Futility Closet - 017-An Aircraft Carrier Made of Ice

Episode Date: July 7, 2014

In 1943 German submarines were devastating the merchant convoys carrying supplies to Britain. Unable to protect them with aircraft or conventional ships, the resource-strapped Royal Navy considered an outlandish solution: a 2-million-ton aircraft carrier made of ice. In this episode of the Futility Closet podcast we follow the strange history of the project, which Winston Churchill initially praised as dazzling but which ended in ignominy at the bottom of a Canadian lake. We'll also discover a love pledge hidden for 200 years in the heart of a Yorkshire tree and puzzle over the deaths of two men in a remote cabin. Our segment on Project Habbakuk is based chiefly on L.D. Cross' 2012 book Code Name Habbakuk. In the photo above, research workers cut ice and form it into beams on Lake Louise near the Chateau Lake Louise resort hotel in 1943. Our post on the Yorkshire inscription appeared on Dec. 18, 2009. Sources for the podcast segment: John Lindley, The Theory and Practice of Horticulture, 1855, citing the Gardener's Chronicle of 1841. "Redcarre, a Poor Fysher Towne," in the Journal of Horticulture and Practical Gardening, Aug. 4, 1870. "Local Writers and Local Worthies: William and Cholmley Turner," in William Hall Burnett, Old Cleveland: Being a Collection of Papers, 1886. Kazlitt Arvine, Cyclopaedia of Anecdotes of Literature and the Fine Arts, 1856. Here's the illustration from Lindley: The inscription reads: THIS TRE LOVNG TIME WITNES BEARE OF TOW LOVRS THAT DID WALK HEA RE Thomas Browne's poem "The Lovers to Their Favourite Tree" appears in his Poems on Several Occasions, from 1800:   Long the wintry tempests braving, Still this short inscription keep; Still preserve this rude engraving, On thy bark imprinted deep: This tree long time witness bear, Two true-lovers did walk here.   By the softest ties united, Love has bound our souls in one; And by mutual promise plighted, Waits the nuptial rite alone-- Thou, a faithful witness bear, Of our plighted promise here.   Tho' our sires would gladly sever Those firm ties they disallow, Yet they cannot part us ever -- We will keep our faithful vow, And in spite of threats severe, Still will meet each other here.   While the dusky shade concealing, Veils the faultless fraud of love, We from sleepless pillows stealing, Nightly seek the silent grove; And escaped from eyes severe, Dare to meet each other here.   Wealth and titles disregarding (Idols of the sordid mind), Calm content true love rewarding, In the bliss we wish to find.— Thou tree, long time witness bear, Two such Lovers did walk here.   To our faithful love consenting (Love unchang'd by time or tide), Should our haughty sires relenting, Give the sanction yet deny'd; 'Midst the scenes to mem'ry dear, Still we oft will wander here.   Then our ev'ry wish compleated, Crown'd by kinder fates at last, All beneath thy shadow seated, We will talk of seasons past; When, by night, in silent fear, We did meet each other here.   On thy yielding bark, engraving Now in short our tender tale, Long, time's roughest tempest braving, Spread thy branches to the gale; And, for ages, witness bear, Two True-lovers did walk here.   Browne writes, "There are likewise other letters, which seem to be the initial of the Lover's names, who appear to have frequented the solitary spot where the tree has grown, to vent the effusions of their mutual passion, and to enjoy the pleasure of each other's conversation sequestered and unobserved." The other writers don't mention this. Frances Cornford's triolet "To a Fat Lady Seen From the Train" appeared in her volume Poems in 1910: O why do you walk through the fields in gloves, Missing so much and so much? O fat white woman whom nobody loves, Why do you walk through the fields in gloves, When the grass is soft as the breast of doves And shivering-sweet to the touch? O why do you walk through the fields in gloves, Missing so much and so much? G.K. Chesterton's response, "The Fat Lady Answers," appeared in his Collected Poems of 1927: Why do you rush through the field in trains, Guessing so much and so much? Why do you flash through the flowery meads, Fat-head poet that nobody reads; And why do you know such a frightful lot About people in gloves and such? Many thanks to Doug Ross for the music in this episode. If you have any questions or comments you can reach us at [e-mail]. Thanks for listening!

