Futility Closet - 008-Owney the Mail Dog, Candy Bombers, and Bertrand Russell

Episode Date: May 5, 2014

In 1888 a mixed-breed terrier appointed himself mascot of America's railway postal service, accompanying mailbags throughout the U.S. and eventually traveling around the world. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll recount Owney's postal adventures and the wave of human affection that followed him.We'll also look at an Air Force pilot who dropped candy on parachutes to besieged German children in 1948, learn the link between drug lord Pablo Escobar and feral hippos in Colombia, 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 8. I'm Greg Ross, the creator of Futility Closet, and with me is my wife and co-host, Sharon. the creator of Futility Closet, and with me is my wife and co-host, Sharon. In today's show, we'll follow the exploits of the Candy Bombers, who dropped chocolate bars on tiny parachutes to German children in 1948,

learn about drug lord Pablo Escobar's link to wild hippos in Colombia, follow the adventures of Oni, a dog who appointed himself mascot of the U.S. postal system in 1888, 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, which 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. Perfect for filling five minutes or 50. Look for it on Amazon and iTunes.

Also, just a passing note, if there's anyone out there who's a WordPress theme designer or who knows one who's accepting custom work, I'd be grateful to hear from you. I'm looking for someone to work on the Futility Closet site. You can reach me by email or leave a comment on the blog. In our listener mail this week, Kai Shepard wrote in to say that he enjoyed our story on the white bird from last week. And he wanted to add that although our story was about the first nonstop transatlantic flight between Paris and New York, other transatlantic flights had been previously attempted.

Kai wrote to say, Eight years earlier, the U.S. Navy commissioned a series of four specially designed planes from Glenn Curtis, the NC-1, NC-2, NC-3, and NC-4. These planes set off to cross the Atlantic from New York to Lisbon, flying in a series of hops. Along the route were numerous destroyers, which would supply the planes as they worked their way across, as well as rescue vessels. Only one of the planes finished the journey, the NC-4, and it took 19 days to complete. That's amazing. This journey, however, was overshadowed two weeks later, when John Alcock and Arthur Brown flew a modified Vickers Vimy non-stop from St. John's, Newfoundland, to County Galloway, Ireland, in 15 hours, 57 minutes, winning a prize offered by the Daily Mail of 10,000 pounds.

Both men also received various other rewards and were knighted by King George V a few days after landing. I really enjoy your site, and the podcasts are a great listen. Hope to hear many more in the future. So that's just a few years. I mean, it's amazing how fast all that was unfolding, you know, to do it in a few hops, and then eight years later to do it from Paris to New York in one swoop.

Yeah, I mean, 19 days and then to be able to suddenly go from that to a nonstop flight. I always thought the whole unfolding of aviation in the 20th century is just an explosion. I mean, the Wright brothers were in 1903 and then we were on the moon in 69. That's 66 years. That's one human lifetime. Yeah. It's just astonishing how fast that evolved. The pace of technology sometimes, yeah.

Also in listener mail, we heard from Jordan Smith, who sent a photo of a surfer with a black and white striped surfboard and wetsuit and said, This is touted as an anti-shark surfboard and wetsuit, which use the same deceptive painting scheme that you have recently discussed on warships, prototype cars, and zebras. So the deal with this is, apparently, Shark Attack Mitigation Systems has recently designed wetsuits and surfboards with black and white striping that they think will make a surfer look unpalatable or potentially even dangerous to a shark. There hasn't been a great deal of testing of their claims yet, so we're not prepared to say whether this does indeed fool sharks or not.

But it's interesting to see how many uses zebra stripes may be turning out to have. I wonder if that means if you put a zebra in a shark tank that the sharks will avoid it. Will avoid it or think it's dangerous, but... Maybe zebras eat sharks. Maybe they're natural enemies. Even when a zebra sees a shark, it jumps on the water and there's a desperate struggle and the zebra always wins. So sharks have learned to avoid anything with stripes on it.

