Futility Closet - 010-A Baboon Soldier, Lighthouse Rescues, and a Parliament of Owls

Episode Date: May 19, 2014

When Albert Marr joined the South African army in 1915, he received permission to bring along his pet baboon, Jackie. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll follow Jackie's adventures in England, Egypt, and Belgium, his work for the Red Cross after the war, and his triumphant return to Pretoria in 1919. We'll also meet a Rhode Island lighthouse keeper's daughter who saved the lives of 18 people over a period of 48 years, 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 10. 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 meet a baboon who served in the South African Army in World War I, follow a lighthouse keeper's daughter who saved a succession of 18 people from drowning in Newport Harbor in the 19th century, and present the next Futility Closet Challenge.

We have something new to mention today. You can help support the Futility Closet podcast by taking a short anonymous survey. It will take no more than five minutes. Your answers will help match our show with advertisers that best fit our listeners like you and allow us to keep making these podcasts. Listeners who complete the survey will be entered in an ongoing monthly raffle to win a $100 Amazon gift card. We promise not to share or sell your email address, and we won't send you email unless you win. So go to www.podsurvey.com slash futility.

That's www.podsurvey.com slash futility to take our survey and get your chance to win a $100 Amazon gift card. Utility to take our survey and get your chance to win a $100 Amazon gift card. In our last episode, we asked what people thought of Greg introducing himself as Greg Ross and calling me his wife and co-host Sharon. We do it this way for more of an informal feel, but one of our listeners thought that might sound like a slight. No one wrote in about whether or not they thought that is offensive, but one listener did note that it could sound a little unusual. Mike Cowley wrote in to say, I have to say that to this Gen X Australian it does a little, but more in an old-timey kind of way than with any undertone of disrespect. In another context, I'd be a little surprised to hear younger people introduce themselves that way, But in this country, it's still common for those older to use that form,

and I doubt that many would take offense. I did, however, recently hear someone introduce himself and his wife as Mr. and Mrs. Fuddy Stuffington, and that sounded seriously off. That's a really good point, Mike, that there's maybe this generational effect that we hadn't really thought of. The listener who had originally written in was from the UK, and it suggested that maybe it was a difference between the UK and the US. But really, there could be a generational issue here. I totally agree that I would not want to be called Mrs. Greg Ross, although certainly people older than me might consider

that perfectly natural and normal. I would much prefer to be called Sharon. And because I'm kind of an informal person, I guess I don't really stand on I need to be Sharon Ross. I guess there's also perhaps an assumption, and maybe it's generational, that if spouses are introducing themselves and only one last name is given, that's just because they share a last name. Maybe it is the case that people younger than us, so many women keep their last names these days, that it would be considered a little odd not to specify the woman's last name. I can see that. And that's, we don't know,

and since nobody else wrote in from other countries or from the U.S., now we're not sure if this is maybe a generational thing or a country thing. Or both. Or just us, or who knows. The original letter writer had suggested that it was maybe sexist and that I would never think or we would never think of having me say, I'm Sharon Ross and this is my husband, Greg. And I actually don't think that that's true. I don't think this is a sexist issue. I would feel perfectly comfortable with saying I'm Sharon

Ross and this is my husband, Greg. And I'd feel okay if you said it. Yeah. So I don't think it's that at all. So we're kind of curious as to whether maybe it's a generational thing that we missed. That could be. Mike goes on in his email to say, I'm also curious as to whether Sharon has any input into the website and other futility closet activities since she's not mentioned anywhere that I could see. That's a good point. We'd assumed that most of the listeners of this podcast would be coming from Greg's website and hadn't really thought about how the podcast might seem to people who were coming through other sources or other avenues. Yeah, the podcast became a lot more popular than we expected. Yeah. When we were

planning this, we thought that most of the audience would be people who were familiar with Futility Closet from the website and the book. And it's gotten a lot more traffic. We've had more than 100,000 downloads on every episode. So there are a lot of people who are listening to the podcast

who've never heard of Futility Closet and we're still sort of adjusting to take account of that. Right. And we also originally thought the audience would be much smaller for the podcast than it's been. And we could figure this out as we went along before a very small group of people, before

