Futility Closet - 005-Mailing People, Alien Shorthand, and Benjamin Franklin

Episode Date: April 14, 2014

Henry Brown found a unique way to escape slavery: He mailed himself to Pennsylvania. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll accompany Brown on his perilous 1849 journey from Richmond to Philadelphia, follow a 5-year-old Idaho girl who was mailed to her grandparents in 1914, and delve deeper into a mysterious lion sighting in Illinois in 1917.We'll also decode a 200-year-old message enciphered by Benjamin Franklin, examine an engraved ball reputed to have fallen out of the Georgia sky in 1887, and present 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 5. 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 tell the story of a Virginia slave who mailed himself to freedom in 1849, revisit a 1917 lion sighting in central Illinois,

solve a 200-year-old cipher set by Benjamin Franklin, and present the next Futility Closet challenge. A special note, for this week only, our book, Futility Closet, an idler's miscellany of compendious amusements, is on sale. The print book is $9.99 and the e-book is $4.99. The book presents the same types of historical oddities that we've been covering in these shows, as well as wordplay, puzzles, paradoxes, and other bite-sized amusements and conundrums. Look for it on Amazon and iTunes.

paradoxes, and other bite-sized amusements and conundrums. Look for it on Amazon and iTunes. In our listener mail this week, James Keyline wrote in about our feature last week about the rash of strange airship sightings that were seen over the western United States in 1896 and 1897. To point out that one thing that may have disposed people to imagine that such things were at least possibly floating in the air above them was the fiction of the time, such as Jules Verne's novel Clipper of the Clouds, which came out in 1887. Books such as that suggested that lighter-than-air dirigibles were being developed, and it was only a matter of time before they would see one themselves. James writes, I found the airship sighting articles interesting because it is sandwiched between the Verne story and the first practical dirigibles by men like Count von Zeppelin

and Alberto Santos de Montt. It is also amid the period when dime novels frequently featured airships of one type or another. Even if people did not read the stories, they might see one of the exciting covers in the cigar store or newsstand they might visit. That's a good point. People were reading fiction at the time,

and that sort of treated a lot of these things, too, so that helps to explain why they were maybe inclined to see these things, or imagine they saw them. James also sent, I hadn't seen this before, a hoax, I think it's a hoax, from the Chicago Tribune in 1887 from someone who claimed to have seen a metal ball that fell out of the sky bearing

graven characters. Supposedly this happened in Clayton, Georgia. Dr. Sires was driving home in the evening when, quote, my eyes were dazzled by a brilliant white flash resembling a lightning stroke and immediately following came a sharp hiss as of escaping steam. He says he investigated and found a ball buried five feet in the ground. He says instead of a rough mass of meteoric iron, there appeared a smooth, perfect sphere of steel blue metal with polished surface and engraved with pictures and writings.

There upon the surface of the strange ball was a deeply graven circle within which was a four-pointed star, a representation of a bird reptile resembling in a measure our extinct Archaeopteryx, and a great number of smaller figures resembling those used in shorthand. He said he had it examined by an analytical chemist who declared it a new element. And he explained this by saying that perhaps a Lunarian gunner had fired the ball from Mars or Venus and suggested that we could reply using a gun 130 feet long and strong enough to hold a charge of 30 pounds of dynamite and hold a very violent conversation with the Martians that way.

I don't know any more about this. He says at the end of the story, the ball is now in the possession of Dr. Sires, but will be sent to the Smithsonian Institution in a short time when an official report will be made. And needless to say, nothing was ever heard of it again. So thanks, James, for sending that in. In response to our story last week about the butler who claimed to be attacked by a lion in 1917 in central Illinois, Emily asked, perhaps the lion on the Illinois estate is just a mountain lion, not nearly as far-fetched as an African lion, fully capable of mauling someone out picking flowers. That was a great question, Emily, because I had the same one myself after thinking about the story. You know, maybe it was a mountain

lion. That would make a lot of sense. And actually, one source does cite the butler as specifically saying it was an African lion. But you have to wonder how familiar this butler was with African lions to be so sure of himself, you know, that it was an African lion. So I looked into this some, and it turns out that mountain lions are indigenous to the entire contiguous United States. But by the early 20th century, they were pretty much eliminated from the Midwest. So it's not really likely that they would have been found in Illinois. And also, it was the director of the Lincoln Park Zoo who suggested that it was possibly a goat gone wild. Yeah, that's the key, I think. Or maybe even just a dog. So I would think if there were mountain lions in the area, the director of the zoo would have suggested a mountain lion over a