Well, I also wouldn't recommend that you wear something that looks zebra striped if you're going to be swimming anywhere near where there are crocodiles because crocodiles do like to eat zebras. So you'd have to be very careful where you wore this wetsuit. Good advice. Thanks to Kai and Jordan for their contributions, 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. At the end of World War II, the defeated Germany was divided up among the Allied powers. The Soviets took the eastern part and the other Allied powers took the west.

And the city of Berlin, which fell into the eastern part, was similarly divided. What that meant was that West Berlin was a little island, an enclave of Western control within the larger Soviet zone. And in 1948, the Soviets decided they didn't want to continue that way and blockaded West Berlin in hopes of starving it into joining the Soviet bloc. That was one of the first real crises of what would come to be known as the Cold War. And the West decided to counter it. They couldn't get supplies into West Berlin by road or rail or river anymore because of the blockade, but they could fly in. And they decided to start flying food and coal and other supplies in to keep West Berlin going. This is known as the Berlin Airlift. There's a wonderful sort of

episode that marks that whole period that concerns one of the pilots who was flying supplies into Berlin. His name was Hal Halverson. And on July 19th in 1948, he was innocently enough standing on the airport grounds in Berlin, West Berlin, talking with some children outside the airport fence. There were about 30 kids there. And one of the things he noticed was he'd traveled all around the world with the Air Force, and he found that normally kids in other parts of the world, if they saw an American pilot, would ask him if he had any candy. And none of these kids did that. And he realized that that's because many of them had been born during the war or some shortly before it.

And so they had never tasted candy. They had no experience with it, and so they didn't ask him for it. He had nothing to give them. He had two sticks of gum. So he tore those in half and handed them through the fence, and the kids loved them. Four of them got the gum, and the others sort of carefully tore up even the foil wrapping and sniffed it and carefully treasured it

and folded it up in their pockets. So he wanted to give them some more candy. He didn't have any. At that moment, a plane happened to fly over on its way into landing at the airport. And he said, without thinking, next time I fly into the airport, I'll drop some candy for you from the plane. And one kid asked, how will we know which plane you are? And he said, I'll wiggle my wings as I come in. So they agreed on this and he left to go back to the base and immediately had misgivings about making this promise. He just wanted to help the kids, but this would be breaking the airlift regulations, and he could get into a lot of trouble just dropping things out of the plane.

At the same time, though, he didn't want to break his promise to the kids. So he went to the base exchange and got his allotment of candy and gum for the month, and after some thought, he decided to rig up some parachutes so he wouldn't just be dropping these right out of the plane onto the kids. He made parachutes out of handkerchiefs and twine and sort of experimented with them for a while and got them working. And the next time he and his crew flew over, he saw the kids, wiggled his wings, and dropped these things out of the plane. After they touched down and landed, he looked back and saw them laughing and smiling and waving to him through the fence. So this became a regular thing. Every week, as he flew into the airport with his supplies, he would

drop, you know, some candy for these kids on parachutes. The problem was that they couldn't risk the commanders finding out about this, And eventually a reporter got wind of this and saw the plane flying and making this drop and got his tail number off the plane and started asking about it. So Halverson got called before his commanding officer and expected to be court-martialed for doing this. But in fact, they told him to keep doing it. They thought it would be...

There was so much hardship in West Berlin at that time with the blockade going on that they wanted to maintain the German morale. And this was one way to do it, just having something like this going on that the Berliners could participate in and know about. Some little positive thing. Yeah, it made a big difference. So to his own surprise, he started doing this daily and the kids It made a big difference. So to his own surprise, he started doing this daily, and the kids loved it and started sending him fan mail to the base. Here's an example of a letter he got from a little girl dated August 29, 1948.

Dear Uncle Wiggly Wings, When yesterday I came from school, I had the happiness to get one of your sweet gifts. First, I did not know what to do of joy, and I could not come home quickly enough to look at your wonderful things. You cannot think how big the joy was. They all, my brother and parents, stood about me when I opened the strings and fetched out all the chocolate. The delight was very large. Gratefully, Lieselette Muller.