we had to make so many mistakes in front of big groups of people. So for those who aren't familiar with the whole Futility Closet history, basically Greg started it as a hobby website about nine years ago, and it was entirely his thing. It started to grow over the years, took up more and more of his time, but it was still mostly his thing. I contributed in minor ways or provided minor assistance here and there, but he was really the creative force behind it entirely. And then last year he put out a book, and it was the same kind of thing. It was mostly his project, and I just helped in some small

ways where I could. So if you do look on the website or in the book, you'll really see Greg's name, except for a very nice acknowledgement to me in the book that I very much appreciated. But then more recently, when we started trying to make Futility Closet into a more self-sustaining enterprise and do this as a full-time thing, then I sort of started taking on a much more active role. I got recruited to help co-host these podcasts, and I started taking over many of the business functions. Yeah, which has been invaluable. But a lot of that's more behind the scenes. So people that were familiar with Futility Closet would have certainly known Greg's name and were probably wondering who I was when I suddenly showed up on these podcasts. But hopefully that explains a little bit more about why we also we set up the

podcast so that Greg introduces the episodes also by introducing his website and explaining his website. Because that's he is the creator of that. And then he introduces me as the co-host of the episodes. Yeah. That's just sort of how we conceived it because it was in our minds in the beginning, it was sort of an adjunct to the website and now we're trying to sort of conceive it as its own thing now, I think. Yeah. So those were excellent questions and comments, Mike. We really appreciate you writing in. If anyone else has any questions or comments, you can write to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com or leave a comment in the show notes at blog.futilitycloset.com.

This week we bring you an auxiliary baboon. Last week we talked about a baboon in South Africa who served as assistant signalman on a railway line. And this week we have another baboon who accompanied his master through World War I. This one is also from South Africa, and this one was named Jackie. Apparently all baboons are named Jack. Maybe just all South African baboons are named Jack. Yes, I shouldn't overgeneralize. And he began as a pet of that family, the Mar family family, who lived on the outskirts of Pretoria.

And one of the sons, Albert Marr, joined the South African Army in 1915. He asked for permission to bring along his baboon, and they said yes. And I can't get any more details about that. He just said, hey, I have a baboon. Apparently it's just a matter of asking. I would like to bring my baboon. And so he became, Jackie became the mascot of the 3rd South African Infantry Brigade and traveled all over the place.

They went to England first where they did none of this by half measures. They fitted the baboon with a special uniform and cap. And then the two of them headed to North Africa where they fought in Egypt. Albert was wounded there on February 26, 1916. And Jackie, while they were waiting for the stretcher to come, Jackie licked the wound just as a way of making a contribution, which made him a great favorite with the other soldiers. He was more than just a mascot, though. He had acute eyesight and hearing, and so when Albert was on guard duty,

if he heard or saw something, he could chatter and kind of tug at Albert's sleeve, which is apparently useful on some occasions. According to the South African Military Veterans Organization of Australasia, Jackie wore his uniform with panache, would light up a cigarette or pipe for a pal, and always saluted an officer passing on his rounds. He would stand at ease when requested, placing

his feet apart and hands behind his back in regimental style. At the mess table, he used a knife and fork in a proper manner and cleverly used his drinking basin. And this is true. At least some of this is documented in photographs. I've got photos of him saluting and this wonderful photo, which I guess I'll put in the show notes,

of him eating with a knife and fork in uniform. Oh, wow. And he has this sort of regal bearing. It's hard to describe. He looks like a soldier. He looks, you know, sort of cultivated and thoughtful and looks like no one has ever mentioned to him that he's a baboon. He just regards himself as a soldier. I'll put it in the show notes. In April 1918, they were in Belgium

and being shelled pretty badly. And Jackie was finally wounded in both the arm and the leg, pretty badly in the leg. Lieutenant Colonel R.N. Wood's End of the Royal Medical Corps wrote, It was a pathetic sight. The little fellow carried by his keeper lay moaning in pain, the man crying his eyes out in sympathy. You must do something for him. He saved my life in Egypt. The baboon was badly wounded, the left leg hanging with shreds of muscle, another jagged wound in the right arm. But they fixed him. They wound up amputating the leg,

