Futility Closet - 006-Texas Camels, Zebra Stripes, and an Immortal Piano

Episode Date: April 21, 2014

The 1850s saw a strange experiment in the American West: The U.S. Army imported 70 camels for help in managing the country's suddenly enormous hinterland. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll see how the animals acquitted themselves in an unfamiliar land under inexperienced human masters.We'll also learn a surprising theory regarding the origin of zebra stripes; follow the further adventures of self-mailing ex-slave Henry "Box" Brown; ask whether a well-wrought piano can survive duty as a beehive, chicken incubator, and meat safe; 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 6. I'm Greg Ross, the creator of Futility Closet, and with me is my wife and co-host, Sharon. 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 investigate an enterprising experiment to import camels into Texas in 1855, ponder why zebras have stripes,

consider the miraculous restoration of a fabled piano, and present the next Futility Closet challenge. Just a reminder, if you enjoy the type of material covered in these podcasts, you'll want to check out our book, Futility Closet, an idler's miscellany of compendious amusements. 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. Look for it on Amazon and iTunes. In our last episode, we discussed the compelling story of Henry Brown, a slave who mailed himself to Philadelphia in 1849 to escape slavery. In our listener mail this week, Jim wrote in, One thing that seems missing from the story about Henry Brown and how he mailed himself to freedom is that you never mentioned what happened to his wife and children. Any thoughts? That's a good question. That is a good question, Jim, and thanks for writing in. It's a bit of a complicated story.

The short answer is no. It appears that he never did get reunited with his wife and children. What we've been able to find out about that is that later in his life, Henry did tell people that he had tried but had been unable to purchase his family back. And what more we know about that comes from one of Henry's early business partners who reported that he wrote a letter to the new owner of Henry's wife and children asking about the possibility of purchasing them. And this would have been fairly soon after Henry had gotten to Philadelphia.

The new owner wrote back and said that he would sell them for $1,500, which is about $46,000 in today's money. So that would have, you know, almost certainly been beyond Henry's ability to pay. And soon after that, Henry moved to England to avoid the consequences of the Fugitive Slave Act. So that was passed in 1850. So he left for England not long after getting to Philadelphia. It's unclear whether later than that he did make any future attempts to get his family back. And there were some later in his life

who were critical of him for maybe not having tried harder. But we have some reports that it appears that Henry's goal was just to make a new life for himself in England, just to sort of start over. And he did eventually actually remarry in England. He married a woman there. So that's kind of what we know about that aspect of the story. But as a postscript to the whole Henry Brown escape story, it turns out that Samuel Smith, one of the white sympathizers who had helped Henry Brown mail himself, he actually attempted to ship two more slaves in boxes from Richmond to Philadelphia in May of 1849. It's the very same thing they'd done with Henry. Right. But unfortunately, these slaves were discovered in part because of the publicity from Henry's case.

Samuel Smith was arrested and sentenced to six and a half years in prison for his role in the whole plot. And if you'll remember, in our last episode, we mentioned that Frederick Douglass had actually been kind of critical of all the publicity that Henry's case was getting. Because he was concerned that all that publicity would prevent anybody from being able to use it as a future method. And apparently he was justified in those concerns. Although, of course, it was a risky proposition at best with or without the publicity.

But certainly the publicity from Henry's case made it pretty much impossible for anybody else to do it. Yeah, that's interesting. So if you have any questions or comments about anything from our podcasts, you can send them to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com or leave a comment for us in the show notes at blog.futilitycloset.com. In the 1850s, shortly after Henry Brown mailed himself to Philadelphia, a similarly odd episode was unfolding in the American West.

The U.S. Army imported about 70 camels and dromedaries to use in the newly acquired American Southwest, and it was largely a success. People tend to look on this episode as kind of this zany footnote in American history, but it was actually quite a sensible idea given the circumstances at the time. And it was actually a great success. It was just quickly outmoded by history and by technology. region, more than half a million square miles of largely desert land, and someone discovered gold at the far end of it. So suddenly you have this huge backyard with no good way to cross it, and a lot of people who are desperate to get to California at the opposite end of it. And it fell to the U.S. Army to try to handle all this, to establish posts, to maintain the roads,

to help people who got into trouble as they struggled to cross it, and to make sure that the mail could get through. And that's a huge amount of territory for anyone to manage, and they had a lot of trouble because the horses and mules and donkeys that they were using for transportation in this huge region weren't really well adapted to it. A number of people over the years had suggested importing some camels, at least as an experiment, because they're well adapted to the country, and people had been living and working with camels in the Middle East for thousands of years. It just made a lot of sense, but because it was unfamiliar and sounded kind of wacky, Congress would just laugh whenever it was proposed.