goat. But that's just my speculation. When I was researching this, that was the part that sticks in my head. The one thing I couldn't find is the original story where the butler described what he said he encountered there's a lot of news stories you can find about all the hysteria that followed but it seems to me the key to the story is what the butler thought he saw uh and i haven't been able to find the story that covers that because as you say that this cyrus devry was the first director of the lincoln park zoo suggested in the story reread that it there was the possibility that it was a goat. And that means that the butler's description was, you know, broad enough to admit that. He wasn't

saying, he didn't describe the lion so specifically. I don't know how many descriptions of anything could be either a lion or a goat. Right. So it really makes me wonder exactly what the butler did say he saw. And I'm going to keep chasing that down. If I get anywhere, I'll let you know. It is the case that there have been occasional reports of mountain lion sightings in illinois and indiana in recent years which might make somebody think well there really are mountain lions in these areas so that could be what attacked the butler but apparently that is actually a more recent phenomenon only from the last few years. So apparently it's kind of unlikely that in 1917 there was a mountain lion in central Illinois. It's a good guess, but it doesn't seem a really strong possibility. I'll keep digging into it and see if I can find out exactly what the butler said,

and I'll include a link to the alien ball story in the show notes. 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. Henry Box Brown, in nine years of doing this job, this is one of my all-time favorite stories, the story of one Virginia slave who mailed himself to freedom. Just the courage, imagination, resilience of one man. His name was Henry Brown, and he was a slave in Virginia. He'd passed a relatively uneventful childhood on a farm in Virginia. And then when he was a young man, his master's son ran a tobacco factory in Richmond, so he went there to work.

And he was doing relatively well. Over the span of 12 years, he'd earned enough money to marry a fellow slave, and they rented a house together and began raising a family. But one day in August 1848, he lost everything. He and his wife were owned by separate masters, and his wife's master needed money and sold her and the children one day, which was just out of the blue. Henry was at work one day, and word came that his wife and their children, they had three children and she was pregnant with a fourth, had all been sold. And the master had the right to do that. So all Henry could do, he went into town and saw them being marched out, chained together in this procession of slaves.

One of his children recognized him. And all he could do was walk along with him, holding his wife's hand for four miles, and finally just had to say goodbye to her, and his whole family left. So he said, thereafter, he said, thoughts of freeing myself stayed in his mind because he felt he'd lost everything. He said, those reasons which often deter the slave from attempting escape no longer existed in reference to me for my family were gone. He, through his church, had gotten in contact with some white men who were sympathetic to the abolitionist cause, who wanted to help him escape slavery. But they debated this for a while and just couldn't come up with a plan, some way to get him out and up north where he could be free. But one day, Henry was at work in the tobacco factory,

and he was praying about this, and said, there darted into my mind these words, go and get a box and put yourself in it. So it seems pretty clear that the idea was his. He came up with the idea of shutting himself up in a box and getting conveyed as dry goods to a free state. And he, he explained this plan to his friends, uh, and they had misgivings about it because it's so terribly dangerous. They thought one of his friends. And they had misgivings about it because it's so terribly dangerous. They thought one of his friends, Samuel Smith, said he did not think I could live in a box for so long a time as would be necessary to convey me to Philadelphia. Basically, they're in Richmond, Virginia, which is roughly in the middle of the state of Virginia. And so if they're going to undertake this,

they have to get him up into Pennsylvania, which is a free state. And in 1849, when they're going to try this, the way to do that is to take a train to north to the Potomac River, take a steamboat up from there to Washington, D.C., and take a train from D.C. through Baltimore and up into Pennsylvania. It's about 275 miles, and if everything goes perfectly, it'll take 24 hours, which is a long time to be shut up in a box. And things almost certainly won't go perfectly. hours, which is a long time to be shut up in a box. And things almost certainly won't go perfectly. If he's caught or discovered, which is

entirely possible, he'd get a lashing and be sold down south and I think likely be made, they'd make a severe example of him to dissuade other slaves from getting the same idea. But they just thought, Samuel Smith thought it was entirely likely he wouldn't survive at all.

Uh, but Brown persisted. He said, I'd already made up my mind. He just felt there was, there was nothing in his old life to live for. And he was determined to be free. Maybe he felt like he had nothing left to lose. Yeah. I mean, it's terribly sad story, but that seems to be how he felt. So, uh, his white friend, Samuel Smith, traveled up to Philadelphia.