but he seemed to function perfectly well without it. And when the war came to an end, the pair of them arrived in England, where Jackie became a celebrity, and the army asked him and Albert to support the Red Cross, collecting money for sick and wounded soldiers. So that occupied them until April 1919, when Jackie was officially discharged. On his arm he wore one gold wound stripe and three blue service chevrons indicating three years of frontline service, and he received a parchment discharge paper, a military pension, and a civil employment form for discharged soldiers. So they went back in great ceremony to South Africa where there were parades for them,

and in Praetoria Jackie received the Praetoria Citizen's Service Medal. Jackie died in 1921, and Albert lived all the way into 1973 when he passed away at the age of 84. What strikes me about both this story, the monkey soldier and the monkey signalman, is that when you read the accounts about them from people at the time, you get the feeling that it didn't strike them as really that remarkable. It's as if someone had brought his dog with him for service. You know, it's unusual, but it's not just astonishing. Right. So these are the only stories I know. But if anyone else knows of any stories about baboons and humans, I'd be interested to

get them, especially from this time period, because it seems like there was so much mixing between the populations that I imagine there are a lot of other stories like this. It's just interesting to see the relationship, the really close relationship that the baboons had with their humans. Yeah. It's really nice. Yeah, it's nice to see. Be sure to check out our show notes to see photos of Jackie and Albert

at blog.futilitycloset.com. 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 a wonderful collection of fascinating nonsense and the most useless book you absolutely need to own. I spent this week becoming righteously indignant on behalf of a woman who died a hundred years ago. Her name was Ida Lewis, and she was the daughter of a lighthouse keeper in Rhode Island in the middle of the 19th century. And the reason she's famous today is for a series, a long series of rescues she made in Narragansett Harbor while she lived there tending the light. 18 are documented, 18 different rescues. And it may be substantially

more than that because she never told anybody about any of them. Every rescue she did was always brought to public attention by someone else. So there may be cases where she rescued someone, she never told anyone, and if the rescued party didn't tell someone and there were no witnesses, they're just entirely dogmatic. The reason that I'm kind of irate on her behalf is that I think a lot of these rescues, the people she rescued were somewhat ungrateful. And when news that she was doing this finally came to light 11 years after she started, to my mind, the character of the public adulation she got was sort of officious and unsympathetic and ceremonial when what she needed was real help because her own actual daily life was quite difficult. There are so many rescues that I literally, there's not time

to go through all of them, but I want to go through the first few just to give you a feel for what it's like. The first one, she was only 16 years old. It was September 4th, 1858. Four private school classmates were out horsing around on the harbor, and one of them climbed up the mast and managed to capsize the vessel. So they were clinging to the hull, and she rode out and pulled them in one by one. She said later, we have only one life to live and when our time comes, we've got to go. So it doesn't matter how. I never thought of danger when people needed help, but at such times you're busy

thinking of other things. Those boys she saved on that day were very appreciative. And in fact, one of them would serve as a pallbearer for her funeral 53 years later. So that one's fine. But the second rescue is more in the character of what she typically faced. The way the harbor is set up, if you picture just a harbor with a rock in the middle with a lighthouse on it, it was called Lime Rock.

That's where she is. On one side of the harbor is Fort Adams, which is a military fortification full of soldiers. And on the other side of the harbor is the town of Newport, Rhode Island. So what would unfortunately tend to happen is soldiers from the fort would go into Newport, get drunk, and then need to get back to the fort. There's two ways to get back. If you're sober, you'll tend to want to just walk around the harbor safely. If you're drunk enough, what you'll do instead is borrow someone's boat, start paddling

across, and if you're unlucky, capsize it and need rescuing. And that's what happened in February 1866 to three drunk soldiers. Two of them drowned, and one of them had his foot caught. His foot had gone through the bottom of the boat, so it was caught there as the boat was sinking. So she rode out to him, managed to get him into her boat, but wrenched her back in the process. She took him back to the lighthouse where she lived and her family did, where he was fed and given a change of clothing. Her back took more than a year to heal. She never heard from the soldier again, and he never returned the clothing. She never spoke of either of these two rescues to anybody.