So they started to make these drops almost daily, and the crowds of kids, as you can imagine, outside the airport, got bigger and bigger, and you began to worry that there'd be some sort of stampedes or kids would start to get hurt. So with his superior's permission, they started just making drops. They'd depart from the normal route and started making dropping candy over schoolyards, over children's hospitals, over soccer fields, just sort of dropping candy out of the sky onto delighted German children. And Halverson was still making these flights himself, but he was also starting to organize other.

At the peak of it, they had a couple dozen candy bombers, they called them, people dropping candy all over Berlin. This was important to all the people of Berlin, but particularly to that generation of kids who had been raised believing that Americans were the enemy, which they had been until a few years earlier. And those experiences really stayed with a lot of those German kids for the rest of their lives. A 15-year-old girl wrote during the airlift that it reminded her, quote, that in this world there are higher things than national egoism, namely humanity and the existence

of all peoples and human dignity. Three years after the blockade ended, the West Berlin evening newspaper Der Abend asked its readers to answer the question, what do you remember about the blockade? They got a lot of responses. A stonemason said, people who for a long time had been opposed to us in battle suddenly stood at our sides as if they were our own brothers. And another Berliner said he found it wonderful that things turned out in a way that nobody could easily believe. Our enemies of yesterday became the friends of today. One day in October, Halverson was just standing on the tarmac at the airbase waiting to take off, and this little girl, eight or nine years old, approached him with this tattered handmade teddy bear and said, please take my bear. She wanted him to take

it onto the plane. And he tried to decline it, to put her off, but she insisted. And her mother explained that during the war, during Allied bombing raids, which was terrifying for a little girl, she'd be in the air raid shelters clutching this bear and believed it had saved her life. And now she wanted to give it to an American pilot so he could take it onto the plane, believing it would save his life. She didn't know he was the candy bomber. She just knew he was an American pilot.

It just shows what an effect this was having um and he finally he accepted the baron he kept it afterward so uh what was happening is the cold war was still organizing itself but it was becoming clear that if it was going to be one it wouldn't be with guns and bombs, but as a competition for the sympathy and conviction to people around the world. And that's what this was. It had begun, it certainly had PR value and the military recognized that, but it had begun with a genuine human impulse that Halverson just wanted to help these kids at the fence. And it was continued in that spirit. Back in the United States, as people got wind of this, they started wanting to contribute themselves. There was in Chicopee, Massachusetts, which is the home of Westover Air Force Base, where planes were leaving to join the airlift,

the town's schoolchildren from 22 different schools, from grade schools to colleges, all sent representatives to this organizing meeting, and they elected officers and set up committees and things. And the mayor assigned them a firehouse to work in and basically they organized all the materials that were being sent to the candy bombers uh in berlin uh they came from the contributions came from across the united states the connecticut chapter of the veterans of foreign wars sent 3 000 handkerchiefs wgreens drugstore sent 200 pounds of candy and gum. The Bud Company of Philadelphia donated 11,000 yards of

linen, which the children cut into 18 inch squares, attached twine and candy and on each parachute they stamped in German this candy is sent to you from the school children of America. Altogether those kids sorted and prepared 36,000 pounds of candy attached to 100,000 handkerchief parachutes for the candy bombers,

and they sent them over to Germany, and they were dropped into the town. There's one other letter I have to read to you. Throughout all of this, Halverson, he was sort of the public face of the whole candy bombing, whatever you want to call it, campaign, and became beloved among, as you can imagine, among West German kids. He got letters continuously, but there's this one he got from a nine-year-old boy named Peter Zimmerman who sent him a map and a note in his own handmade crude little parachute

so he could make a personal flight to his house and drop candy personally to him in the yard. The note said, Fly along the big canal at the second bridge turn right. I live in the bombed out house on the corner. I'll be waiting in the backyard at 2 p.m. Halverson actually did this. He actually, on his next flight, flew down following the directions and tried to find the house, but he couldn't find it. So he just went back to the base.