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 8,000 curiosities in history, language, mathematics, literature, philosophy, and art. You can find us online at futilitycloset.com. Thanks for joining us. Welcome to Episode 17. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. In today's show, we'll learn how the Royal Navy planned to build an aircraft carrier out of ice during World War II, rediscover an inscription carved on an English tree by two lovers in 1555, and puzzle over the deaths of two men in a remote cabin.

I've been reading this week about Project Habakkuk, which is this half-crazy idea during World War II by the British Navy to build an aircraft carrier out of ice. Out of ice. Well, mostly out of ice. I'll get into that. I say half-crazy because they really were in a desperate situation because of German submarines, which were continually torpedoing convoys of supply ships that were trying to come across the North Atlantic. Churchill said later, the only thing that really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril. Britain's obviously an island nation and depends on imported goods for the just regular daily life there. But during the war, they needed lots of it, more than a million tons a week. And the problem was that the Allies didn't have any way.

They couldn't spare ships to protect these convoys that were coming across with goods, and there were no bases, air bases for land-based planes that had enough range to get to the area where the, you know, there was a certain area of the Atlantic where they just couldn't summon any power to oppose the submarines. Okay.

So in July 1942 alone, 142 ships were sunk. It was a major problem. So Lord Mountbatten started actively encouraging scientists to pursue novel ideas and just said, propose anything you can come up with, even if it's sort of outlandish, just because we really have to solve this problem. And they got what I think was a pretty outlandish suggestion from an interesting man named Jeffrey Pike, who was, I guess you'd call him an idea man. He came up with all kinds of very unusual proposals for all different kinds of problems during the war, but he had no technical training. He was an academic and a journalist and an educator.

So he was better at coming up with these sort of grand, quirky ideas than he was at really estimating how well they could be realized. His idea was to use an iceberg. He said, we can't spare the steel to actually build a ship, but if we can enlist this sort of free-floating big body out in the sea, fit it with engines, flatten the top, then we can drive it around and hopefully launch planes off the top surface of it. That was his proposal. The nice advantage of using ice, he said, was it won't attract magnetic mines, and also it might be useful later on as the Allies were planning what would become the D-Day invasion,

the invasion of the European continent. They could use them for that as well. So he wrote up this long, detailed proposal to do this, gave it to Mountbatten. Mountbatten gave it to Churchill, who really liked it. Churchill wrote in a response to the original proposal, wrote a memo in December 1942 saying, I attach the greatest importance to the prompt examination of these ideas. The advantages of a floating island or islands, if only used as refueling depots for aircraft, are so dazzling that they do not at the moment need to be discussed. There would be no difficulty in finding a place to put such a stepping stone in any of the plans

of war now under consideration. And that, the word dazzling there is, I think, unwittingly well chosen. Churchill was so desperate to find some kind of good workable solution that I think there's some element of wishful thinking in here. Because already on the face of it, this sounds like kind of an iffy idea. And he was really pressing hard for it and had to be convinced eventually that it wouldn't work. Part of the problem for that is that Pike, Jeffrey Pike, the one who'd proposed this, as I say, didn't have the technical training to really estimate whether it was possible to put it into...

To actually do it, yeah. But apparently must have had a lot of either charisma or confidence or something because he was really, his manner at least, seemed to sell the leaders on this quite well. But he had a lot of ideas that didn't really go anywhere. One is, I'm getting some of this from L.D. Cross's book, Code Name Habakkuk. She says, Pike proposed many uses for ice in what he called super-cooled water, water that had been chilled below freezing but still remained liquid. It could be streamed out of cannon tubes at high pressure

onto vehicles and armies to immobilize them immediately, or be used to quickly construct ice roads for tanks and troops. Pike had no idea how to make supercooled water, but that was just one of those pesky practical details that kept popping up. That's a good example of the kinds of things that Pike was coming up with. They're very imaginative, but he doesn't really seem quite to know whether they can actually work. So he just assumes, if I come up with a great idea, I'll leave it to somebody else to figure out how to realize this. Yeah, and it's only much later that the engineers start getting into it and say, this can't possibly work, which is sort of what happened here. Also, he was a good advocate for these things. The name Habakkuk comes from an Old Testament prophet who said,

