Futility Closet - 031-Pigs on Trial

Episode Date: October 27, 2014

For 500 years of European history, animals were given criminal trials: Bulls, horses, dogs, and sheep were arrested, jailed, given lawyers, tried, and punished at community expense. In the latest Futility Closet podcast we'll explore this strange practice and try to understand its significance to the people of the time. We'll also rediscover the source of Futility Closet's name and puzzle over how a ringing bell relates to a man's death. Sources for our segment on animal trials: Anila Srivastava, "'Mean, Dangerous, and Uncontrollable Beasts': Mediaeval Animal Trials," Mosaic, March 2007. Jen Girgen, "The Historical and Contemporary Prosecution and Punishment of Animals," Animal Law Review, 2003. Esther Cohen, "Law, Folklore, and Animal Lore," Past & Present, February 1986. "Medieval Animal Trials," medievalists.net, Sept. 8, 2013 (accessed Oct. 20, 2014). James E. McWilliams, "Beastly Justice," Slate, Feb. 21, 2013. E.P. Evans, The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals, 1906. The Hour of the Pig (released in the United States as The Advocate), BBC, 1993. Here's the original UTILITY sign from American University's administration building that inspired our name: (Thanks, Karl.) This week's lateral thinking puzzles come from Paul Sloane and Des MacHale's 1994 book Great Lateral Thinking Puzzles and from listener Meaghan Gerard Walsh. You can listen using the player above, download this episode directly, or subscribe on iTunes or via the RSS feed at http://feedpress.me/futilitycloset. 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 31. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. In today's show, we'll explore the phenomenon of animal trials, criminal trials of pigs, grasshoppers, and rats that took place for over 500 years throughout Europe. We'll also rediscover the source of Futility Closet's name

and puzzle over how a ringing bell relates to a man's death. Just a quick housekeeping note, we've shut down the blog where we used to post the show notes, so now you can find all the shows and their notes on the main site at futilitycloset.com. Just click podcast in the category list. On June 14, 1494, a pig was arrested in a French village for having strangled and defaced a young child in its cradle. The pig was hauled into court where human witnesses explained that on the morning of Easter day, as the father was guarding the cattle and his wife was absent in the village, the infant being left alone in its cradle, the said pig entered during the said time,

the said house, and disfigured and ate the face and neck of the said child, which in consequence of the bites and defacements inflicted by the said pig departed this life. The court heard witnesses and considered the evidence, and then the judge decided, we, in detestation and horror of the said crime, and to the end that an example may be made and justice maintained, have said, judged, sentenced, pronounced, and appointed, that the said porker, now detained as a prisoner and confined in the said abbey, shall be by the master of high works hanged and strangled on a gibbet of wood near and adjoining to the gallows and high place of That sounds outlandish to us today, the idea of a pig undergoing what looks like a human trial, but that was practically an institution in the Middle Ages. That sort of criminal trial for animals took place in Europe between the 13th and the 18th centuries,

and it was quite widespread. There are continuing questions today about what it meant, why it was done, and why it persisted so long. I have to say at the top here that I found this one fascinating to research. There's a lot of really smart, thoughtful, learned discourse on this, and not a really strong consensus as to the answers, which in itself I think was interesting. So to begin, this is very widespread, as I said. Most of it occurred in France, Italy, Switzerland, and Germany, but cases were found as far afield as Brazil, Russia, Canada. Animals were tried and punished in Portugal, England, Scotland,

Yugoslavia, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Russia. There were actually two systems, a secular and an ecclesiastical one, but they were similar in a lot of ways. The secular courts generally heard cases against domesticated animals for the most part, cows, bulls, and horses, most often pigs, because pigs ran wild and were numerous and had an unfortunate penchant for attacking babies. I'm sorry to say. The ecclesiastical courts, on the other hand, generally heard cases against pests for the

most part, insects and rats, that sort of thing. Insects. They did trials for insects. Yeah. But you can't. Those were held in different courts in part because you can't haul a swarm of locusts into court. You sort of have to try them in absentia.

And then impose, the Ecclesiastical courts mostly imposed a supernatural sentence, typically what was called anathema, which is basically excommunication for animals. So they would excommunicate bees or locusts. Okay, I got you. And sometimes order them to vacate. Like if they were infesting someone's house or property, typically fields, they'd order them to move to the other side of the river or something. So that was... Did you happen to come across whether it worked?

No, but someone made the interesting point. They said it sort of didn't matter. Like you'd say, okay, these weevils have to move to this other unoccupied location. If the weevils moved, great. But if they didn't, then the church could say, well, humans have been too sinful this year. And so in his wisdom, God has decided not to have the weevils move as a punishment to us. So either way, the church kept its prestige and authority.