And shortly afterward, he got a second note from Peter Zimmerman that said, No chocolate yet. You're a pilot. I gave you a map. How did you guys win the war anyway? So Halverson finally mailed him a chocolate bar. Anyway, because the airlift was such a success in getting supplies into West Berlin, eventually, in the middle of 1949, the Soviets just capitulated and gave up trying to blockade the city. So the whole thing was, apart from even just the candy bombing, the whole Berlin airlift had been a success. By the time the blockade ended, Halverson had run 126 missions over Berlin and dropped 90,000

candy parachutes had been dropped on the city. And these had a lasting effect on the memories of all the people of Berlin, and particularly of those kids. Many years later, he returned to the city in 1998, and a dignified man of 60 years old approached him and said, 50 years ago, I was a boy of 10 on my way to school. The clouds were very low with light rain. I could hear the planes landing, though I couldn't see them. Suddenly out of the mist came a parachute with a fresh Hershey chocolate bar from America. It landed right at my feet.

I knew it was happening, but couldn't believe it was for me. It took me a week to eat that candy bar. I hit it day and night. The chocolate was wonderful, but it wasn't the chocolate that was most important. What it meant was that someone in America knew I was here in trouble and needed help. Someone in America cared. That parachute was something more important than candy. It represented hope.

Hope that someday we would be free. So this really had a profound emotional impact for these children. Especially on that generation of kids. And the wonderful thing is Halverson kept going. When he first got back from Berlin, the Air Force asked him to travel around the country giving after-dinner speeches and sort of just sharing this story. But he kept doing it throughout his life. And even today, there's an effort to do candy drops around the United States, just dropping candy for children, just to sort of commemorate the whole experience. There's an old 1945 Douglas C-54 that does these drops.

It's called the Spirit of Freedom. And drops candy just as Halverson did for groups, in this case, of American children. And the amazing thing I found in researching this segment is that Halverson's still involved in these things. in researching this segment is that Halverson's still involved in these things. I found accounts in various newspapers of drops in Virginia in 2006, in New Jersey in 2011, and in Florida in 2014.

And in two of those, Hal Halverson himself participated. He's 93 now. The most recent one I can find where I know he participated was in 2007, and I don't know for sure whether he's still doing them. I can't find a schedule of these drops. If anyone out there knows of any kind of schedule or advance warning of candy drops around

the country, please let me know so I can share it on a future show. We'll have a link to our original post and a video about Hal Halverson and the Candy Bombers in our show notes at blog.futilitycloset.com. fertilitycloset.com. In response to our story last week about the possibility of importing hippos into Louisiana in the early 20th century, Chris let us know that he had heard that hippos were actually imported into South America several years ago. So in looking into this, I found out that Columbia currently has the largest population of hippos in the world outside of Africa. What happened was, in the 1980s, drug lord Pablo Escobar built a luxurious retreat for himself that he called Hacienda Napoles. And that included a Mediterranean-style mansion, multiple swimming pools, a 1,000-seat bullfighting ring, life-size statues of dinosaurs, and his own

personal airstrip. But apparently, Mr. Escobar felt that his estate would not be complete without a personal zoo. So he also imported in some zebras and giraffes, kangaroos, rhinoceroses, and hippopotamuses. Escobar eventually was gunned down by police in 1993, and after his death, some of his animals died or were transferred to other zoos. But nobody wanted the hippos, partly because they can actually be kind of aggressive, and hippos are difficult to move because of their enormous size. So the hippos stayed put, flourishing in the really nice artificial lakes that had been dug for them. But it turns out the Colombian climate and vegetation are actually rather suitable to hippos, and they have no natural predators in Colombia. So Escobar's original four hippos now number at least 30,

with some estimates putting the total number between 40 and 60 hippos. The problem is that some of them have been escaping off of the estate and living in the wild, and this can present a problem because hippos are rather territorial, and they can be highly aggressive if they feel themselves to be threatened, and they can weigh as much as 9,000 pounds. Carlos Palacio, the head of animal husbandry at NAPA LACE, said, some experts see this herd as a treasure of the natural world in case Africa's hippo population So apparently it might have been for the best that the U.S. didn't end up importing its own hippos after all. Apparently not. We'll have links to articles about Pablo Escobar's hippos in our show notes.