There was an abolitionist office there. The Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society had an office in Philadelphia. And so he traveled there and put the idea to them, said, if we undertake this and send a box up here, can we direct it to you? Will you agree to receive it on your end? up here. Can we direct it to you? Will you agree to receive it on your end? And the man they were talking to there, James McKim, agreed to it, but had his own misgivings afterwards. He too thought that it's very likely that he wouldn't survive the trip or might get discovered. Also, they had a further concern, which is that if he didn't survive, on top of the tragedy of his death, they would then have accepted shipment of a dead body,

basically, of a runaway slave that they then have to contact the Pennsylvania coroner and would be this gigantic scandal that had been delivered to an abolitionist office in Philadelphia. So it was that also. But Henry was just adamant. I'm getting a lot of this from Jeffrey Ruggles' 2003 biography, The Unboxing of Henry Brown. And Ruggles found, actually, that there's some precedent for this, that Henry Brown was not the first to think of escaping by box. Four years earlier, in 1845, on a wharf on the Mississippi River, someone had started crying out from inside a box, asking to be let out.

And that turned out to be a slave who had hoped to be taken upriver to Cincinnati and then delivered eventually up north into Canada, which is a much longer trip. And he didn't even get off the wharf. It was said when the box was opened, the slave emerged, quote, nearly dead with suffocation and steaming like the escape pipe of a steamboat. The slave said he would have died in a very short time if he'd not been extricated. So his friends were very sympathetic and wanted to help Henry reach freedom, but they just thought this was a very dangerous way to go about it. Very risky, yeah.

But he was adamant. So they agreed to help him with this. There were two steps of preparation that they had to do before he could be sent. The first was to actually get a box made. And accounts may differ about the size of the box, but it was quite small. It was three feet by two and a half by two, roughly. Henry Brown was five foot eight and weighed 200 pounds. And he's going to spend at least 24 hours in this box.

That's one. So they had the box made and ready. The second is he's expected to be at work every day at this tobacco factory, and he can't just skip work. So he has to come up with some excuse so that he won't be missed there and can be safely out of the area before anyone suspects something is going on. His plan for accomplishing that was to put a little bit of what was called oil of vitriol, which is sulfuric acid, on his hand to injure himself badly enough that he could be excused from work.

And unfortunately, he poured more of it on his hand than he intended to, and he says the hand was soon eaten through to the bone. So he's very badly injured now. But his supervisor excuses him from work that Friday, so he accomplishes that at least. So now they have everything in place. He just has to go through with this. So on Friday, March 23rd, 1849, he and his friends met at 4 a.m. And he gets into the box. He says, I laid me down in my darkened home of three feet by two,

and like one about to be guillotined, resigned myself to my fate. And his friends nailed the lid on the box and then wrapped it with five hoops of hickory wood, which is an important point because that means from this point on, he can't get out of the box on his own. Before, possibly, he could maybe have kicked his way out if he had to, but now he can't. So if, God forbid, the box is forgotten on a platform or drops off a boat or something, he's finished. I mean, he's really helpless from this point on. So the Postal Service exists at this point, but they won't have a parcel service until 1912. So they're basically contracting with a private company to take him up to Philadelphia. So the first step of this journey is to take him to the office

where they just sign the contracts to get this on its way. And as soon as he gets to the office, he's immediately turned upside down. His friends had written, after they had nailed the lid on the box, they had marked on it, this side up with care, but apparently they'd done this very indistinctly. Oh, no. So Henry's going to spend a lot of this trip upside down, which is... Oh, no.

I mean, it would have been bad enough, but this makes it much, much worse for him. So he's turned upside down while someone nails something to the end of the box and they take him by wagon to the first leg of the journey, which is this trip by train from Richmond up to the Potomac river. And fortunately they load them on the train right side up, but that's, so now he's in the box. He's got to spend four hours in the box on the way up to the river. He has only four things with him. He has some crackers, which he decides not to eat because he thinks they'll make him thirsty. He has half a gallon of water.