The third rescue was less than a year later. Three Irish farmhands were driving a sheep along Main Street in Newport when it broke away and somehow plunged into the water. Uh, so these three men who were driving it stole Ida's brother's skiff and rode out to it and then capsized the skiff. So she had to row out there, uh, and rescued, uh, them and got a rope around the sheep's neck and towed it to shore. Oh, so she even saved the sheep. Yeah, and that's another sort of unfortunately ungrateful episode.

The farmhands were appreciative, but she never heard from them again, nor from the owner of the sheep, which was a rich Newport banker named August Belmont, or received any compensation for saving this prized sheep's life. One more that I think is illustrative, the fourth rescue. Two weeks later, these are coming pretty quickly now. At midnight, a sailboat struck a rock in shallow water and lodged there as a storm came on, and the sailor clung to that wreck for hours. Ida's mother got up at 6 a.m. to check the lantern and saw him out there. So Ida, she roused Ida, who rode out to him, hauled him into the boat, and was heading for the lighthouse, and he told her,

no, just take me to the wharf. So she did that. He left without thanking her, and she never heard from him again. And then to add insult to injury, some weeks later she got a note from the owner of the sailboat that had been wrecked, and instead of thanking her, he said he would gladly have given her $50 if she had let the man drown. Apparently he had stolen the boat. Oh, wow.

So it just gets worse and worse. $50 if she had let the man drown. Apparently he had stolen the boat. Wow. So it just gets worse and worse. Also, I should say, often the boats that people are taking to try to get across the harbor, often that was Ida's brother's boat. He just kept it there. So that makes the whole thing even worse. Often she was having to save people's lives who had stolen her brother's boat and then capsized it in the middle of the harbor. So it's all quite hard to take. Anyway, up to that point, which is 1867, that's four rescues of multiple people. And she hasn't told a soul that she's been doing all this. She just goes out and saves them and goes back to her duties. Her father took the appointment as lighthouse keeper when she was 12, but he had a pretty debilitating stroke shortly afterward. So he's mostly disabled now. So on top of rescuing people, she's also

maintaining the lighthouse and taking care of her family. She has her disabled father, her mother, and three younger siblings. So she's got a lot to handle, even apart from the rescues. The fifth rescue took place on March 29th, 1869. And this is the one that really changed things for her because this is the one that made her famous, ultimately. Two men who turned out to be soldiers from the fort had hired a 14-year-old boy to steer them across the cove to Fort Adams. It capsized, the boy drowned, but she and her younger brother rode out in a storm to pull them in. Those were two soldiers who, when they got back to the fort, finally, you know, mentioned to people who had saved them and word got out. And so reporters started coming to interview Ida and basically her fame quickly spread as being this woman who was rescuing people

in Narragansett Harbor. So then everything changed very quickly. That summer, Newport declared July 4th Ida Lewis Day. 4,000 people turned out, and she was very self-effacing and modest and too embarrassed to talk about this stuff publicly. She was 27 years old at that point. To her, rescues were just part of the job. She said, if there were some people out there who needed help, I would get into my boat and go to them even if I knew I couldn't get back. Wouldn't you?

there who needed help, I would get into my boat and go to them even if I knew I couldn't get back. Wouldn't you? She was compared a lot to Grace Darling, who was sort of a similar situation in England. Grace Darling was the daughter of an English lighthouse keeper who had accompanied her father out to help some victims of a shipwreck in 1838. So it's much the same situation. And Grace Darling was a national hero in England and world famous for doing that. So from this point on, she's still got all the responsibilities I described before, she's still rescuing people. And now she's got to contend with almost constant public attention from people who are just curious about her or who I guess are well intentioned, but are still taking up a lot of time that she doesn't have away from her duties and not really offering any meaningful assistance

to her. Later that summer, 1869, after a women's rights convention in Newport, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton visited her, and Stanton later wrote, although our young heroine was busy at the washtub, she promptly made her appearance apologizing for her dress. She said she was obliged to work and had so many visitors that she could not always be dressed to receive them. In one day, she told us she had 300 calls. She's modest, unaffected, and seems surprised rather than pleased with the amount of attention she is just now receiving. And I think that's really the truth. I should make it clear here.