But that's how the ecclesiastical courts worked. The secular courts tended to actually follow quite closely the punishments that would be handed down to a human convict, which was typically hanging, but sometimes torture and just all other sorts of punishment, which was at no small cost. That's the other thing that's remarkable about this. If you were a pig hauled into court, you were given a lawyer at the court's expense. If you were jailed during the course of the trial, you were housed and fed at the community's expense. And then at the

end of it, if you were found guilty and hanged, the hangman got a fee just as if you'd been human. So there's a real significant cost to this, to the community. Which makes the whole thing a bit more perplexing, I think. So those are the two different kinds of court systems, the secular and the ecclesiastical, but there are a lot of similarities between them.

Both of them seem to take the whole process quite seriously. The lawyers involved would develop quite involved arguments to defend their clients. So the lawyers would take this really seriously, defending these pigs or bees or whatever. Yeah. In the secular trials, what would typically happen is that a complaint would be filed, say a pig had attacked someone, the animal would be arrested and brought before the court, a public prosecutor would prepare a formal accusation, and the judge would assign a defense counsel. This is all just as would happen with a human. And similarly, at the trial, witnesses would be examined and evidence would be presented as if it

were for a human defendant. And then the decision was rendered according to common law precedents. And as I said, even the punishment was sort of matched to what a human would normally get. In the ecclesiastical courts, typically, if someone would complain, for instance, a farmer would complain that pests were infesting his crops, the court would order an investigation which would involve a procession and a prayer to allay heaven's anger. If that failed, they'd summon them to trial, and the lawyers would typically argue on behalf of their clients. Typically, as you can imagine, the animals didn't show up, even though they were given a summons.

I imagine they never showed up. That would be really dramatic if they did. So then they were, as I said, for example, quote, solemnly adjured to vacate the lands or vineyards that they had been devastating within a given period of time, often six days. There are exceptions to this because there's some really ace lawyering going on on behalf of animals.

That's what I was going to, I was just going to ask you, did the animals, were they ever found innocent? In 1519, the Commune of Stelvio in Italy prosecuted a group of moles for damaging crops. The mole's lawyer asked for safe passage to another location free of possible harm from dogs, cats, and other enemies. And the judge actually granted this. So the moles, in order to fulfill the terms, had to be able to get where they were ordered to go.

The judge ordered that, quote, A free safe conduct and an additional respite of 14 days be granted to all those which are with young and to such as are yet in their infancy, which is touching. with young and to such as are yet in their infancy, which is touching. Other cases where the animals got off, there is at least one case where a donkey and a pig were initially condemned to death, but on appeal had their sentences downgraded to corporal punishment. And this sort of shows, gives a little glimpse into how people thought about, thought about these animals. They weren't just animals.

They were sort of persons. They were like sentient actors. Yeah. In 1457, another pig was convicted of killing a five-year-old boy. Her piglets had been present at the crime and were actually found to be stained with blood, but they were let go on account of their youth and the corrupting influence of their mother. So it's all very similar to human defendants, as far as that goes. There's a very famous case by a terrific French lawyer named Bartholomew Chassonnet. In 1522, he found himself arguing on behalf of rats that he'd eaten the barley crop in a French village, and he made a succession of arguments that were accepted. One was that it would be impossible to summon all these rats because they're just abroad

in the countryside. They couldn't all respond to one summons because they were all widespread and couldn't be reached that way. The judge actually agreed with this and agreed to send out multiple summons, whereupon Chassene argued that his client should be excused, quote, on the ground of the length and difficulty of the journey and the serious perils which attended it, owing to the unwearied vigilance of their mortal enemies, the cats, who watched all their movements and with fell intent lay in wait for them at every corner in passage. So they did take this seriously, the defense attorneys. It wasn't certainly just

meant to be entertaining. And evidently everyone involved in this thought it was quite grave, as much so as with the human defendant, which just makes it more confusing from our point of view to make sense of. If you read popular accounts of this, they tend to just give a few lurid examples and say, well, people back then were just superstitious fools, and that's all there is to it. Apart from being glib, that can't be the case for at least three reasons. One is that, as I said, the courts invested a lot of time and resources into this for a period of several centuries, so it seems unlikely they would do that just for superstition alone. 500 years from the 13th to the 18th century, so that in itself is a sign that this was accomplishing something. It's just hard for us to define what it was.