But in 1853, Jefferson Davis, the same man who would lead the South in the Civil War, which is quickly approaching, was Secretary of War. And he had, this was sort of a pet project of his, or at least he was sympathetic with it. And he had enough clout and status that he could get Congress to listen to him. So in the end, they appropriated $30,000 and sent a ship across to the Middle East to collect 70 camels in two batches, which were delivered to Indianola, Texas, and then brought up a bit further north into central Texas, just as an experiment. And by all accounts, it went extremely well. They found that camels can withstand heat and aridity.

They could perform well in terrain that the horses couldn't begin to manage. Mountains, deserts, they could cross mud and rocks. And they're incredibly strong. A camel can carry 400 to 600 pounds, 25 to 30 miles a day. They'll eat plants that other animals won't. They can get along without much water. And their disposition was patient, gentle, and obedient. They were just, the whole thing was a marvelous success. And it was led by some very enlightened officers. This one guy I've really grown to like, a former lieutenant, Navy lieutenant named Edward Fitzgerald Beale,

led a herd of camels out west to do some surveying into Arizona. And he wrote at one point on the trail in Arizona, quote, the camels are so quiet and give so little trouble that sometimes we forget they're with us. Certainly there never was anything so patient and enduring and so little troublesome as this noble animal. They pack their heavy load of corn, of which they never tasted grain,

put up with any food offered them without complaint, and are always up with the wagons, and withal so perfectly docile and quiet that they are the admiration of the whole camp. At this time there is not a man in camp who is not delighted with them. Commonly it's said that there are two strikes against the camels in this experiment. One, they frightened horses, which is certainly a big problem, but not an insurmountable one.

And I think a lot of it was just because they were unfamiliar. Horses in the American West had never seen a camel before. Never seen a camel, didn't know what to make of them. And they weren't natural enemies. I think that could have worked itself out or we could have found some way of getting the work done without that just killing the whole experiment.

The other problem, though, was that people also found the camels unfamiliar and insisted on seeing them as a curiosity rather than just ordinary animals who were well adapted to this country and could do useful work. And that was a bigger problem. Also, our own ignorance of them. People had been using them for centuries in the

Middle East, but we didn't know much about camels. The army didn't. At one point, Beale, the same man, counted his expedition an entire success despite, quote, the fact that we have not one single man who knows anything whatever of camels or how to pack them. One of the biggest problems they had was just getting a saddle to stay on a camel. I mean, it was that primitive because no one knew. They had brought over some so-called camel drivers when they had imported the camels, but these men turned out not to know very much about camels at all and soon just asked if they could go home. So they have these camels, but they don't really know what to do with them.

Yeah, there's no owner's manual. They don't know how to work with them. And the camels got through this with as much dignity as they could, but I wonder if maybe they weren't being mistreated in some fundamental ways just because no one knew anything about camels. But still, Beale was delighted with them, and in 1858 another herd was sent to make a topographical survey of the Big Bend region of western Texas. It seems like, and they were very happy.

It was a big success there, too. In December 1859, Secretary of War John B. Floyd wrote in his annual report to the president that the experience with the camels constituted, quote, a most useful and economical means of transportation for men and supplies through the great deserts and barren regions of our interior. As a measure of economy and efficiency, I cannot too strongly recommend the purchase of a full supply to the favorable consideration of Congress. So it really seems like this whole thing was counted a great success

by the people who knew it best and would only have improved as, you know, time and experience and hopefully consultation with people who knew camels and would only have improved as time and experience and hopefully consultation with people who knew camels, could only improve it even further. So that all sounds wonderful. What intervened was history. In 1860, Lincoln was elected and the Civil War soon broke out. And when that happens, the army has its hands full immediately and has to cancel any experiments like this.

So they wound up just auctioning off the camels, and the whole thing just kind of fell apart. But that's not the camels' fault. The camels, some of them were just let off into the wild or escaped. Some found work carrying cotton to Brownsville. Others wound up in the silver mining business hauling ore. Some helped build the Transcontinental Railroad, and some became freight animals. And a lot of them ultimately ended up in traveling shows, or some helped build the transcontinental railroad and some became freight animals. And a lot of them ultimately ended up in traveling shows because they were still seen as kind of freaks and curiosities instead of just ordinary animals.