She herself did not complain at all, as far as I can tell. I'm sort of complaining on her behalf because I think somebody ought to, but she was very forbearing and gracious about all this. But if it's people just showing up just because she's famous and they just want to see this famous person, and as you say, they're not doing anything that in any way actually improves or helps her life. Right. They're just interruptions and distractions. And if she is really modest, it might just be embarrassing. Yeah. The people who, to my mind, they fall into two classes, the people who sort of interrupted her,

the famous people and then just ordinary people who wanted to meet her. The famous people go right to the top, including Ulysses Grant, the newly elected 18th president who came to Newport and interviewed her there. And I think, I'm not saying that he was trying to capitalize on association with her. I think he genuinely did admire her and wanted to thank her for what she had done. But with at least some of these people, you sort of, I sort of get the impression that people wanted to advance their own fortunes somewhat by

associating with someone who was so widely admired. Maybe I'm being cynical. I don't think I am. William Tecumseh Sherman came out and sat on the rock for nearly an hour asking her questions about her life and saying he was glad to get to such a peaceful place. This is one I like. The Secretary of the Treasury, a man named George Boutwell. He said he came purposely to thank me personally for saving the life of a soldier from Fort Adams because the light, meaning the lighthouse, was in his department and he was proud to have a woman in his department who was not finicky about getting her hair wet. A lot of these things have sort of this undertone, at least to modern ears of real condescension. Wow. So that's the president and the secretary of the treasury. The vice president, Grant's vice president, Charlotte Colfax, also came down, and this is

just as bad. He asked whether she was engaged, and as it happens, she was. And he said that was unfortunate because it meant that when she got married, she would take her husband's name, and she had gotten famous with her maiden name, Ida Lewis, and she would lose that. He just assumed that her fame was important to her. She told him, if I should ever marry, no hope of personal gain will ever make me a party to even a conventional deceit. When I get a husband, I will bear his name and no other. Let the world forget me as it will. So she's managing this whole family and maintaining a lighthouse and saving people

and lecturing the Secretary of the Treasury on proper humility. So those are the famous people, or at least some of them. The ordinary people, I think, are even worse. In the summer of, this is the same summer, 1869, her father said he counted between 9,000 and 10,000 visitors who In the summer of, this is the same summer, 1869, her father said he counted between 9,000 and 10,000 visitors who traveled to Lime Rock to meet the heroine and said there were probably not 20 who compensated her for the trouble they gave. She told reporters that on a given day she would shake upwards of 600 hands.

The Boston Journal wrote, quote, people would land on the rock, prowl over the house, quiz the family, pry into household affairs, patronizingly ask the age of each person and what they lived on and how they felt when Ida was saving souls. She would trustingly lend photos and memorabilia to people who promised they would bring them back and she'd never see them again. People would call out, Ida, Ida, come save me, and then laugh when she took the call seriously.

Many visitors would just come. They wouldn't even come out to the rock where the lighthouse was. They would just come to the shore of the harbor and expect her to row out and pick them up and this wasn't just 1869 it had become an annual thing every summer she'd just have this onslaught of curiosity seekers and was very

again I'm the one doing the complaining here she was gracious as she could be and spared as much time as she could for this she gave tours and answered questions she just saw this as part of the job. And she was constantly showered with these ridiculous presents. The Chicago White Sox gave her a pair of white lace stockings, which the Boston Journal called a perfectly useless gift, and made the point that they said that the salary of a harbor lighthouse keeper is not too much. Of cash, she has very little, and flowers and canary birds were not

of much value. She was still struggling at this point to be formally recognized as the lighthouse keeper. When her father had died, the duties of that office had sort of devolved onto her, but she hadn't been formally appointed, which means she didn't have the security or, frankly, respect that came with that. That was apparently the case with a lot of daughters and wives of lighthouse keepers, that they would just sort of have to take over the job when the father died. But wouldn't be formally recognized for it. Yeah, she finally was. Ambrose Burnside became a senator and helped her. She finally achieved that in 1878, but only after many years of pressing for it. There's one really dramatic further rescue that I have to talk about

