Futility Closet - 009-The Monkey Signalman, Racetrack ESP, and Toxic Dumps

Episode Date: May 12, 2014

After losing his feet in an accident in the 1880s, South Africa railway worker James "Jumper" Wide found an unlikely friend in a baboon named Jack. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll learn how Jumper taught Jack to work as a signalman on the railway line, where he won the trust of both authorities and passengers.We'll also meet an Englishman who dreamed the winners of horse races, ponder the strange case of the Stringfellow Acid Pits, and present the next Futility Closet Challenge.

This episode is brought to you by Squarespace, the all-in-one platform that makes it fast and easy to create your own professional website, portfolio, and online store. For a free trial and 10% off, visit squarespace.com slash closet and enter offer code closet at checkout. A better web starts with your website. 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 9. 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 learn about a baboon who worked as a signalman on a South African railway in the 1880s, meet an English baron who dreamed the winners of horse races in the 1940s, consider whether my wife ought to slap me for reading this paragraph, and present the next Futility Closet Challenge. If you enjoy the offbeat topics that we talk about in these podcasts, you'll want to check out our book, Futility Closet, an idler's miscellany of compendious amusements,

which contains hundreds of assorted curiosities, as well as wordplay, puzzles, paradoxes, and other bite-sized amusements and conundrums. Look for it on Amazon or iTunes and discover why other readers have called it awesome and addictive and small increments of joy. In our listener mail this week, Andrew Hookum wrote in to say, I'm so delighted with your blog and now also the podcast. Thanks so much and keep up the good work. On the subject of mass psychogenic illness, there was a great

Harper's piece by Jack Hitt from 1995 called Toxic Dreams about how approximately 4,000 folks from Glen Avon, California, sued the town dump, Stringfellow Acid Pits, for allowing various chemicals to be released there. Andrew quotes from Hitt's article, Each of 4,000 plaintiffs were suffering from different ailments, ranging from young Philip Leyva's extreme retardation of bone maturation, Andrew goes on to say, That's interesting. It's a really good point that I think Andrew raises, that when you have a situation like this where there could be a physical cause to problems,

but you don't know what do you attribute it to. So if you have somebody who has nightmares or uncontrollable crying or other residents were reporting insomnia or anxiety, how would a jury determine if that's directly physically related to the chemicals that were stored in their neighborhood? physically related to the chemicals that were stored in their neighborhood, or it's the stress of knowing that there were chemicals that you might have been exposed to, and then the stress itself is causing possibly physical reactions. Or, as we talked about with the mass psychogenic illness, we do know that humans are suggestible. So just believing that there might be a reason for you to produce symptoms sometimes can produce symptoms in people so it is a really good question of how would you tease that out yeah the the

historical examples including the ones we gave of mass psychogenic illness like dancing suddenly in 16th century strasbourg are so sort of vivid and odd that it looks like these are sort of isolated examples but we're all suggestible to some extent. Yeah. And particularly under stress, and this is certainly a stressful situation, there's got to be some layer of suggestibility going on in people's behavior there, and it's very hard to tease out where the boundaries are around that.

That would be really challenging. In another piece of listener mail for this week, Andy Washington wrote in to say, Hi guys, loving you from across the pond. I have a question. Here in the UK, it seems anachronistic and sexist for a husband to introduce himself with his full name, but only give his wife's first name. Also, you always say your name before your wife's. That coupled with only giving her one name feels like a slight. Is that

still widespread in the U.S.? Every time you introduce the show, I can't help thinking, what's her surname? And why doesn't she just slap him? By the way, I'm a man. Keep up the good work and give everyone the respect of using their first and surname. What do you think? Well, I have to say I was kind of amused by the email. It never occurred to me that I had a good excuse to slap What do people think I should be offended? That's where I come down on this. I hadn't thought of it, but it seems to me that the person in this case whose opinion matters is you. Yeah, we were just going for something kind of informal,

like Greg at a party would usually introduce me as his wife Sharon rather than Sharon Ross, but maybe this is a different situation. So Andy also raises the possibility that there might be a cultural facet to this, too. So we're kind of curious. What do you listeners think? And tell us where you're from and whether you think that makes a difference, because maybe people do this differently in different countries. Yeah, I'm just curious.

Even if you think it's okay the way we're doing it, I'm just curious around the world how different people manage this. Yeah, how would we handle this situation? Are we being anachronistic or do you think this is okay? So write in and let us know. Send us an email to podcast at futility closet about a baboon that served as an assistant signalman on a railway line in south africa i ran it because it seemed well attested in it the sources i could find supporting it were authoritative, but I remember using the word preposterous because that's preposterous. But I checked in on that story over the ensuing years, and by 2011 I'd found it's definitely true.