Right, it meant something to someone. Finally, these trials peaked in the early 1600s, which was a period of relative enlightenment, which is not what you'd expect if it was just superstition. So the question is then, why? Why did they do it? Why was this almost an institution for half a millennium? And as I said, there's no consensus about this, but I just want to share what I found in reading about it because I find all of this fascinating. To begin with, religion informed people's worldview a lot more then than it does now,

and there are traces of the early Hebrew law that inform the Old Testament that say explicitly, in Exodus it says, if an ox gore a man or a woman that they die, or whoso shedeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed. So there's some biblical precedent saying that this sort of thing ought to be done or that animals are culpable for crimes. Also, we don't today, except for our pets, we don't really interact that much with animals anymore. So we've sort of fallen back into thinking of them as interchangeable units. But in the Middle Ages, you'd be interacting, say, with various domesticated animals all the time and find that pigs, for example, are very intelligent. They have

individual distinct personalities. You can see their behaviors understandable. So they seem less like just brute beasts than they do sort of to us today. They have... Individuals, yeah. Yeah, they're not fully rational beings, but they have sort of at least a rudimentary personhood. But it seems like maybe that was the issue, is that they were thought of as fully rational beings, as fully capable of, you know, purposeful activity as a human, I guess. Well, there's some... No, because there are some countervailing cases where lawyers

chastise one another for not, for giving them too much credit for intelligence and for sort of criminal conniving and stuff. Nobody thought that they were actually capable of that. Oh, okay. Because I'm thinking, wouldn't the defense just be, well, I'm a pig and I don't know better, you know? Like, I don't know. No, so it's somewhere in between those two things, I guess.

I don't know. No, so it's somewhere in between those two things, I guess. There's a scholar named Anila Srivastava who makes the point that the law, then as now, proceeds largely by analogy. So there was an existing way to handle human offenders. For example, if a man killed a child, say, he gets arrested, he gets assigned a defense counsel if he needs one. He gets his day in court where evidence is considered, witnesses are heard. The court comes to some kind of decision, and then justices meet it out, whatever that turns out to be. He might be hanged. He may be let go. So that sort of track through the legal system already existed, and so it wouldn't have been hard to just assign animals to that track

right i mean if you lose a baby if your baby is killed by whatever means you feel like you want revenge or justice yeah retribution is in there too yeah exactly so that's certainly another factor too and there's not any one of these things probably all these factors were in play at various times and places. But the notion of assigning animals to the human sort of built court track, if that still sounds crazy to you, consider how we treat corporations today. In the eyes of the law, a corporation is a person. 500 years from now, people may look back on that and think, that's crazy. Did they think an organization was literally a human being? No, no one's saying that. We're just saying there's an existing legal category for humans, and we've decided to

put corporations into that category, which makes a certain amount of sense. So that tells you maybe why it might not have seemed quite so outlandish to those people to find an animal in court. But it doesn't really address the impetus, why they went to all the time and trouble to actually do this. Well, almost like I was saying, like if you were a parent and your child was killed, you don't care if it's by a pig or by a person. You have the same feelings.

Right. And so, I don't know, maybe it was very cathartic for people to have the perpetrator of the crime tried and found guilty. It would be, and I'm sure that was part of it, but you'd have to convince the court system to take this on as a regular practice, which would be harder to do. There's actually a movie about all this, believe it or not.

In 1993, the BBC made a drama called The Hour of the Pig, in which Colin Firth, of all people, plays a young French lawyer who's asked to defend a pig in one of these trials. He doesn't know what to do, so he goes to a priest who's played by Ian Holm. And Ian Holm says, look, you and I are both educated men, but people still believe in witchcraft now. People are asking me every day, is this permissible? Is that a sin? He says, I don't even know the answer to this half the time, and I'm not even sure it matters. Colin Firth says, what are you saying? And he says, in a world where nothing is reasonable, in the end, nothing can be truly mad. And I think that's a

real key point. People want order. People want to believe that there are underlying rules and orderliness and sort of lawfulness to the universe. Today, that's what we've sort of lost sight of because we understand the universe so much better than they did then. Today, you have the answer to every question literally in your pocket. We've forgotten what it's like not to know things. But back then, life was largely a series of catastrophic, bewildering misfortunes that just didn't make sense. None of which made sense.

There's a lot of anxiety, a lot of fear. So people needed some way to deal with that. One writer says, to an extent that we cannot today find easy to conceive, these people of the pre-scientific era lived every day at the edge of explanatory darkness. And so if you were, say, a peasant farmer digging away in your field, a swarm of insects might come down and start attacking your crops. You have no idea why that's happening or what to do about it. Right.

But you can go to a priest and he'll tell you, okay, there's a great chain of being, God at the top, man in the middle, and animals are subordinate to man. An animal that violates that order is committing a crime that's punishable. In other words, things are supposed to be orderly and sedate and sort of lawful. And as a community, we're going to... Try to enforce that. Right. And just sort of, in trying a pig, yeah, we're trying a pig.