One autumn evening in 1888, a dog walked into a post office in Albany, New York, and lay down on a pile of mail bags. No one knew where he'd come from. He was a mixed-breed terrier and apparently was an orphan. So over time, the mail clerks who worked in the post office began to care for him and came to call him Oni. Oddly, he was attracted to mailbags. He would spend a lot of time lying on them. And in those days, most mail was carried by train, and they would carry it from the post office to the rail depot

a few blocks away in a wagon. And Oni would take to riding on the mailbags in the wagon, and eventually to riding on the train on top of the mail bags as far as New York City, and eventually even farther afield. So he never got into trouble and would have always eventually returned to Albany, but the clerks in Albany eventually bought him a collar just in case he got into trouble. The collar said, Oney Post Office, Albany, New York. And soon he was away from Albany for months at a time. He just dove into the mail business and sort of appointed himself mascot of the railway mail service, which was fine with them. He got along with everyone and was apparently a very extroverted dog. He was known originally as being a mascot of the Albany Post Office, but he eventually got so far afield that he became a companion to railway clerks throughout the nation.

He moved always with the mail pouches, jumping from train to train, and whoever the clerks were aboard the train at any given time would take care of him. If there was a restaurant in a depot, they would take him to get something to eat, and he always eventually wound up back in Albany. Eventually, as he got farther abroad, the Albany clerks fastened a note to his collar asking employees of the railway mail service to attach baggage tags to his collar just so they could keep track of where he had been,

because there was no way to tell how far he'd gotten. No one person knew, because no one was traveling with him. Baggage tags were these little metal or leather tags that were usually attached to luggage or another baggage, and each rail line tended to have its own distinctive kind, so it was one way to keep track of where he had gone. They could just see the collection on his collar when he got back home. But the collar soon filled up.

He was such a well-traveled little dog. So the postmaster general, John Wanamaker, had a little harness-like jacket built that he could wear. Instead of having the tags on his collar, he could wear this jacket, which soon that filled up as well. On April 9, 1894, a New York newspaper wrote, nearly every place he

stopped, Oney received an additional tag until now he wears a big bunch. When he jogs along, they jingle like the bells on a junk wagon. And this is actually interesting because it became a way, inadvertently, of tracking where he had gone because as the jacket filled up they would lighten the load by

occasionally taking off some of the tags and other things he'd accumulated and sending them back to Albany. And so a lot of those have been preserved. Hundreds of them have. And the Smithsonian Institution's Postal Museum has actually got a map that sort of shows partially all the different places in the U.S. that he visited.

Eventually he hit every state in the Union. And in addition to these baggage tags, people would attach anything to them. The tags were joined by hotel key checks, medals, inscriptions, verses, badges. A railway postal worker from Rock Island, Illinois added a sign to his collar that read, Be good to Oney. Others attached charms to his collar that read, Be Good to Oney. Others attached charms to the jacket that read, Good Luck to His Dog Ship, Always Welcome, and Oney Call Again. And just as an example of how far afield he got, the collection includes trinkets from Paris, Kentucky,

Charlestown, Massachusetts, Puyallup, Washington, Detroit, Omaha, Van Horn, Iowa, Brookings, South Dakota, Winona, Minnesota, and Cloverdale, California. He got farther and farther afield and returned less and less often to Albany, but he always did come back. At one point, Albany's clerks got an inquiry from Montreal, of all places. I don't know how he got to Montreal, but he did and ran into trouble there because he didn't have a dog license. So they asked for $2.50, mostly to pay for his food during his confinement, which they paid and they released him

and he eventually found his way back home again. He didn't have a dog license for Montreal, but he did have them for Brooklyn, New York, Sydney, Nebraska, Sumas, Washington, and Grand Rapids, South Dakota. So people were taking care of him and even doing necessary paperwork in all these different jurisdictions as he traveled around the country. All of these were attached to his jacket at some point.