Behold ye among the heathen, and regard and wonder marvelously, for I will work a work in your days which you will not believe that would be told you, which sounds very impressive but doesn't actually really quite say anything. He just wanted the whole thing to sound very impressive. Also, they misspelled Habakkuk. In the Bible, Habakkuk's name is spelled with one B and three Ks, and they immediately in the project spelled it with two Bs and two Ks, which sort of sets the tone for the whole thing. Churchill said at the beginning of this whole project, the scheme is only possible if we make nature do nearly all of the work for us and use as raw material seawater and low temperature. The scheme will be destroyed if it involves the movement of very large numbers of men and a heavy tonnage of steel or concrete to

the remote recesses of the Arctic night, which, as we'll see, is eventually what happened. It just became, the original idea wouldn't work, and they had to keep shoring it up with additions and expensive measures to help see it through, and it just became obviously too expensive to work. In the beginning, Pike had envisioned using an actual iceberg with a flat top for plane landings and a hollowed out interior where the planes could be kept. But one of the scientists who began to look at this more closely, the Austrian molecular biologist Max Perutz, pointed out that icebergs famously have most of their mass under the surface. It's only a relatively small area of top. So if you're going to have an iceberg of manageable size,

there's probably not going to be enough available space on top for you to fly planes off of. So the plan evolved from using a naturally occurring iceberg to actually building an artificial aircraft carrier out of ice. And for that, they developed a material called pycrete. So when you hear people say that Hibakook was to be built entirely out of ice, that's not really accurate. 14% of it would have been, 86% would be ice, but 14% of it is wood pulp. Basically, picrete is a mixture of wood pulp and ice.

The advantage that gives you is that it makes the whole thing more buoyant, it melts more slowly and it's stronger you can sort of use it as a proper building material whereas ice tends to fracture and so it's not halfway plausible yeah in fact it was demonstrated quite dramatically later on in canada by mountbatten who went into one meeting of high-level leaders with a block of ice and a block of this pycrete stuff took out his service revolver fired it at the ice which shattered and then fired it at the ice, which shattered, and then fired it at the Pykrete.

And not only did that not shatter, but actually the bullet ricocheted and went through the trouser leg of one of the admirals, which is very compelling. Very dramatic demonstration. So yeah, the idea of using Pykrete as a building material wasn't crazy. But what was somewhat crazy is trying to build something as big as this. Because as the plans took shape,

if they had actually managed to build this thing, the thing that would have struck you if you saw it was not the material it was built out of, but the colossal, almost unthinkable size of the thing. As the requirements took shape, in order to accommodate heavy bombers, the deck would have had to have been 2,000 feet long, which is six and a half American football fields. And the ship would have had a displacement, basically a weight, of 2.2 million tons. For comparison, that's 26 times the size of the Queen Elizabeth, which was the largest ocean-going passenger liner at the time, and 50 times the displacement of the other aircraft

carriers at the time. So it's just unthinkably huge. If they'd gotten it built, it would have carried up to 150 twin-engine bombers or fighters and been driven around by 20 turboelectric motors. But that's a lot to ask. As I say, they found that pycrete could be used as a building material, but they found that the scale was still a problem. It's easy to think of ice as this sort of rigid material that you can just use to build things with. But if you think of a glacier, ice flows. There's a phenomenon called plastic flow.

If you put it under stresses and other forces, it'll, you know, bend and warp and flow, and you have to provide against that. Over time, the ship would begin to sag under its own weight. So Perutz found out that in order to combat that, you'd have to build in a refrigeration plant and fit it with all these ducts just to keep the whole thing chill as it floats around the ocean so it doesn't just begin to fall apart. So in order to test all this, they eventually decided to make a 150th scale model in a lake in Western Canada to test that refrigeration plant and to see if they could launch little attacks against this little model ship and see how well it actually stood up in a fight. And the Canadians, there's something quintessentially Canadian about this, were very gracious and accommodating and good humored about the whole thing and kind of rolled their eyes in private. The Prime Minister Mackenzie King wrote in his diary that the assignment was another of those mad wild schemes that started with a couple of crazy men in England.