A baboon worked for nine years as a signalman on a railway line. The story starts with James Wide, who would become his master. He was originally from England, but moved to South Africa around 1876. He took a job as a guard on the Cape Government Railway, which was a new line between Cape Town and Port Elizabeth, sort of along the southern coast of the country. Why got the nickname Jumper? Because he was really adept at jumping between trains,

but as you might guess, eventually fate caught up with him, and he fell under a train and lost both his feet. His legs had to be amputated at the knee, which is obviously immediately a crisis. He was desperate to keep his job with the railway line, and after a lot of discussions with them, they agreed to hire him as a signalman. He had two peg legs at this point, so he wouldn't have to move that much. He could just stay in the signal box and just shunt trains from track to track. The problem was that the cottage that he lived in was some distance from the signal box where he had to work, and if you

have no feet, it's a lot of trouble and difficulty to get from one to the other and then home again. He made a trolley, which was a sort of little wheeled platform that he could put up on the train tracks and basically push himself along, but it's still slow and difficult work, you can imagine. So that was the situation, and then one Saturday morning in 1885, he was driving to town and saw a baboon driving an ox cart. This is a whole separate chapter of South African history. There were skirmishes between farmers and baboons in that area, and that meant that some baboons died,

and that meant there were some orphaned young baboons, and some of those would be adopted by humans. There's sort of this mixing of human and baboon society, which is fascinating in its own. So some of these baboons that were adopted were put to work as ox cart drivers, as railway laborers, and goat herds on farms, just doing simple human tasks, because baboons are smart and they're strong,

and apparently they're pretty reliable in doing some jobs. Wow, that's just kind of amazing to try to think about. Yeah, that right there is just amazing. So he saw a baboon driving an ox cart into town and thought, there's one smart baboon, maybe he can help me, and talked the baboon's owner into selling him. He at first was thinking that he would just use the baboon, train him to push him along in this trolley to get from his house to the signal box and back. Oh, I see. Which he did do.

But this was, Jack was the baboon's name. Turned out to be really smart and a quick learner, and so he wound up doing quite a bit more. This is a report from a railway superintendent named George Howe that appeared in a railway publication called The Railway Signal in September 1890. Jackie's up early and begins the day by carrying water and general housework. I don't know what the housework was. It's also reported that he tended a garden somewhere, which actually doesn't surprise me

if you hear everything else he did. They have an early breakfast and go to work. By this time, they had been working... When Howe wrote this article and sort of visited them to just witness all this, they had been working when, when Howe wrote this article and sort of visited them to, to just witness all of this. They had already been working together for five years. So James Wide had had five years to sort of train Jack to do all these things. By this time he'd trained Jack to get the trolley and wrestle it up onto the train tracks himself.

Then Wide would get on the trolley and Jack would push him along. They used to have a collie dog too, apparently. get on the trolley and Jack would push him along. They used to have a collie dog too, apparently. So he used to sit on the trolley and have a dog and a baboon push him along, but the collie got loose and was eventually killed by a train. So the job fell entirely to Jack eventually. They'd get to the signal box and Wide would get off and go into the signal box and Jack would wrestle the trolley off the tracks again by himself. They're like an old married couple at this point. And then, so at first that was just Jack's whole job was just to push him up and down the tracks.

He'd push him on the uphill grades and then jump aboard and they'd both ride down on the downhill grades, which apparently Jack loved. which apparently Jack loved. But as they spent time in the signal hut and with the baboon observing the man working these levers to shunt the trains back and forth, apparently Wide was able to train him to do the job. This is from Dorothy Chaney, who's a primatologist at the University of Pennsylvania from her book, Baboon Metaphysics.