There are some reports, the number gets thrown around as the total number of these tags that he was carrying was 1,017. I have some doubts about that specific number, but certainly there were hundreds, which is amazing. Also, this was sort of the heyday of rail travel in the U.S., and so there were a good number of accidents, and no train on which Oney traveled ever met with an accident, which gave him additionally the reputation of being sort of a good luck charm, which made him even more popular. You'll be gratified to learn that throughout these travels,

he maintained an enlightened interest in civic affairs. He was a guest at the fifth annual convention of the National Republican League held in Buffalo in 1892. He attended the Iowa Bankers Association Convention in Council Bluffs in 1893. He visited the Produce Exchange in Toledo, Ohio in 1894, and he was greeted at the 1895 Tacoma Poultry Association meeting in Washington State. On one day in 1896, he happened to visit a post office in Brattleboro, Vermont, and 300 people turned out just to pay their respects to him. He was famous at this point. There are reports that he also visited Mexico and Alaska. I can't confirm Mexico, but I think it's reasonable to assume that he did make it to

Alaska. It certainly wouldn't be impressive because he actually next went all the way to Japan. On August 19, 1895, he left Tacoma, Washington on the steamship Victoria and visited several cities in China and Japan. He was sent by registered mail. He had so many connections now in the mail business that he could travel however he wanted. Sent by registered mail. He had so many connections now in the mail business that he could travel however he wanted. Sent by registered mail part of the way under a special mail classification they made up for him called registered dog package. I think that's probably the only time that's been used. He traveled with a little suitcase that contained a sleeping blanket, a comb, and a brush, and he spent most of the time during the trip chasing rats on the ship. The Japanese were as impressed with him as everyone else was and gave him an

imperial passport, which gave him the freedom to travel anywhere in the country but imposed some odd rules. For example, he was not allowed to attend a fire on horseback, rent a house, hire a carriage at night that did not have headlamps, or scribble on temples, shrines, or other buildings, which I'm pleased to say he refrained from doing. Were these special rules they made up just for him? No, I think that's what happens in the 1890s if you get an imperial passport. That's what I gather.

I think. After Japan, he went to China briefly and then returned to Japan. There's another little anecdote here. A fellow passenger, an American, Herbert Flood of San Francisco, was departing Japan at the same time, and he recalled, When I entered the office of the steamship's agent at Kobe, Japan, to book passage, I inquired if there were any other passengers,

and was informed that there was one other who was all ready to leave on the ship, which would sail in two hours. On the agent's books, the passenger's name was entered as Mr. Oney and his residence, America. I asked for an introduction to my fellow passenger and the clerk whistled. A large-sized Irish terrier who had been sleeping on a pile of mailbags in the corner trotted to the front. It was Oney, the traveling dog and protege of the postal clerks in America. So that was it for Japan for him. And rather than just go straight home back across the Pacific, he took the long way home, going all the way around the world. He sailed on to Singapore, Suez, Algiers, the Azores, and landed at New York City on the British steamer Port Phillip.

Then the postal clerk sent him back to Tacoma, Washington, where he'd started from. He circumnavigated the Earth at this point and was greeted by hundreds of people. Reportedly, he was six pounds heavier at that point. The trip had taken 132 days to get all the way around the Earth. There is no way to tell how far he traveled in his life. The number that gets thrown around is 143,000 miles, and I think there's no way to confirm that, but I don't think it's totally crazy to think he covered it.