There are a lot of tall tales and stories about feral camels wandering in the West. Some people still think they're out there. The last documented sighting I can find comes from the Oakland Tribune in April of 1934, which is pretty good. That's 80 years after they were imported. That says, it's datelined Los Angeles. Topsy, the last camel that trekked across the desert of Arizona and California, is dead. Attendance at Griffith Park here destroyed her after she became crippled with paralysis in the parking lot where she spent the declining years of her life. in the parking lot where she spent the declining years of her life.

So it ends kind of sadly, but the experiment itself made a lot of sense at the time and only fell apart because the Civil War happened. Even if the war hadn't happened, history was just evolving so quickly in the 19th century that if we hadn't had a Civil War, the Transcontinental Railroad went through in 1869, which is just 21 years after the southwest was annexed so there was just a tiny little historical window when we had this giant desert and needed camels help to sort of transport things in it but once the railroad went through that kind of transformed transportation entirely so one way or another camels would be outmoded quickly just because history was unfolding so rapidly at the

time. There's one interesting sidelight here, just to conclude. If you've seen The King and I, you know that King Mongkut of Siam wrote to the President of the United States after having heard about these camels and proposed that we import some elephants, too. That actually happened. On February 14th, 1861, King Mongcote, he wrote to James Buchanan, who was president at the time, saying that he'd heard about these camels and proposed that we try the same thing with elephants. And Buchanan left office and it fell to Abraham Lincoln to tell him that, quote, our political jurisdiction does not reach a latitude so low as to favor the multiplication of the elephant and steam on land as well as on water has been our best and most

efficient agent of transportation in internal commerce. So the whole thing was a noble experiment that actually went quite well. It's just that with the unfolding of history and particularly of technology, there was just a big enough window in history for them to continue and reach their full potential. We'll have a link to our post about the camel corps, including an illustration of a rather unhappy camel being loaded onto a boat, in the show notes at blog.futilitycloset.com. This week's episode is brought to you by Audible, which is offering our listeners a free audiobook of your choice and a free 30-day trial membership. With more than 150,000 titles to choose from, you can always find a great book on Audible, from fiction to nonfiction, bestsellers in every category imaginable. You can download and listen to the books on your iPhone, iPod, Android, Kindle Fire, Windows Phone,

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title anytime, no questions asked. I'm actually a big user of audiobooks myself. One of my favorite ways to use them is in bed at night. You turn off the lights and you, you know, to try to relax and unwind from the day, you just let somebody read you a book for a while in the dark. Yeah, it's very relaxing. Audiobooks are also great for exercising and car trips and just even commuting back and forth in your car every day. The book I'm currently actually listening to is George R.R. Martin's A Game of Thrones, the first book in his series. Like

probably half of America, I'm watching the TV show, but I find that the books have just so much more depth and detail than what they could get in the TV show. Like you really understand the characters better, for example, if you actually listen to the books rather than just the TV show. The narrator does just a super job of bringing the book to life to you, too. So I've been really enjoying it. So sign up today.

You get a free audiobook of your choice and a free 30-day trial membership. Just go to audiblepodcast.com slash closet and choose from over 150,000 titles. Download a title free and start listening. It's that easy. Go to audiblepodcast.com slash closet. That's audiblepodcast.com slash closet and get started today. In episode four, we discussed how British and American merchant ships in World War I adopted dazzle camouflage similar to zebra stripes, and how this compares to the use of similar camouflage today by automakers testing prototype cars. One of our listeners let us know that there's actually been some recent research about the

purposes of zebra stripes, and it's not actually for camouflage, or at least not how you might think it would be. You mean actual zebra stripes? Actual zebra stripes on actual zebras. So looking into this, I found that apparently zebra stripes have kind of been a puzzle to scientists, at least back since Darwin. They're kind of hard to explain, and so several hypotheses have been suggested for why the zebras have these stripes. And one of those hypotheses is that there might be a dazzle confusion effect when the animals are moving and that that might be helpful in avoiding predators, for example. But according to the lead author of the most recent study,

it's the case that humans find moving striped objects difficult to target accurately. But we don't actually have any evidence that zebra predators have a problem with this. So humans may have come up with this hypothesis just because the zebra stripes confuse them, but lions might not have come up with the same idea. Actually, the most recent evidence seemed to support that zebra stripes are actually designed to confuse biting flies more than lions or hyenas. Apparently, the stripes throw off the visual system of flies, especially when the flies are trying to land.