But in doing that, we're affirming to one another that idea that we're exerting some sort of cognitive control over the universe and saying things are supposed to be less scary than this. We're exerting authority over the pig and the universe. Yeah. And anything, any crime, any outrage like this, say a pig or insects attacking humans or their property, is exactly that, an outrage, an anomaly, a crime, literally against the ordained order of things. And that puts it in a different category.

You can bring it into court and attack it with legal discourse. It's different from what's supposed to be happening. So that, to me, as I say, there's no consensus on that, but that made a lot more sense of this to me. You can sort of see if you can put yourself in those shoes where you just don't understand almost anything about why the universe works and why your life is so hard, this would help you deal with that some more. And that might explain why as an institution this persisted so long.

Yeah. It had an actual social function that it was fulfilling. It's just that from our vantage point now, things are so different that we can't really appreciate that anymore. There's this notion of universal justice that the intellectuals who ran these courts thought that God had wants just to sort of pervade the universe not just in human societies but in nature as well so that fits with the idea of trying animals as well because if they transgress then it's up to us we're doing honor to god by enforcing on that too which makes some sense as you say too there's simple revenge where

people just want you know yeah if a dog attacks your son you want to see the dog punished somehow that's in there too so there are a lot of different factors um but i just found the whole thing to be really fascinating what i came away with was that uh society's changed so much that we just can't any longer appreciate what this was like for them. The animal trials went up through the 18th century, which in the scheme of things is not really that long ago. So it's kind of surprising that we have so much trouble sort of empathizing with those people. It makes me wonder if a few hundred years from now, people look back on some of the ways that we have today and find them so incomprehensible that we can't, they can't make sense of them at all. Right.

I think that may well happen. We'll have a link to E.P. Evans' book, The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals, in our show notes at futilitycloset.com. We have a rather interesting story to share this week that was sent in by Carl Magnuson. Greg is often asked where the name Futility Closet comes from for his website, as it's a rather unusual name. He explains this in the preface to his book, and it's that the name was inspired by a sign that we saw while I was a graduate student at American University in Washington, D.C. In the administration department, where you would go basically to gnash your teeth and tear all your hair out when they were unable to fix some snafu or other, there was a closet that had a metal

nameplate on it that said utility. And someone apparently had had really similar experiences to mine with the admin department and had written an F before utility. So it was a futility closet. When Greg needed a name for his new blog several years ago, he remembered this nameplate and thought that would be a really cool name for his new website. Because that had stuck in my head all those years. Telling. It was. It really was a very futility area. Okay, so fast forward now to January 2013, and Carl, a fan of Greg's website, moves into a basement room in a house in Washington,

D.C. And the room across from Carl's was a metal sign that said utility with an F written in front. The person living in the room told Carl that the sign had been there when he had moved in, and he just didn't know where it had come from. A few months later, Carl moved into a different house, and he came back to the first house to check to see if there was any mail for him. He found out that nobody was currently living in the room with the sign, so he took it for himself to put up in his new home. Then a new roommate moved into Carl's house named Trevor

and saw Carl's futility sign and asked Carl where he'd gotten it from. It turns out that Trevor had worked at American University, and he's the one who had taken the sign during some renovations, and he put it up in his new home where Carl had first seen it. I'm trying to count the coincidence. Yeah. So Trevor was actually pretty surprised to see this sign in his new digs because it was kind of like, wow, my sign's here. At this point, Carl didn't know yet the full story about the sign and the connection to Greg's website. That happened actually a bit later when Carl was reading Greg's book on a bus in Iceland, of all places. He got to the part of the book explaining the name of the website, and Carl realized, wow, I have the original sign that started this.

Which is just an impossible coincidence. It really is. So as Carl says in his email, so to recap why I find this fascinating, while reading a book in Iceland, I discovered that the website I discovered from my cousins in Michigan and Arizona while I was in Tennessee was named after a closet sign that a guy who lived in two separate houses in Washington, D.C., which I also lived in, had taken from a place he used to work and forgotten about, which I now have on my bedroom door. I just don't think you can make that up. I love that story. It's such a, what I really love

about this is it's such a futility closet type story. It really is. Like, that's the sort of thing I would run as opposed to anyway, even if it hadn't had anything to do with it. And it just has all these elements that happen to happen. Carl and Trevor lived in two houses, the same houses in Washington, D.C., and then met so that Trevor could have explained the origins of the sign to Carl. I mean, if this happened in a movie, you would just be shaking your head and like, yeah, right. Like not believing it at all. So he sent, uh, photos of the sign. I hadn't seen this in years. I can't remember what the timing was here, but I had remembered the sign of saying utility closet, but it's even better. It's just a door that just says, right. That's all it says.