Basically, no one knows how old he was when he first showed up in Albany. But this was about 10 years later, and he was traveling almost continuously through his whole life in between. So I don't think that's a crazy estimate. At this point, he was receiving Globetrotter awards from various kennel clubs, but he was getting older. He made one last big trip to the far west to attend the convention of the National Association of Railway Postal Clerks in March 1897. I'm getting this from William Jefferson Dennis's 1916 history of the railway mail service. Either by instinct or by the help of clerks, Oney managed to attend all the postal clerks' conventions where he was right in his element. The San Francisco convention of March 1897 might have been taken as a sort of triumph for this famous dog

rather than a meeting to discuss postal clerk's affairs. As the meeting was being called to order, in came Oney, wagging his stumped tail in delight, and ran down the aisle amid the cheers of the audience. He mounted the stage, and an apparent great glee looked about as if to say, Now you can proceed, I'm here. Perhaps few speakers ever received such applause as followed. The stumped-tailed, shaggy dog, Oney, appealed to the sentimental nature of every male slinger in the convention, and it was fully 15 minutes before order was restored.

But he's getting older at this point. He's at least 10 years old now. In 1897, he'd lost sight in one eye and reportedly could eat only soft foods and milk. So they finally sent him back to Albany where all this had begun. And there's kind of... It's a great story up to this point. It has kind of a tragic ending. He was living in the Albany post office, but in June 1897, he either boarded or was put aboard a train to Toledo, Ohio. And something bad happened in Toledo.

We don't know the circumstances exactly, but it ended, he was shot. He died of a gunshot wound on June 11th in Toledo. Apparently, there are different stories that he was mistreated or his mood had changed as he got older, but he maybe perhaps bit someone. But anyway, that's how he died. He finally died of a gunshot wound in Toledo. But he was so popular at this point that James White, the superintendent of the Railway Mail Service, took up a collection among American postal clerks, and they had him preserved by a Toledo taxidermist. So you can see him today if you want. He's on display permanently in the Smithsonian National Postal Museum in Washington, D.C.

There's an interesting postscript to this whole story that I haven't had time to look into yet. Apparently, at about the same period, the same thing was happening in Australia. It's like the camels. There's this weird cosmic balance that has been maintained between Australia and the U.S. There's a dog called Bob the Railway Dog who was riding trains, thousands of miles apparently, across Australia in the 1880s, which is just about the same time, which is kind of an amazing coincidence. So if anyone out there knows anything more about Bob the Railway Dog, I'd love to hear about it. more about Bob the Railway Dog. I'd love to hear about him. We'll have a link to our post about Oney, as well as some photos and a link to an interactive map showing his exploits in our show notes. Now for a weekly challenge. Last week's challenge didn't seem to spark much interest,

so we're going to try a very different direction this week. We'll also be extending the deadline from Friday to Saturday to give you more time to work on your entries. This week's challenge comes from Bertrand Russell, of all people. He was on a BBC radio program in 1948 and introduced what he called an emotive conjugation. It goes like this. I am firm. You are obstinate. He is a pig-headed fool. Basically, he was illustrating that we judge our own behavior very differently than the way we judge that of other people. This was apparently kind of a hit in 1948 because the New

Statesman ran a competition among its readers to submit their own examples, and they said they received an unprecedented response of 2,000 entries. Here are some of them. I am well-informed. You listen to gossip. He believes whatever he reads in the papers. I am righteously indignant, you are annoyed, he is making a fuss about nothing. I am a creative writer, you have a journalistic flair, he is a prosperous hack. And I am sparkling, you are unusually talkative, and he is drunk. So come up with your own emotive conjugations and send them to us by Saturday, May 10th. 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 world's first arrest by telegraph, discover a magic square found in a multiplication table, and meet a man who dreamed the winners of horse races. Well, that's it for this episode. You can find 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 sample over 7,000 cerebral hors d'oeuvres. 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.