Jack learned to perform Jumper's job as signalman by waiting patiently with Jumper in the signalman's hut and listening for the number of blasts from the approaching locomotive drivers. Each track was assigned a different number. If the driver gave one, two, or three blasts, Jack switched the signals in the appropriate manner, altering the direction of travel so that oncoming trains would not collide. If the driver gave four blasts, Jack collected the key to the coal shed and carried it out to the driver. His performance was so unerringly correct that he earned the name Jack the Signalman. Howe, the railway

superintendent who actually watched all this, says, Jack knows the signal whistle as well as I do, also every one of the levers. Another source says, the baboon's method of working the signals was a famous spectacle. This became obviously very famous around the country. He pulled the levers looking around to ensure that the

correct signals had been moved and then watched the approaching train catching the various offerings thrown to him by the country. He pulled the levers looking around to ensure that the correct signals had been moved and then watched the approaching train catching the various offerings thrown to him by the passengers. So they did this for years. They would sleep in White's house and then go to work together and do the job all day and then come home. Well, I like how it sounds like the train passengers are throwing him treats or something. Yeah, it was just successful. If you think about it, that's a huge responsibility even for a human being to get that right, to make sure the trains don't collide.

And he never made a mistake. From Cheney's book, this is the primatologist again. On one occasion, a prominent lady traveling from Cape Town to Port Elizabeth saw to her horror that the signals in the train yard were being changed by a baboon. Sentences like that make this whole job worthwhile. When executives in Cape Town received her indignant report, their first reaction was disbelief.

When she insisted that her account was true, they sent a delegation of inspectors to Utenhague. Jumper and Jack were dismissed from duty, but Jumper persuaded the inspectors that he and Jack could do the job. He challenged the inspectors to give Jack a rigorous test of his skills, and Jack passed with flying colors. He even looked in both directions each time a signal was changed, apparently checking to make sure that trains passing in the yard

would be on different tracks. From that day on, Jack the signalman received daily rations and was given an official employment number, and after a long and successful career, he died of tuberculosis finally in 1890. The interesting thing about the superintendent's report, this man who visited them and watched them five years after they'd been working together for five years, is their relationship. He says, I have only just returned from a visit to Jack. It was very touching to see his fondness for his master. As I drew near, they were both sitting on the trolley. The baboon's arm rounds his master's neck, the other stroking wide's face. At my approach, Jack jumped to the ground, but his strong love could not be restrained.

Now he was stroking Wide's face, then his hand, then with a touch as light as a woman's, brushing a speck of dust off his master's trousers, and the while keeping up an incessant chatter. Later that day, they had to go to a railway meeting, Wide and Howe, and they left Jack outside because they knew he'd be making too much noise. But when they came out, Jack started crying when he smelled his master approaching. And Howe wrote, The goodbye to Jack was an odd sight. A dark night, three or four railway hand lamps, a group of men and women to see them off.

The trolley on, I went to Jack to shake hands. He gazed on me for a second, undecided whether to give me his paw or his teeth, for the light seemed to annoy him. But no doubt the memory of certain lumps of sugar and a supply of cake arose before him, and I got his paw and a grunt. A word from his master and the strange pair disappeared into the darkness. Roger Webster wrote a collection of South African tales in 2005, and he says, And just in case anybody doubts the validity of this lovely story,

I quote an excerpt from a letter written by a Mr. H.W. Bidwell to Dr. Selma Scheuland, the then director of the Albany Museum. That's the second oldest museum in South Africa. I have succeeded in getting a promise from Mr. Wide here to send you the skin, etc., of the most distinguished baboon the world knows about. His fame has been publicized all over the world. I think that the animal would be a great attraction to your museum. And then he actually has a letter

too from Y, James Y the Bedroom's master himself, saying that he'd have much pleasure in forwarding the skin and also a pair of photographs showing Jack at work. And this is the only actual sentence I can get in Y's own words. He apparently didn't talk much. He says, I wish him to be mounted sitting in a chair with his

left hand resting on his knee as that was a favorite position of his when he was alive. Unfortunately, they couldn't do that because the skin was in such bad shape that they had to just send it back. But Jack's skull apparently is held in the Albany Museum. It's hard to know exactly which one it is because there are several baboon skulls, but one of them belongs to Jack. I don't know what happened to Wade after he lost Jack.

I mean, he's still unable to move about very well, and I just don't know what became of him. The Cape Mercury newspaper reported that he was left brokenhearted after he lost him. They'd worked together for nine years without a single accident. I mean, he was a model employee. They spent nine years together, which that's got to be one of the longest and most, I think, successful working relationships ever between a human and a baboon. We'll have links to our stories about Jack and Jumper and two photographs of them working at the signal box in our show notes.