He has a gimlet, which is a little pointed drilling tool that he thought he might need in order to let holes into the box, which turns out to be very smart. And he has his hat. So he drills four holes in the box. The biggest problem almost immediately is the box gets very warm inside it's very poorly ventilated and he's a big man so he drills holes in the box and he bathes his face with water and then fans himself with a hat and he fans himself practically this whole trip because his biggest enemy is uh just the heat

inside the box so anyway he gets to the potomac so the first leg is down, he gets to the Potomac. So the first leg is down. Now he has to get transferred to a steamboat and taken up to Washington, which is the next leg. And this is worse because he's on the steamboat. This is going to take four more hours. And again, he's put down upside down. And the problem now is that he's on the deck of the steamboat and surrounded by passengers, just regular people who are going to be going upriver to Washington. So he's in a lot of pain and a lot of distress, but he can't afford to move or make any sound for fear of being discovered. And four hours is four hours. He says in the narrative that he published afterward about this, he says,

In this dreadful position, I remained the space of about an hour and a half, it seemed to me, when I began to feel of my eyes and head and found to my dismay that my eyes were almost swollen out of their sockets. Another half hour goes by, he says, attempting again to lift my hands to my face, but I found I was not able to move them. A cold sweat now covered me from head to foot. Every moment I expected to feel the blood flowing over me, which had burst from my veins. Oh, wow. me from head to foot every moment i expected to feel the blood flowing over me which had burst from my veins oh wow so he's lying there and he hears he can hear indistinctly people talking outside the box he hears two men in conversation one of them said they'd been in the boat for two hours and had traveled 20 miles and proposed they sit down so fortunately he says they suited the action to the word and turned the box over containing my soul and body thus delivering

me from the power of the grim messenger of death so there's one bit of good fortune. But he still has to be very quiet because they're right there sitting on the box and he can't afford to be discovered. Anyway, they do make it successfully to Washington, D.C. around 4 p.m. So he's been in the box now for about eight hours. And the next leg is to take him by train from D.C. up to Baltimore. And for that, they have to put him on a wagon and transfer him to a railroad depot to go up. And now things get even worse because the wagon driver takes this 200-pound box,

arrives at the railroad depot to get him loaded onto the train, and asks for help because the box is heavy. And Brown writes, Someone answered him to the effect that he might throw it off. But, says the driver, it is marked this side up with care. The other answered him that it did not matter if he broke all that was in it. The railway company were able enough to pay for it. So the porter does this.

He either throws it or drops it off the wagon, quote, with violence to the ground. And it rolled down a small hill, turning over two or three times. Brown wrote that it landed, quote, on the end where my head was. I could hear my neck give a crack as if it had been snapped asunder and I was knocked completely insensible. So he's knocked out, but he manages to avoid making a sound that anyone hears, so he's not discovered.

But he's unconscious. He comes to in time to hear the porter say that there's no room for the box on the train and that they'll have to leave it over for another day, which is a death sentence. I mean, he can't last a whole day in this box. So Henry prayed. He says, put it into the hearts of these men to find a way to send this box forward.

And you heard a man's voice say, that box must go on. It's the express mail. The train was committed to take it because they'd been contracted, fortunately. So they loaded it onto the freight car. But again, he's upside down now. But fortunately, the train traveled only half an hour and then stopped to take on more baggage, and they righted the box. So that was only briefly terrible. So he's most of the way there now.

The train now travels for 37 miles from Washington to Baltimore, and they transfer it to another rail line. He's getting close to Pennsylvania now, which is where he needs to be. Two hours out of Baltimore, it crosses the Susquehanna River on a barge. two hours out of Baltimore, it crosses the Susquehanna River on a barge. And at this point in his narrative, when he's recounting this, he doesn't describe much of this leg of the journey.

It's thought that he was either asleep or just so out of it from all the stress and pain and agony that he wasn't really aware of what was happening to him. But he becomes aware gradually. He hears a voice call out, we're in port and at Philadelphia. So now he's in Pennsylvania, he's in Philadelphia. He knows he's in a free state, but he's trapped in this box still at this point

and doesn't know exactly where he is or who's handling the box. The abolitionists who had agreed to receive the box sent a man to retrieve it. And there's this beautiful scene in the abolitionist's office where they bring the box in and sit it down on the floor. This is about 6 a.m. The sun's just coming up.