And C.J. McKenzie, who is the head of the Canadian National Research Council, wrote in his diary, I am quite sure that if it were suggested in normal circles here, we should not have the ghost of a chance of getting it before even a minor official. But they confided these things to their diaries and just went ahead and helped out Britain because it was something you know, it was something useful they could do for them during wartime. But the Canadian war, because they actually got into it and hard-headed people started looking at what it actually would take to realize this plan, began to show it was just completely unworkable. In order to build it,

it would have taken manpower approaching 8,000 men over eight months. The ship would have to have been built from 280,000 blocks of ice they'd have to come up with from somewhere. And the cost would exceed $100 million. On top of that, even if they could afford to do all of that, it was so big that there are no dry dock facilities anywhere to actually accommodate such a project. And you'd have to pick certain harbors that were deep enough

to accommodate such a ship. So there are a to pick certain harbors that were deep enough to, you know, accommodate such a ship. So there are a lot of practical considerations standing against it. On April 1st, a report recommended either dropping the project entirely or proceeding very vigorously to try to meet the deadlines. McKenzie, the research head, wrote in his diary again, the construction aspects are almost overwhelming. The present time schedule certainly cannot be met, and it is even possible that the thing can never be built. The first cost estimate had originally been 700,000 pounds, but by May 1943, the sagging problem kept seeming worse and worse, so they began to think they'd have to now reinforce the thing with steel and insulated skin.

They just kept having to make all these interventions just to keep the thing workable. insulated skin. They just kept having to make all these interventions just to keep the thing workable. That raised the cost to 2.5 million pounds and delayed the delivery beyond 1944, which was the crucial thing. They really wanted to get this. If they're going to do this, they really needed to desperately in a hurry. Right away, yeah. And so it began to look, even if they could overcome all these technical hurdles, it would just take too long. And it's now going against what Churchill said you needed, which was for not to require time and manpower and steel.

Yeah, so it's just sort of bogging down and becoming more and more evident that it's impractical. On top of that, the list of requirements kept increasing as they were working on this. Now they were told it had to have a range of 7,000 miles and be torpedo-proof, which meant that it would need a hull that was 40 feet thick. So we're going in the wrong direction now. It's getting harder instead of easier. My favorite objection, on top of all these technical ones that we've been talking about, my favorite one is, even if you could get the thing built and launched and it working, someone pointed out that it would take so many men to man such a ship that there were no officers available who had the authority to command it. Cross writes, how could Habakkuk ever be commissioned since no officer could command her? She was too large to

be commanded by a lowly captain, and no officer of higher rank could be assigned to her because she was, after all, only one ship. It was so big that you'd have to have a pretty high-ranking officer to have the authority to command her, and they couldn't spare someone to run just a single ship because they were needed elsewhere. So the whole thing just didn't make any sense at all. So under all those considerations, the project did finally fall apart late in 1943. For bad reasons, it's good. The bad ones were all these practical considerations that I've been discussing. The biggest one was that the refrigeration plant would have taken an enormous amount of steel, which, as you say, Churchill pointed out, that's the one thing we definitely can't do. Right, right.

That was sort of the whole point to begin with. But the good reasons were that there were other things happening that lessened the problem of the U-boats. One is that Portugal had granted the Allies permission for British planes to use the Azores to fly planes out of, so they could reach now the area where the U-boats were shooting convoys. Also, they developed long-range fuel tanks for the planes. So there are just other ways to address the submarine problem, and that reduced the urgency that was driving the whole Habakkuk project so in december 1943 it was sort of decided to just let the whole thing die on the drawing board rather than try to take it any further which is probably a good thing because uh perutz this uh long-suffering austrian

scientist who'd been working on it said that the enormous amount of steel needed for the refrigeration plant alone if you took the the steel that it would have taken just to make the refrigeration plant, it would have taken so much that you could have just used that to build a conventional aircraft. So the whole thing is just useless. I mean, it's just completely pointless at this point. So it never went anywhere. There is nothing to look at. There's nothing but just plans and discussions to show for all that work and agony and imagination to go into this.