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It's easy to use, but if you want help, they have a great support team that works around the clock. Plans start at $8 a month and include a free domain name if you sign up for a year. So start a trial with no credit card required and start building your website today. When you decide to sign up for Squarespace, go to squarespace.com slash closet and make sure to use the offer code closet to get 10% off your first purchase and show your support for Futility Closet. That's squarespace.com slash closet and remember to use the offer code closet. Squarespace, a better web starts with your website. website. John Raymond Godley eventually became a member of the British House of Lords, but he began his career as a journalist and author, and he got into that line of work in a very unusual way. He

had a series of dreams in the late 1940s in which he apparently dreamed the winners of a series of horse races. The story begins on Friday, March 8, 1946. He had just returned to Oxford after serving in the Royal Navy during World War II, so he was resuming his studies there and had an odd dream on that night. I'm getting this from his 1955 memoir called Living Like a Lord, and he begins the chapter with this. He says, let me say it once that I can offer no explanation, rational or irrational, for the facts which follow. I'm simply setting them down a true account of experiences without knowing what may be their significance. The dream he had that night was that he was reading the next

day's evening paper and he was able to read the racing results, including the names of all the winners. On waking up, he could remember two of the names of those horses. One was Bindle and the other was Julidin. These were actual real racehorses that he knew from his waking life. He was a racing enthusiast in real life. So it's not surprising that he knew those names. But when he went down to breakfast the next day, he found to his excitement and amazement that they were both engaged to run that afternoon. He told his friends, other undergraduates, about this coincidence. And they told him, of course, you have to bet on this race then, on both of them. And they pressed their own money on him to bet in their own names.

So he did this and both horses won, uh, which is amazing. He'd won altogether about 34 pounds and his friends had won about the same. He was pleased to have the money, but he was sort of kicking himself because in this dream, he had been able to read the names of the winner of every race that day. And it was only his own bad memory that had prevented him from remembering all of them and betting on all of them. So he started sleeping with a pencil and a pad of paper, just hoping it would happen again. And, of course, it didn't. Except that eventually it did on April 4th, about a month later, also in 1946. This time he was vacationing in Ireland in a remote village.

And he says, I sat up in bed, rubbed my eyes furiously and concentrated on remembering my dream. He'd woken up with the name Tubermore in his mind, which was not any horse he knew. It was just this strange word. He checked the papers and found no horse with a similar name running that day. But on an impulse the following day, he called it the postmistress and she checked and said there was a horse that day called tuberose which is only two letters off so he conferred with his brother and sister and they said just as his friends had you have to bet on this so he did tuberose won the race and they found out only afterward was a huge long shot he was running at 100 to 6 so they had won more than 62 pounds and he says uh that horse actually, after that race, never won another rent.

So he doesn't know what to make of this. He says it was possible to dismiss the matter as a coincidence when it happened the first time, that it should happen twice made me wonder deeply what it was all about. So he began to record his dreams again, and again they went nowhere, so he stopped recording them when he returned to Oxford. On July 28th, he had the third dream. He dreamed that he walked into the Randolph Hotel, he was smoking a cigarette,

walked into a phone booth, called his bookmaker, and when the clerk answered, he said, This is Mr. Godley. I wonder if you could tell me the result of the last race. And the clerk replied, Certainly, sir. Monumentor at 5 to 4. And he woke up with the name Monumentor in his head, forced himself to get out of bed and find a pencil and literally write it down.

And the next morning he bought a paper and found enough, found that there was a horse called Mentores that was running in the last race that afternoon. And he'd never heard of that horse either. At this point he was getting reluctant to involve his friends. He said, I revolted against the whole experience. I could not believe that the whole thing had any psychic or supernatural significance. It was all a grotesque and unbelievable coincidence. But he wanted to have witnesses in case this one came true as well.

So he told a few of his friends and then bet four pounds on Mentores. And there's an interesting wrinkle here. He could have just called his bookmaker to find out whether Mentores had won the race, but he thought it seemed important since he dreamed certain circumstances about how he had learned the result that he should reproduce those as much as possible to try to help the dream come true so at five o'clock he lit a cigarette walked into the randolph hotel and called his bookmaker he said this is mr godley i wonder if you could tell me the result of the last race and the clerk said certainly sir mentores at six to four.