There's nobody outside. There's just a handful of abolitionists in this box on the floor. James McKim, who, remember, was the guy who was terrified that he wouldn't survive and thinks he may have just accepted shipment of a coffin, knocks nervously on the box and says, All right, and Brown calls out, all right, sir. McKim wrote, I never felt happier in life, hardly. It was an immense burden off

my mind. So the Abolish cut away the hoops, and McKim wrote, we opened the box and up rose with a face radiant with joy and gratitude, one of the finest looking men you ever saw in your life. Brown extended his hand and said, good morning, gentlemen, which is just the best thing you can say coming out of a box. And McKim lost his breath but shortly said,

you are the greatest man in America. And then there's a great amount of rejoicing. McKim said, then hadn't we a time of congratulations and mutual rejoicing? I wish all the world could have witnessed the scene of opening that box. McKim took him home and gave him a bath and some refreshment. He said, brown's happiness seems greater than he could express brown had actually picked out a hymn to sing if he succeeded in going and he sang it then and mckim said it was exceedingly affecting he has a fine voice it

was impossible to listen to him without tears so he made it he went on to some fame for this he wrote a narrative of his adventures that was ghostwritten by one of the abolitionists, and he actually went on a lecture tour telling this story and brought the box with him. He would leap out of the box at the climactic moment of the narrative. And he did that throughout the northern U.S. When the Fugitive Slave Act was passed in 1850,

that would have given his former master the right to come up and reclaim him, so he had to flee to England. But he did the same thing there. He went touring and sort of permitted the abolitionist cause and brought the box with him. So the whole thing was a great success and a testament to his courage and determination. If anything, the story was too widely publicized. Frederick Douglass, who was glad to see any slave escape slavery, wrote, had not Henry Box Brown and his friends attracted slaveholding attention to the manner of his escape, we might have had a thousand Box Browns per annum.

So he spent the rest of his days a free man, and he actually took the nickname Box and was known by that for the rest of his life. If you want to know any more about this, the best source I've found is this biography by Jeffrey Ruggles called The Unboxing of Henry Brown. Also, I have a lithograph by Samuel Rouse, which I'll put in the show notes, which shows that moment in the abolitionist's office when he's emerging from the box, which is terrific. So I'll put that in the show notes. Well, in a similar but much less serious vein, we also ran a post in 2008 about little five-year-old Mae Pearsdorf who wanted to visit her grandparents in 1914. And her parents didn't have enough money for a railway ticket for her to do this,

so they decided to mail her to her grandparents. I don't know if they'd heard about Henry Box Brown or got the idea on their own, but they brought her to a post office in Grangerville, Idaho, and proposed trying to mail her parcel post to Lewiston, about 75 miles away. They found her to be just under the 50-pound weight limit, so the postmaster decided to class Little May as a baby chick, and he stuck 53 cents in stamps onto her coat, and then they put her into a train's mail compartment.

And shipped her. And, you know, shipped her with the mail to Lewiston, where a mail clerk took her safely to her grandparents' house. Could I do that now, then? We can save a lot of money. Right. No. The post office outlawed the mailing of human beings shortly after May's story became public,

so please do not try this at home yourself. We'll have a link to our posts about Henry Brown and May Pearsdorf in the show notes at blog.futilitycloset.com. Back in 2008, I had published an item on Futility Closet called Who Can Read Franklin's Cipher? I had found it in Henry Williams' 1903 book, A Book of Curious Facts. And in it, he's quoting Eliot Sanford in The New York World. Sanford had written, Benjamin Franklin wrote from Passy in 1781 a letter to Monsieur Dumas. He said, I have just received a blank joining blank, but this is not likely to afford blank. This has never been deciphered. The State Department at Washington has no key to it.

I submit it for the consideration of the whole world. I remember debating whether to publish that item because I couldn't immediately verify the cipher or the fact that it had still resisted decipherment. But in the end, I decided, well, I'll just go ahead and publish it and give the source and maybe someday someone will be able to shed some light on it. And now someone has. I got an email this week from Peter Dawent of Ghent University in Belgium. He's a mathematician there, and he directed me to a page by a Japanese researcher that publishes a deciphering of Franklin's message. And the story behind it is interesting. Apparently, this Dumas was a supporter of the American side in the revolution, and a friend of Franklin's,

he lived in the Netherlands, and they were corresponding, but because the revolution was going on, they needed a cipher to, you know, encode the sensitive parts of their messages. And Dumas proposed this cipher, and what he did was take a passage out of a book that he had written, which was written in French. And he and Franklin each had a copy of this same passage in French. And what they both did was go through letter by letter and just number, assign a number to each successive letter in the passage. So that way, if you needed to encipher some message, if you needed the letter

A, for example, you would just look for a letter A anywhere in this French passage. And instead of writing A in your letter, you would just write the corresponding numeral. And then the guy at the other end could just reverse that process to uncover it. That way, the thinking was that if the British managed to intercept one of these letters, they wouldn't be able to make much of it without having the original passage. So Franklin quite these letters. They wouldn't be able to make much of it without having, without knowing what the original passage was. So Franklin quite liked that, and they used it for years to correspond back and forth.