And some people probably put hundreds and hundreds of hours of thought and work into trying to make this a reality because Churchill wanted it so much. Yeah. The only thing today that remains is there's a plaque at the bottom of a lake in Canada, in Western Canada in Patricia Lake. In 1988, the Alberta Underwater Archaeological Society put a plaque down there where that's just the remains of the little model prototype they come up with. Sank, and it's down there somewhere with the plaque next to it proclaiming the site an underwater historical resource. And that's all that remains of Project Habakkuk. 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 like this item. Back in December 2009, almost five years ago, I posted an item on Futility Closet about an inscription that had been discovered on a tree that was cut down in Yorkshire in the mid-1700s. Estimating the age of the tree backwards just by counting rings, it looks like it had been made about 200 years before that, or about the year 1555. The inscription read, this tree long time witness bear, two true lovers did walk here. And at the time I posted that in 2009, I kind of, I thought it was a great story,

but I kind of had doubts that such a great story could actually be completely true. But I've been looking into it lately, and it turns out it's much better attested than I thought. I think it's pretty certain to be true. The reason I think that is that the tree had been cut up on the manor of Lord Falkenberg in Coxwold. And when it was brought to his attention that this inscription had been found, he donated it, those parts of the tree, to a museum locally, where they were kept for at least 70 years from what I can tell. And so many people saw them and they were written about and their illustrations made of them. And in fact, poems written about them. So the whole thing is much better documented than I had thought.

Isn't that kind of nice when a story that just seems too incredible to be true actually does turn out to be true? Yeah, and to be well documented is actually very rare. The Gardner's Chronicle of 1841 says, upon being riven asunder, the outer part of the tree was cleft in two like a case, leaving the inner portion of the trunk entire, and the root inscription was discovered distinctly legible both upon the inner part of the trunk and with the letters inverted upon the outer casing. So what happened was they cut the tree down, cut it into sections, and then put a wedge into one of them and hit that, and then I don't know much about how trees work, but this outer sort of integument fell apart, and there was an inner part that was what had been originally carved upon, and the tree had

grown over that and sort of preserved it for 200 years, which is amazing. So there are a lot of descriptions of this. I have an illustration, which I'll put in the show notes, showing very clearly not just the carving on the inner tree, but on this outer casing that surrounded it. We don't know anything about who the two lovers were who left it now almost 500 years ago, but the letters they carved in were Roman capitals five or six inches high, and they carved them in nine spiral lines occupying a space of five feet. One description says two hearts, each transfixed with an arrow after the usual and approved fashion, are introduced in the third line, and in one of them may be traced the letter B. So there were two of them,

they were in love, they carved this message on a a tree. I guess one of them had a name beginning with B, but that's all we know. I thought it was interesting, too, that that symbol of the heart with the arrow goes back that far. It goes back that far, yeah. I had no idea. If you trace all this together, if you rely on the memory of the porter at the museum, and if you count the rings of the tree, it looks like the estimate of the timeline is reasonably certain. It looks like what happened is the tree sprouted, started growing around the year 1500, grew for 55 years. And then in 1555, these two people, whoever they were, carved this inscription on it.

And then the tree sort of closed over that. And the two lovers, I guess, passed away. You know, Shakespeare came and went, the world kept turning, 200 years went by. And then sometime before the year 1757, they decided to cut down this one tree for firewood and discovered it and then put it into the museum. So I cannot imagine that the original tree remains. I think it would have decayed into nothing by now, but we have this illustration and we have these many descriptions of it. And in fact, at least

locally, I think in Yorkshire, it was quite well known, at least at the time, there's a poet named Thomas Brown who wrote a poem around 1800. I'll put that in the show notes as well. What I think is great about this story is that those lovers, whoever they were, could have written anything on the tree. They could have just written John loves Mary or something. But what they chose to write was, this tree long time witness bear, two true lovers did walk here. In other words, we pledge our love and we call explicitly on the tree to witness this pledge