So the horse had won. His dream prediction had gotten the odds a little bit wrong, but he's still doing it. It was very close, yeah. So if you're keeping score, at this point, he's had three dreams involving four horses, all of which have won. The next dream didn't occur for a year,

but this is the one that he says really changed his whole life. On the night of Friday, June 13th, 1947, he was again at Oxford, and now he had a dream that he was at the races, and he observed two things. In the first race, he could see that the winning horse was being ridden by a jockey named Edgar Britt, who was a real jockey that he knew from his waking life. And then immediately after that, the second race was underway, and people were shouting, the favorite wins, it's the bogey, the bogey. Apparently that was the name of the horse. And he woke up, that clamor woke him up with that name in his dream. So he checked the papers the next day and found enough,

sure enough, that Edgar Britt was riding the next day. He was riding a horse called Baroda Squadron. And in the following race, there was a horse engaged called the Brogue. So here's what he did. He wrote a full account of this whole dream including the current time he had it witnessed by a friend of his and her landlord and the landlord's wife then he went to a post office across the street put the statement in an envelope sealed it in the presence of the postmaster and who stamped it with the official time stamp and locked it up in the post office safe. The reason this changed his life is that he was still at university and wasn't sure what he wanted to do with his life, but he was leaning toward becoming a journalist. And the problem with that

was that he didn't think he would be able to start immediately on one of the big papers. He'd probably have to start on a smaller paper and work his way up. And that didn't appeal to him? No, but he was thinking, well, whatever this is that's happening to me, these coincidences, maybe it's interesting enough that I could interest some paper in letting me write a freelance story about this. And that could maybe lead to something or at least get me, you know, one published article. So he called the Daily Mirror and said, basically, hello, I appear to be dreaming the winners of horse races, and I think I know the names of two horses that are going to win this afternoon. They said, what are their names?

And he said, I'll tell you their names now if you promise to let me write a story about this if they win. They said, all right, and he told them the names, and both horses won. So that changes everything. Not only are his dream predictions now six for six, but the mirror gave him 25 pounds for the story and splashed it across their center pages. It was eight columns wide headlines said the strange dreams of Mr. John Godley.

So that made him momentarily famous in England, but then an agency picked it up and the same story ran the next day in the United States and later on in South Africa, Australia, France, Germany, and Switzerland. And a few weeks after that, apparently they liked his writing because the managing editor of the Daily Mirror called him back and offered him a full-time job as a journalist. So it was a real big break for him.

Yes, and that led to further jobs. I mean, that was the start of his whole journalism career. He writes, There can be no possible doubt that this was all a direct result of Baroda Squadron winning the four o'clock at Lingfield. As you can imagine, hundreds of people wrote in asking for his dreams about future races, and he didn't respond to any of those. He says if this were a fairy tale, his streak would have continued indefinitely. But in fact, the next dream he had turned out to be a bad prediction. In real life, he had bet on a horse named claro and on the night before that race he dreamed that he was in oxford and heard a loudspeaker announcing the results and he couldn't make out what the loudspeaker was saying but he stopped a man and asked can you tell me who won this race

and the man said yes claro won so when he woke up he doubled his real life stake on that horse and when the rice happened actually clara was nowhere near winning it was just a complete failure i mean the prediction was entirely wrong. In the book, he says, Although I do not want to make excuses for myself, I think it is fair to put this dream into a different category from the others, since it was the only one in which I knew beforehand that the dream horse was engaged, and above all, because I already wanted that horse to win.

I think it was a case of wishful dreaming. I badly needed those winnings and couldn't afford the tenor I lost. So make your own judgment about that, but we have to put the race into the lost column. Just a couple more of these. More than a year went by, and on January 15, 1949, it happened again. At this point, he's still working for the newspaper, and he dreamed his colleagues there were putting together the racing page, and he looked over someone's shoulder and saw that a horse named Tim McCrab was listed as one of the winners. He discovered the next day that that horse was indeed running in the fifth race, bet on it against a heavy favorite and won at four to one. And then the last example he gives in the book came about 27 days later. He had a dream involving

two horses, one named Pretense and one named Monk's Mistake. He bid on both of them pretty heavily, stood to win more than 1,000 pounds if the dream came true, and it sort of halfway did. Monk's Mistake lost, but Pretense won. So he showed a profit for the day of 44 pounds, but was somewhat disappointed that it wasn't as great as it could be. So those are all the examples he gives in the book, which was published six years later in 1955, at the end of that account, he says, make your own deductions, but accept my facts as true. They are. In the six

years which have gone by since then, it has never happened again. But in looking into this, I found that it actually did happen again. After he published the book in 1958, which I think is nine years after the last dream he had one more big and this was his most lucrative victory in 1958 he dreamed that a horse named What Man won the Grand National which is a big annual steeplechase event held in Liverpool