The reason that it resisted deciphering is that because the original passage was written in French, it didn't have the letter W or the letter K. And because Franklin was writing in English, he would sometimes need to use those letters. So the workaround they had hit on was that if Franklin needed a W, he would use two U's in succession. And if he needed a K, he'd use a C. And that worked fine for their purposes because they both understood that that's how it was working. But if you don't know that, it's harder to decipher the message because it's not written in strictly normal English.

It's got these oddities in the spelling. Anyway, the deciphered message reads, I have just received a new commission joining me with Mr. Adams in negotiations for peace, but this is not likely to afford me much employ at present. That was apparently appeared in a book in 1979 called The United States Diplomatic Codes and Ciphers, which I hadn't apparently found when I was looking into the cipher. But this Japanese researcher, Satoshi Tomokyo, who he tells me he works in a patent office in Japan, has a very beautifully clear explanation of the cipher itself and how it was deciphered and some of the history behind it, which is very interesting.

So thanks to Peter Dawent in Belgium and to Satoshi Tomokyo in Japan. I'll include a link to my original post about the cipher and to Satoshi's very clear and comprehensive description of its solution in the show notes. Kind of cool. After six years, we finally now know what it means. Yeah, that's great. Now for the weekly challenge. Each week, we give you a creative challenge, and you can compete for a copy of our book.

In last week's challenge, we asked you to compose an original Tom Swifty, a pun based on the attribution of dialogue, such as, Let's trap that sick bird, Tom said illegally. We got a lot of great entries this week. Unfortunately, way too many to list here. So thanks to everyone who entered, and here were a few of our favorites. Benjamin Snitkoff sent, Linus, I hated your book, The Nature of the Chemical Bonds, Tom said appallingly.

G. Lowe sent in, These are all good. Jonathan Ural gave us, No, I insist. Madam must have the first pickle, Tom said diligently. Daniel sent in, Should we really be employing criminals at our particle accelerator? Tom asked concerned. And, Anybody who starred in Notting Hill ought to be whipped, Tom said flagrantly. Trey and Lisa sent,

There's no thrill like camping, to judge so far. And we got, I think we can say, more entries into this one than any challenge we've done so far. Yeah, and we really had to struggle with which ones to read and which ones to pick as a winner. Yeah, just whittling them down to the ones we could read online was just really hard. And it's really hard for me to pick one of these for a winner. I think I'm going to go with the Notting Hill one, nothing against Hugh Grant, but I think that's a really clever pun, Flay Grantly. So, Daniel, that's you. If you can send us your mailing address, we'll send you a copy of the Futility Closet book.

For this week's challenge, I've stolen this gleefully from the Washington Post style invitational competition from way back in 2003. Take the title of any book, movie, or TV show, rearrange the words, and tell us what the new work is about. For example, Sharon came up with The Rye and the Catcher, which is about a young baseball

player struggling with alcohol addiction. We could also have called that The Wrath of Grapes. Bang the Big Theory, in which a PR firm promotes Copernicus as a heliocentric model of the solar system, which would actually be a good show. That would be a good show. The Game's Hunger, in which a video game enthusiast finds difficulty in sticking to a budget. And Journey, an unexpected hobbit, in which Bilbo Baggins replaces Steve Perry in a shakeup at Columbia Records in 1986.

Come up with your own altered title and send it to us by Friday, April 18th. We'll read our favorites on the show, and the winner will receive a copy of the Futility Closet book, where you can learn more about the astronaut who smuggled a corned beef sandwich into space, gangster Dutch Schultz's last words, and the meaning of Vespertilianize. Also, we still have a fund of ideas for future challenges, but we're openly soliciting new ones. If you have an idea for a challenge we think we could use in a future episode,

please send it in and we'll be glad to credit you for the idea. Well, 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, be sure to look for the book on amazon.com or check out the website at futilitycloset.com, where you can browse over 7,000 time-killing posts.

If you'd like to support Futility Closet, you can tell your friends about us, leave a review of the book or podcast on 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