and to bear that witness for a long time, which is exactly what the tree did. Which makes sense. I mean, if you wrote it on paper, paper know, like paper wouldn't last for 200 years, usually, like a tree might. Yeah, they have very conscientious trees in Yorkshire. And now, so then it got rediscovered 200 years later, and here I am reading it to the world 500 years after that. It's like I was saying, I guess last week,

about Rule Gridley's monument, that we're all every day leaving lots of tokens of our existence on this earth, and some of those will be preserved by happenstance and studied by people 500 years from now, but we today have no way of knowing which ones those will be. Right, like other lovers probably carved things into stones or trees or whatever, and they weren't discovered. And they're just lost.

And this was just discovered by accident. Yeah, and I think these two would be astonished to find out that it had lasted this long. But it did. We'll have an illustration of the inscription, as well as Thomas Brown's poem, in our show notes at blog.futilitycloset.com. In 1910, Frances Cornford published a poem called To a Fat Lady Seen from the Train. Oh, why do you walk through the fields in gloves, missing so much and so much? Oh, fat white woman whom nobody loves, why do you walk through the fields in gloves,

when the grass is soft as the breast of doves and shivering sweet to the touch. Oh, why do you walk through the fields in gloves, missing so much and so much? Seventeen years went by, and in 1927 G.K. Chesterton felt moved to reply, Why do you rush through the field in trains, guessing so much and so much? Why do you flash through the flowery meads, fathead poet that nobody reads, and why do you know such a frightful lot about people in gloves and such? So this is our lateral thinking puzzle segment. This week, Greg is going to give me a scenario that's going to sound somehow confusing or strange or odd, and I'm going to have to try to figure out what's the underlying situation just by asking yes or no questions.

Yep. I'm going to get three minutes to see how far I can get on my own, and if at the end of three minutes I'm still floundering around, I'll start to get hints so that this won't take all day. You ready? I hope so. Okay, this was sent to us from a listener named TJ. Two men lie dead in a cabin in the woods. No tracks lead either to or away from the cabin.

What happened? Okay, these are human adult males? Yes. Does it matter what country it's in? No. Does it matter anything else about the geographical location? No. Does it matter what season it is?

No. Or time of year? No. Okay, two men season it is? No. Or time of year? No. Okay, two men lie dead in a cabin in the woods. Yes. Did they kill each other? No. Did one of them kill both of them?

Either intentionally or accidentally? No. No. Is there another person or persons involved that I need to know about? No. Are there animals involved that I need to know about? No. Are there animals involved that I need to know about? There could be animals. No.

Birds, woodpeckers, I don't know. Did they die of natural causes? Define that. Like something that you would die of even if nobody had done anything wrong to you, like a heart attack or a stroke or disease or illness. No, they didn't die of natural causes. They didn't die of natural causes. Is the cause of death important?

Do I need to ascertain that? Yes. Were they poisoned? No. Were they killed by some kind of violence? Yes. Would they have marks on their body that would show violence? Yes.

If I looked at them, I could see there was violence done to them. Show violence? Yes. If I looked at them, I could see there was violence done to them. Violence that was done to them by an inanimate object? Yes. By something in the cabin? Yes. Did the roof fall on them?

No. Did something big fall on them? No. Were they impaled by icicles? No. I'm a good guess, no. Were they electrocuted? No. Were they impaled by icicles? No. I'm a good guess. No. Were they electrocuted?

No. Were they both killed by the same means? Yes. They were killed by something in the cabin that was already in the cabin? Yes. Did something they brought into the cabin? No. Something that was in the cabin when they entered the cabin? Yes. Does it

matter how, how quickly, how long they were in the cabin before they were killed? Uh. Is that significant? I wouldn't say so, no. Okay, and it's by violence. Like, I would see blood on them, or wounds, or marks? Uh, yes, you certainly would. Um, were they killed by something sharp? No. Something heavy? No. Something large? No. Were they smothered? No.