because she was recognized finally for that by the federal government. On February 4th, 1881, this is more drunk soldiers, I'm afraid. At this point, the harbor is ice covered, and they were trying to cross it on foot, but they got onto thin ice and fell through. Ida grabbed a clothesline and ran out to them and threw the line out to them and told them, you can't both grab the line at the same time. We have to do this one at a time. They both grabbed it and pulled her in, pulled her onto the thin ice,

and she fell through. She weighed 103 pounds. She can't pull two men out. So she struggled her way back out to the thick ice, climbed it out, pulled one man out of the ice, and by this time her brother joined her and they got the other one out. But that was such a dramatic rescue that Congress recognized her for services to humanity. They had, in 1874, established this medal for life-saving

medal. They called it the life-saving medal of the first class, and she was the first woman to win it. Treasury Secretary William Wyndham wrote, is an occasion for added satisfaction that such a memorial of unquestionable heroism should have been won by a woman, which is another sort of condescending dig, I think. She had said elsewhere, anyone who thinks it is unfeminine to save lives Good for her. There was one man who seems to have gotten and really appreciated what she had done, and it's her attitude toward it, who was a Navy lieutenant, F.E. Chadwick, who sort of administered a lot of the affidavits and conducting the paperwork necessary to award the medal. And one of the things he said at the formal presentation was, I would preface this by here recording the great modesty which Mrs. Lewis has shown in relation to her noteworthy acts. She has kept no personal records of what she has done, has preserved none

of the many laudatory newspaper notices which have frequently appeared regarding her, knew scarcely any of the dates of her actions, and in most instances did not know the names even of the men she had saved. This very unusual disregard for the causes of her distinction was brought to light in the investigations necessary to make an authentic report of her many rescues to the lighthouse port. In other words, it was only at this point that they were finally realizing how much of this rescuing she had been doing and how little account of it she herself had taken.

She just thought it was part of the job. It was just something she did. So it's only at this point, which is very late in the game, that they got her to sit down with her mother and the two of them put their heads together and made as good an account as they could of the many rescues she had made. And that's where the formal number 18 comes from, of the ones they could document for these affidavits. But as I say, there could be many more that just didn't have witnesses and that she didn't

remember. The last rescue comes in 1906 when two of her friends were rowing out to see her. One of them stood up to adjust her skirts and fell overboard and couldn't swim. So Ida rode out and rescued her. At that point, Ida was 63 years old. There's a further rescue that's not one of the documented 18 that happened three years later when five girls fell off a skip that capsized. At that point, Ida was 66. In 1906, an act of Congress incorporated the American Cross of Honor to recognize one person each year who rendered the most heroic services saving lives. She received it the very next year, and it dubbed her the bravest woman in America. She finally died in 1911, and there was a huge, you can imagine, outpouring of respect at the funeral. Spillover from the attendants extended 75 yards in either direction,

and the funeral procession included two carriages overflowing with floral arrangements. So people did appreciate her. It's just you were saying they didn't appreciate her in a way that was helpful and was actually often an act of hindrance to her. I can't find any record that anyone ever just went to her and said, how can we repay you? What do you need? How can we actually help you?

They gave her a rowboat at one point. It was the one thing in the world that they knew she didn't need, but it just seemed somehow symbolically appropriate to give to someone like that. You know what I mean? Right. So people just treated her the way they wanted to treat her, the way that made them feel good or happy, without any regard for what would have been helpful to her. Yeah. No one seemed to

treat her like a real human being who had her own... She had a very difficult life on top of that and could have used a lot of help. She was just a public figure and everybody thought they owned her because of that. Yeah. Which just makes me... These are the values that we say we want to uphold, that we want to admire in other people. People genuinely admire this. She, you know, we tell our children this, if someone needs help, go and help them, but don't expect recognition or reward for it. She spent her whole life living out that lesson and wasn't very well treated

