one other trial, and came so near that he heard my crying. He carried me in his arms for near a quarter of a mile when we met my father and Sir Stafford's servant. I remember and never shall forget my father's face as he looked upon me while I lay in the servant's arms, so calm and the tears stealing down his face. So he remembered that for the rest of his life,

that image of sort of his extremity and being down by the river in the darkness and the feelings that attended it show up in his work over and over down by the river in the darkness and the feelings that attended it show up in his work over and over. He told his friends about it. He wrote the episode up in his notebooks. As late as 24 years afterwards, um, during that night, he'd heard some calves lowing across the river and even the sound stayed with him. One summer evening, 24 years after this had happened, one of his children was asleep and he, and he thought he heard the child moaning in his sleep, uh, and wrote, I listened anxiously, found it was a calf bellowing, instantly came on my mind that night. I slept out at Ottery and the calf in the field

across the river whose lowing had so deeply impressed me. So the whole incident like really went deep for him. Really scarred him him i think is the word uh that's one when he was seven years old two years later his father died quite suddenly and unexpectedly so that's even worse his father had just returned from putting frank uh into service as a cabin boy with the navy and came home said he didn't feel well lay down and died which shocked and you know and that was october 4th too it the same date. So both those events happened just by coincidence on October 4th, his running away and spending a night by the river and then his father dying. So that's more than enough to really cause some traumatic memories and associations with that date for anyone.

Yeah, but then you would think you'd want to avoid the date, not specifically arrange things to happen on it, like your wedding. That's the puzzle. You could pick any date for your wedding. Why would you choose that one? The one that's by far the most painful date of your, of your childhood, of your life, probably to that point. That's the part that doesn't make sense to me. It has a feeling of placating or redeeming, or, you know, it had some strong personal significance to him, but what I can't, I can find writers who acknowledge the pattern, who say there's something going on with October 4th and Samuel Coleridge, but no one seems to know, at least in my research so far, I can't find anyone who can pinpoint what it was. He doesn't seem ever to have put it into words, or at least not words that he shared with anyone else.

So I'm still digging on that. There's a couple sources I'm going to actually check this week. So if I get anywhere, I'll certainly let you know. But if there's anyone out there who knows the answer to this, what the significance of October 4th was to Samuel Coleridge, please write in because we'd love to know. Now for the weekly challenge. Each week, we give you a creative challenge where you can match your wits with other listeners. Last week's challenge required you to take the name of any place and invent a useful definition for it. We were inspired for this one by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd's 1983 book, The Meaning of Lith, which they described as a

dictionary of things that there aren't any words for yet. For example, they defined greely as someone who continually annoys you by continually apologizing for annoying you. We had several great entries this week, and here were some of our favorites. David E. sent in, Kanzori, the indecision one experiences when having to choose between two or more cues, not knowing which will be the fastest, and Okmulgi, the face one makes once they realize their choice in cue was the wrong one. Megan gave us Peekskill, the small section of hair that is not quite long enough to stay tucked behind one's ear. And Chattanooga, the foil flap that remains attached to a blister packet once the pill has been removed.

Jim sent in Oogadoogoo, a failed attempt to translate baby talk into one's native tongue. And Yannou sent in Wysocia, the scientific term for train wreck syndrome, in which a person continues to watch an event despite wishing to stop. Alvin gave us Boise, to feel like you are forgetting something, but not to be able to figure out what it is you are actually forgetting. And Sacramento, a useless party favor given out during weddings that people feel guilty about throwing away. I'd have to say all of these are very useful definitions that I certainly could use in real life. These are all great entries, and thanks to everyone for sending them in. I think I'm going to go with Boise just because that's such a familiar feeling to me, standing in a doorway somewhere and trying to remember why I came into the room.

So, Alvin, that's you. Congratulations. If you can send me your mailing address, I'll send you a copy of the Futility Closet book. This week's challenge was inspired by another New York magazine competition from 40 years ago. This one asked for what they called near misses. For example, Fiddler on the Porch, Lieutenant Kangaroo, Dressed to the eights? Well, if it isn't Dr. Livingston, the anti-penultimate Mohican, the Green Bay shipping clerks, and who is that bell ringing for, anyway? Send your entries to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com or post them in the show notes at blog.futilitycloset.com.

The winner will receive a copy of the book, Futility Closet, an idler's miscellany of compendious amusements, which contains hundreds of boredom-killing curiosities, oddities, and puzzles. Also, we're, I'm maybe just making this up, we're concerned about the timing of these things. Because this is a weekly podcast, we release each episode on Monday, but that means we have to start recording the next one around Friday. And we're realizing that only gives you about three or four days to discover the podcast,

listen to it, think about the challenge, come up with an entry and make it. And I think maybe that's not a reasonable amount of time. Maybe it's fine. I don't know. But if you have an opinion about that or another suggestion about how we might handle it, please write in. We just want to make sure that you have enough time, the people who are interested, to actually participate. That's it for this episode. You can see our show notes at blog.futilitycloset.com, where you can leave comments or feedback, ask questions, and see the links and images mentioned in today's episode. You can also email us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. If you enjoy Futility Closet, you can find the book Thank you. Amazon, or iTunes, or click the donate button on the sidebar of the website. Our music was written and produced by Doug Ross. Futility

Closet is a member of the Boing Boing family of podcasts. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.