Something made out of wood? No. Metal? I actually can't say specifically. But an inanimate object? Yes. Do they have any disabilities I need to know about? Like they couldn't see or hear

properly or anything like that no um um i'm running out of things to ask about uh i can give you a hint oh wait wait um i might need one soon were they awake when they were killed yes um did they die both at the same time? Yes. Is that important? Yes. Lightning? No, you said they weren't electrocuted. By some kind of weather phenomenon?

No. No weather involved? Okay, give me a hint. The two men had the same occupation. Were they cutting down trees? No. Were they fishermen? No.

I'm making wild guesses here okay they have an occupation that is relevant to being in the cabin were they building the cabin no they have an occupation that was relevant to being in the cabin yes were they hunters no uh does it matter that it's a cabin yes that is is it does it matter you said it doesn't matter where the cabin is so it's a cabin? Yes. Does it matter? You said it doesn't matter where the cabin is. So it's like it doesn't matter if it's in the woods or it's on a lake or anything like that. That's right. You said it doesn't matter. But it matters that it's a cabin. Yes.

Does the time period matter historically? Not really. A cabin because there's no electricity? It matters that it's a cabin because there's no electricity? No. It matters that it's a cabin because there's no electricity? No. It matters that it's a cabin because it's remote? Uh, no. It matters that it's a cabin because of some other feature of cabins?

Yes. Can I give you another hint? Yes. There's something unique about the cabin. There's something unique about the cabin. I haven't even figured out what's regular about the cabin. Or unusual about it. Something unusual about the cabin. What it's made out of?

You could say that. Is the cabin made out of wood? No. Is it made out of ice? No. Is it made out of plastic? No. Is it made out of bricks?

No. Straw? No. Paper? Rocks? No, no, no. So it's not made out of a material that you would normally make cabins out of. No, that's not the case. Oh, it is made out of a material you would make cabins out of. You said it's not wood. That's right. It's not any form of wood. That's right. But cabins are usually made out of wood, I thought. Right, and that's right. Is not any form of wood. That's right. But cabins are usually made out of wood, I thought.

Right, and that's significant. But I need to know what the cabin is made out of, or just that it's not wood? Did something explode? No. I'm trying to think of a hint that won't. Um, um, a cabin that is not made out of wood. That's right. These are human adult males. Yes.

Inside a structure. Who died by violence together with the same occupation inside a cabin. Inside a structure that you were calling a cabin. Yes, that's right. You're on the right track. But it's not a usual cabin. Oh, cabin of a ship. Close.

A cabin of a, what else has cabins? Of an airplane? Yes. Oh, they Of an airplane? Yes. Oh, they're both pilots? Yes. And the plane crashed? Yes. Oh my goodness.

You got it. That's great. You did really well. Oh my goodness. Two men lie dead in a cabin in the woods. No tracks lead either to or away from the cabin. Oh, oh. You did really well.

No. You're so much better than me at solving these. Yeah, that just took a long time, though. I just flash around like a drowning man, and you find the one thing that doesn't make sense and just zero in on it. I guess, but it still took me a while. But you got it. That's really good.

Yay. All right. Well, we've heard from several listeners that they're really enjoying this segment. I guess people like listening to other people suffer or struggle. But we're really pleased that people are enjoying it as much as they are. And some people have asked us about sending puzzles in for us to use, which is terrific. This one came from a listener, too, didn't it? From a listener, TJ. Yeah. Thank you for sending it in, TJ.

From a listener, too, didn't it? From a listener, TJ, yeah. Thank you for sending it in, TJ. So if you want to send in puzzles for us to use, just be sure in the email that the answer isn't immediately apparent, so that the answer isn't spoiled for the person who happens to open the email, because that way we'll have the flexibility for either person to use the puzzle on the other person. Yeah. But yeah, send in puzzles if you want. Our email address is podcast at FusilityCloset.com.

Well, that's it for this episode. You can see our show notes at blog.futilitycloset.com, where you can post comments or questions, listen to past shows, 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 8,000 beguiling recreations,

perfect for filling 5 minutes or 50. If you'd like to support Futility Closet, you can recommend us to your friends, leave a review of the book or podcast on Amazon or iTunes, or click the donate button in 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. Thank you.