in return, I think. There's one enigma at the end of this that I just think is interesting. I'm getting most of the story from Lenore Schumel's 2002 biography called The Keeper of Lime Rock, which mentions at the end that I mentioned that there was an English lighthouse keeper's daughter named Grace Darling who had participated in a rescue of some shipwrecked sailors in 1838. And when Ida Lewis died, there was a framed picture of Grace Darling's gravesite over her bed. And we don't know much about that. It's interesting to me because Ida

basically spent her life sort of modestly effacing, you know, any credit for these many rescues. But I think it did mean something to her. She felt a kinship, maybe, with Grace Darling. So she didn't express that publicly much, but I think it did have a lot of significance to her privately. We'll have images of Ida Lewis and the Lime Rock Lighthouse in our show notes. Now for our weekly challenge. Each week we give you a creative challenge where you can compete for a copy of our book.

Last week's challenge asked you to share the crazy beliefs you had as a child. Here are a few of our favorites. Anna Moreno wrote in, When I was a child, four or five, I can't remember, I used to look up to my dad. He was my prime example of a grown-up human being. One day I was just staring at him while waiting for something and I thought he wasn't breathing. It was kind of hard to tell at that age because 75% of the time I saw him, he was wearing a suit. So I used to believe that grown-ups didn't have the need to breathe. I went through training methods to teach myself how to live without breathing.

I got tired of that training pretty quickly. I imagine. Paul Buddha wrote in, decoration. It wasn't until I was in my teens that I finally realized that parsley is edible. That belief must have scarred me because even now I instinctively hesitate before eating something with parsley in it. Rachel Richards wrote, my dad and I shared a lot of stargazing moments in which he would point out various constellations and astral objects. I enjoyed it a lot until he told me about the massive gravity on Jupiter, especially the great red spot that pulls in nearby objects. I became terrified as a child that I would be sucked into Jupiter. And Cliff Hendon said,

When I would go to a restaurant when I was young, the hot food would come to the table and people would automatically shake salt onto it. I therefore made the conclusion that the salt made the food cool down. The more I put it on, the faster I could eat it. I like all of those. I especially like the last one because it makes, all of them make sense. I mean, you can sort of see why a kid would think that.

But the salt either, I don't think I ever believed that, but I know someone else has told me that. I think that might be a fairly common one because it makes so much sense. Some of these, I think, are just universal. I think one of them is that if you hear a song on the radio, that means that the band is performing it live at the radio station. Everybody believes that. Oh, okay. But I think I'll pick Cliff's then. So Cliff, you're the winner this week. If you can contact us and send us your mailing address, we'll send you a copy of the Futility

Closet book. For this week's challenge, I'd like to look at collective nouns. These are also called terms of venery or nouns of assemblage. They're basically terms for groups of animals. The one that a lot of people have heard of is that a group of crows is sometimes called a murder. These arose originally from the hunting traditions of the Middle Ages, and I've always thought they're just beautifully poetic. A group of crocodiles is called a basque. A group of rhinoceroses is a crash. A parliament of owls, a leap of leopards, a convocation of eagles. A group of ravens is called an unkindness. So crows is a murder and ravens are an unkindness.

Yeah. Nobody likes blackbirds. So we're thinking maybe we could do something more useful than just hunting terms with that. Here's something I came up with that we could use in everyday conversation. A frenzy of tweeters, a grasp of bankers, and a parcel of politicians. So make up your own collective nouns. Maybe you have a better idea for what we should call tweeters or bankers or politicians or any other group that you want to think of.

Send your entries to us by Saturday, May 24th. 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 shark that disgorged a human arm in Australia's Coogee Aquarium in 1935, a man who sold the Eiffel Tower for scrap in 1925, and the meaning of Gone Goozler. That's it for this episode. You can see our show notes at blog.futilitycloset.com, where you can leave comments or feedback, ask questions, and see the links and images mentioned in today's episode. You can also email us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. If you enjoy

Futility Closet, be sure to look for the book on amazon.com or check out the website at futilitycloset.com where you can sample over 7,000 intellectual treats perfect for filling five minutes or 50. If you'd like to support Futility Closet, you can tell your friends about us, leave a review of the book or a 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.