The latest study on this used statistical models, basically, to compare support for these different hypotheses about the stripes and found that none of the hypotheses was supported except for the fly hypothesis, and that one had some pretty strong support but i actually was more tickled with an earlier study that was done two years ago that actually measured the number of horse flies that would become trapped on various gluey boards and they found that the striped boards had fewer flies trapped on them and the narrower the stripes the fewer the flies so i was just reading this and thinking, you know, for those who think their jobs are boring,

just imagine that your job could be to count the dead flies stuck on some gluey boards here and report back on that and tell people that's what you did at work today. So overall, we don't really know how well these dazzle patterns worked on ships or cars against either humans or flies, but apparently the stripes do work for zebras, at least when it comes to flies. So thanks to Ray for putting us on to that, and for those of our listeners who have really inquiring minds, we'll have some links to some articles about the research into zebra stripes in our show notes. In Factor Fiction this week, I want to talk about the Sienna Piano Forte,

this marvelous musical instrument that surfaced in the 1950s and the strange story behind it. In 1955, there was something of a splash in the classical music world when Charles Rosen released a CD of Mozart and Scarlatti sonatas played on what was called the Immortal Piano, which was this wonderful restored piano built originally around 1800 whose tone was really unusual. I can't find a single bad review of that LP or of the concert tour that followed it. The Baltimore Sun wrote, The tones leave an afterglow, a kind of nimbus or aureole that hovers in the air after the strings have been struck, especially the bass, which often suggested the sustained effect of an organ. Time Magazine's critic wrote, The piquant upper lines take on the diamond-point clarity of a

harpsichord, while the sonata's lower notes emerge with something like a modern piano's warmer, darker mass of tone. And the Chicago Daily Tribune wrote, The recording displays an altogether lovely tone, ripe and sweet as mellow fruit. Everyone loved the sound of this piano. It had been restored lovingly over the course of three years by an Israeli piano tuner named Avner Carmi. And what struck me about the story when I learned about it is the story that Carmi gave for where the piano had come from and how it had come into his hands to be restored, because it struck me as almost incredible.

Carmi's grandfather, back in 1917, had approached him with this interesting story. His grandfather had been a concert pianist, and after one performance, the king of Italy came backstage to tell him how much he'd enjoyed his playing and to tell him about this fantastic piano that was in the Italian royal palace at Rome. It had been built, the king said, in 1800 and then further on in the early 19th century by four successive generations of these master harpsichord and piano makers in Italy. And it had this elaborately carved case, but most important was that the tone was almost supernatural. In Carmi's book, he writes, the unique qualities of the immortal piano

are its sound and its ability to adapt itself to whatever music is played upon it. Although it is an upright with a single keyboard, it sounds variously like a piano, harp, harpsichord, organ, lute, guitar, bells, whatever the nature of the music requires. So the king said, you have to come and play this sometime. It's in my palace at Rome.

Next time you're in Rome, stop by and you can play it. And he tried to do this, but for one reason or another, they wouldn't admit him to the palace. And he got to the end of his life without ever actually having played on this piano. He'd only heard about it. So he told his grandson, who also loved pianos, Abner Carmi, this Israeli piano tuner, he said, I wasn't able to get into the palace, but I know the piano is in there. Why don't you try yourself to go and see if you can play it? But Carmi had similarly bad luck. He just couldn't get into the palace. And from this point on, a whole series of unusual coincidences

occur. World War II broke out to begin with, and Carmi was attached to an English transport unit that was cleaning up after Rommel's retreat in North Africa. So one day he was in Egypt, not thinking about pianos, when he was asked to clean up this one odd boxy artifact that had been found back in the dunes in the Egyptian desert. They thought it might have been booby-trapped. So he looked at it and realized it was a piano. Its innards were all clogged with sand and it was unplayable,

but he loved pianos and he recognized that that's what it was and that it wasn't booby-trapped. I'm going to skip ahead here and tell you that this was actually the immortal piano from the royal palace. Wow. Apparently, we think, some German unit had sort of commandeered it and given it to the German entertainment division to help entertain the troops in North Africa. That's how it had made its way down there. And it had been encased in plaster to protect these carvings on it. So Carmi saw it and knew it was a piano, but because it was encased in plaster, he didn't recognize or imagine that this might be this immortal piano that he'd heard so much about. Anyway, he knew it was a piano. He loved pianos. He didn't want to see it burned, which is what they wanted to do with it. So he