What Man was the name he dreamed the nearest horse he could find but a similar name was named Mr. What he backed that one and it came home at 18 to 1 I think that's all of them that's all the ones I can find out about could find, but a similar name was named Mr. What. He backed that one and it came home at 18 to 1. I think that's all of them. That's all the ones I can find out about. So if we add that to the list that's reported in the book, his full record, he'd altogether had eight dreams involving 11 horses, nine of them won and two of them lost. And he seems entirely flummoxed by the whole thing. And you can make up your own judgment about what you think actually happened there. I think it was probably just a huge

series of coincidences, but it was a pretty huge one. What I like about the whole tale, though, is that it jump-started his career as a journalist. So whatever you make of these coincidences, that in its own sense became a dream come true. We'll have a link to our post about Godley's horse racing dreams in our

show notes. about Godley's horse racing dreams in our show notes. 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 invent an emotive conjugation based on Bertrand Russell's I am firm, you are obstinate, he is a pig-headed fool. I was kind of tickled by this challenge so I wanted to try my own hand at it, and I came up with,

I am special. You are different. He is weird. I am overworked. You are busy. He is inefficient. But here are our favorite submissions from the listeners. Tanamu Namioka said, I am running circles around the rest. You are chasing your own tail. He is circling the drain. Jason Aaron sent in, I'm a realist.

You're a pessimist. He's a real Eeyore. Daryl Francis wrote, I observe. You stare. He leers. VST Mage gave us, I am resolute.

You are determined. He is a stubborn ass. And Paul Buddha sent in, I don't live life by other people's rules. You're disobedient. He's a law-breaking criminal. I really like all of these, but I think I like Paul's best at the bottom there. I don't live life by other people's rules. I really like that one. So, Paul, that's you. If you contact us, uh, we'll get you a book. One thing that I really liked about this week's challenge is that, um, to me, the best humor has like a grain of truth to it. And that's part of what makes it so funny. And I thought in this week's challenge, Bertrand Russell was really picking up on the fact that a lot of people do, uh, put the best spin on their own behavior. But then if other people do something

very similar, we don't grant them that same courtesy that we give ourselves. So we might see their behavior in a much worse light than we see our own. And this kind of reminded me of an effect in psychology called the actor-observer bias, where if you're the actor and you behave badly, you tend to look for situational excuses for yourself. So if you are short-tempered with somebody, you might think, well, my boss was just a real jerk to me today and I finally snapped, or I haven't been feeling well all day. So you have the situational excuse for why you behaved badly. But then if you observe somebody else doing a really similar behavior, you don't give them that same courtesy.

So you tend to impute their behavior to stable internal characteristics that they just have. So you see somebody else being short-tempered and you think, well, that person is just a real jerk. They're just really inconsiderate. And you don't stop and think, well, maybe they're having a bad day. It's a different attribution for the cause of the behavior. So if I cut someone off in traffic, I think, well, I just had a long day and I need to get home. But if they cut me off, I think he's just fundamentally a jerk and a bad person. Yeah. So wouldn't the world be just a nicer place if we'd all remember to... Yeah. I mean, it's good to know that because it makes you more charitable toward other people,

I guess, because you understand that they're all just probably behaving the way they are because of their immediate circumstances. But it's kind of unfortunate that we all walk around imputing these character flaws to each other. Speaking of human foibles, I think for this next week's challenge, we're going to ask, what are the craziest beliefs you had as a child? When I was a kid, I used to think L-M-N-O was one letter. H-I-J-K-L-M-N-O-P. Right. It made sense at the time.

This was inspired by a website called IUsedToBelieve.com that collects these things. And here are a few examples from that site. One person wrote, I thought it was illegal for women to use just for men hair coloring. Another said, I thought a contract killer was someone who kills people who break a contract. A third said, I used to believe that I could take a bath and talk into the water spout and anyone else taking a bath could hear me, which would be fantastic. And this last one I really liked. Walking at night, my four-year-old daughter kept staring at the moon above the trees.

I think the moon's following us, she said. Papa, you stay here. She walked about 100 feet, staring constantly at the moon. Then she stopped and called out, Papa, come here. I did, while she kept gazing at the moon. Then she stopped and called out, Papa, come here. I did, while she kept gazing at the moon. Then she said, no, it's not following us. It's following me. So send us your own crazy childhood beliefs by Saturday, May 17th.

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 an invisible student at Georgia Tech, a softball game played at the North Pole, and Lewis Carroll's proof that 2 times 2 equals 5. 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 show. You can also... You can just keep going. I'll leave it at that. 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 mental snacks, perfect for filling 5 minutes or 50.

If you'd like to support Futility Closet, as our cat Sasha is desperately trying to do, 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.