interceded with the officers and said, please, can we just preserve this one piano? It's no danger to anyone. And finally, they relented. Carmi went back to his unit, and they partially restored this piano and gave it to a British entertainment group that used it to play for troops, just for entertainment, for the rest of the war. And actually, Carmi, just by further coincidence, as it kept crossing his path mysteriously, first at Palermo and then at Naples, he would see troop entertainments going on with someone playing on this odd plaster-coated piano. But he still didn't know that it was this magic piano that he'd heard about. So eventually the war ends.

Yet further coincidences. The British entertainment group doesn't need it anymore, so they leave it with a junk dealer in Tel Aviv who can't find any use for this old beat-up piano. I'm getting this now from the liner notes of the 1955 record album. The notion struck somebody that maybe this thing was not really a piano after all. A beekeeper saw it as ideal hive material. A peasant thought it would make a fine incubator for chickens.

A butcher was sure that meat could be kept under refrigeration within its five-inch walls. And so it went until the day came when the long-suffering piano was left to rot in lonesome ignominy, abandoned by the junk dealer in a Tel Aviv city dump. A further coincidence. Carmi comes back home. He happens to live in Tel Aviv, and he opens up his old piano repair shop, which is what he does for a living normally, and he's told his children, if you ever come across an old piano, tell me about it, maybe I can restore it. So they tell him they found this old dead piano in the city dump, and he goes to look at it and finds it's still encased in plaster after all this. So he still doesn't know it for

what it is, but he can see it's a piano, and it's in even more desperately bad shape at this point than it was the last time he saw it. Its insides have been ripped out. It doesn't have any action strings, keyboard, pedals, nothing. The only parts of it that remain are just the plaster case itself and the sounding board, which is this wafer-thin piece of cypress wood at the back that normally resonates with the strings and sort of amplifies the sound of the instrument wood at the back that normally resonates with the strings and sort of amplifies the sound of the instrument. That's all that's left of it. So he looks at it and says, well, this is not restorable. There's nothing here, and leaves it alone. But the next day,

a customer brings it into his shop and asks him if he can restore it. They finally get into an argument over the price of this work and the customer starts banging his fist on the plaster piano and it cracks and reveals uh some of these elaborate carmy carvings that carmy has seen pictures of and he finally realizes this is the immortal piano that he'd been searching for for 30 years they've been following him around the mediterranean for all of world war ii and getting into worse and worse shape so he pays off the guy hurriedly and then spends the next three years, he said, 24 gallons of acetone to get all the plaster off it. But he got the plaster

off and spent three years lovingly refurbishing it and building it all the way back up to its former glory. And then in 55 they released the LP that I told you about that everyone actually loved. So here's my question after all of that. Is it possible to restore even a great piano and tear it down that far so that all that's left is just this plaster-crusted case and the sounding board and nothing else?

And then build it all the way back up again to a fully working musical instrument that retains the character of the original instrument. I don't know anything about pianos, but that just strikes me as very surprising if that's how it works. Carmi had said explicitly that when he encountered it in the Tel Aviv junkyard, that it had no strings, no pedals, no keys, no action, and the sounding board was the only part of it that was left. In philosophy, there's a puzzle called the Ship of Theseus, which says, suppose you have a wooden ship and you replace one part of it, say a plank in the deck. Okay. Is that the same ship that you started with? Most people would say yes, but then you have to

ask, well, suppose you go on from there and one by one replace every other piece of the ship until you're left with a ship in which none of the original parts remain. Is that the same ship that you started with? And the answer may be no. It may be that there's a certain point where it's just not legitimately, not legitimate anymore to call it the same object. And I think that's sort of the same puzzle that I find here,

again, not knowing much about pianos, which seems like if you've removed almost all the musical machinery of it and then replace it with new stuff, does it count as the same instrument? And would it sound the same way? If the answer to that is yes, then I guess everything makes sense. If the answer is no, then I think either Carmi must have been exaggerating the poor condition of the piano when he inherited it, or he didn't so much restore an old piano as create a new one almost

from scratch. I mean, he used the sounding board and I guess the case of it. But apart from that, what he really did was over this course of three years, build an entirely new instrument. I think that's possible. Carmi was, by all accounts, a very great technician with pianos. He served as piano tuner to Artur Schnabel, Artur Rubinstein, and Arturo Toscanini. And at one point in this book, he wrote a book with his wife about this whole experience in 1961. When he's having this argument with this customer who's asking if

he can restore the piano, the customer asks, are you even capable of restoring a piano that's in such bad shape? And Carmi says, can I fix it for enough money? I can build you a piano even from an old icebox. So he has great faith in his own ability to create a piano from scratch, even a great one. So it was within his ability to create a new one from scratch. So I guess my question is whether the piano he did deliver counts as the old immortal piano or just as a new one that he had built. Another puzzle that connects with this is all the reviews I can find and the news articles I can find from 1955 when this was all sort of abroad in the music press, I can't find any critic who seems to have any skepticism. They all sort of go through this long story full of coincidences.

And they just buy it? They just buy into it? Yeah, and then they give their review of the recording or the performance and say it was wonderful. But no one seems to have any skepticism about whether the story could be true. But as I say, I don't know much about pianos and possibly the whole thing makes sense. It just struck me as on the face of it kind of an unlikely story. And I just wondered if anyone who knows more about pianos than I do could shed more light on it. Also, one last question. I don't know where it is today. The last mention I can find of it comes from a 1996 story in the Times.

Carveny was dead by that point, but his daughters were auctioning off the instrument. And they said they were hoping to get the equivalent of 400,000 pounds for it. And I can't find any mention of it after that. So I sort of infer that what happened was that a private party bought it at that point and owns it today. But I'd be curious if anyone knows where the Sienna Piano is today. I'd be curious to find out. So if you can shed any light on any of that,

please write to us and let us know. We'll include a recording of Charles Rosen's 1955 performance on the restored piano in our show notes. And now for the weekly challenge. Each week we give you a creative challenge and you can compete for a copy of our book. Last week's challenge asked you to take the title of a book, movie, or TV show, rearrange the words, and tell us what the new work is about.

As always, we had a lot of fun reading the entries this week, and here are a few of our favorites. Daniel sent in, week and here are a few of our favorites. Daniel sent in, With the wind gone, the crew of a small fishing vessel struggles to survive three weeks of being becalmed far from shore. And, Solace of Quantum, after the

death of his wife, a physicist flees depression by burying himself in his work. Jim Finn sent in, Ark of the Lost Raiders, the Oakland football team disappears and it turns out they got a message from God about a major flood. And Cider Rules the House. No one in this family can do anything without pressed apples. Yonathan Uriel sent in The Book Jungle. A man gets lost in a library and reverts to a wild state.

M.J. Nestor sent in The Hazard of Dukes a period drama in which peers face perilous situations and Couple the Odd a dating quiz in which the audience has the final say this job gets harder and harder every week because we get more and more entries and they're just really clever this one was harder than last week's which is the hardest one we've had I think so far

I think what I I like all of these but I think I'm going to choose Cider Rules the House just because of the description. No one in this family can do anything without pressed apples. I think that's terrific. So, thank you, Jim Finn. That's your entry. If you can send us your mailing address, we'll send you a copy of the Fusility Closet

book. In this week's challenge, I want to play with Google searches. A Google whack, as some of you may know, is a phrase that returns exactly one hit in a Google search. In 2007, humor columnist Gene Weingarten came up

with something he called the Google nope, which is a search phrase that returns no hits at all. The examples he came up with in 2007 include squid meringue pie, what adorable garbage, and please play your bagpipes some more so send us your google note send us a google search that returns no hits at all there's a technical note here that's very important when you do your search when you put your search phrase

into google please be sure to enclose it in quotation marks because that tells google to search verbatim for that phrase as it's written with the words all in order. If you don't do that, you're almost certain to get a bunch of hits. For instance, if you type in squid meringue pie without quotation marks, believe it or not, you get 443,000 hits because Google will return any page at all that includes those three words anyway. I always like to see a page that manages to include squid meringue pie.

Yeah, that's kind of impressive on its own. So when you're looking for a phrase, look for something entertaining, but please be sure to put it in quotation marks. You'll have a lot better luck. So come up with your own Google Note and send it to us by Friday, April 25th. 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 a 1911 plot to steal the Mona Lisa,

some ironic names for law firms, and the meaning of andebatarian. And 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 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.