This is where we keep the futility. Right. Yeah. We had misremembered the sign of saying futility closet, but I can understand now whyremembered the sign as saying Futility Closet. But I can understand now why that stuck in my head because it was classic. Whoever came up with that did a good job. It was really fun to see the sign again after so many years. Yeah. We'll have a photo of the futility sign in our show notes at futilitycloset.com for anybody else who wants to see the inspiration for the name for the website. And thanks so much to Carl for sending in his story.

Yes. If you have any questions or comments for us, please send them to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. So this week I'm on the hot seat for the lateral thinking puzzle. I'm going to try to solve a situation asking only yes or no questions, and we will see how I do. I am going to give you two this week. I think the first one you're probably going to get pretty quickly.

I just like this puzzle. Uh-oh. Now the pressure's on me to get it pretty quickly. Okay. This is from Paul Sloan and Des McHale's 1994 book, Great Lateral Thinking Puzzles. Okay. A woman walked up to a man behind a counter and handed him a book.

He looked at it and said, that will be $4. She paid the man and then walked out without the book. He saw her leave without it but did not call her back. How come? Is this a book of pages? Yes. Like a book that you would read? Yes.

I guess it matters exactly what the book is? No. Does it matter exactly what the book is? Like what the title is? Yeah. Uh, no. Or what, does it matter what kind of book it is? No.

Does it matter what kind of establishment this is? Yes. Um, is it some kind of a store? No. Some kind of a retail sort of, no. No. A hotel? No.

A restaurant? No. Um, a, a No. A restaurant? No. A healthcare facility? No. Some kind of public office, like the police, firemen, government? Arguably, I think you'd probably say no. Library? Yes.

Ah, the book was overdue. Yes. I thought you'd knock that out. I just like that. It's neat. That is cute. Oh, so that was my warm-up, huh? Yeah. That wasn't the real was overdue. Yes. I thought you'd knock that out. I just like that. It's neat. That is cute. Oh, so that was my warm-up, huh? That wasn't the real one?

Okay. Here's the real one. This was sent in by listener Megan Walsh Gerard, who credits her husband Steve. A bell rings, a man dies, a bell rings. Is the man in a hospital? No. Okay. I just had a whole, like, scenario work out in my head there.

I was like, okay, never mind. That's not it. That would have been amazing if he was there. Okay. All right. Okay. A bell rings. Does it ring in the vicinity of the man?

Yes. A man dies because the bell rang or as opposed to the bell ringing indicated something else uh i can't answer that the way it's phrased okay a bell rings a man dies the bell actually rang in the vicinity of the man um if the bell hadn't rung the man wouldn't have died put it that way so yeah oh okay okay i was thinking the bell was indicating something else, not that the bell killed him. Okay. All right.

Okay. Is the location that the man is in important in any way? Yes. Okay. Is he outside? Yes. Is he trying to cross a street or something like that? Or trying to cross something, like railway tracks or a street or a bridge or something like that?

Nothing like that, no. Okay. I had all kinds of scenarios worked out for that, too. Okay. He is outside, though. Oh, interesting. Are there animals involved? No.

Okay. Well, somebody could have, like, conditioned an animal that when it hears a bell, it attacks. Whatever. Okay. I always get all hears a bell, it attacks. Whatever. Okay. I always get all these whole stories in my head. Okay, so he's outside. There are no animals involved. Are there other people involved?

Yes. Does another person directly cause his death? No. Does another person indirectly cause his death? No. No, okay. Does he die of what would be called natural causes? Um.

Would the police consider this a murder? No, no. Okay. Depends what you mean by natural causes. Okay, um, uh, does he die by violence of some sort? Like you would see by looking at his body that some violence had been done to him? No. No.

Um, uh, does he die by poisoning? No. Illness? No. Disease? No. Exposure to the elements? No.

Is he underwater? Yes. Well, yes. Okay. Is he in a submarine? No. He's in water, though? Yes.

Is he swimming? Yes. Does he drown? No. He's in water though? Yes. Is he swimming? Yes. Does he drown? Yes. Does it matter what he's swimming in? Yes. Is he swimming in a natural body of water? Yes. A lake? No. An ocean? Yes. Does it matter which ocean? No. He's in the ocean? Yes. And he drowns? Yes. Because a bell rang? Yes.

Not that a ship hits him or something. Okay, just checking. And no animals are involved. Okay, he drowns because a bell rings. Does he have any specific physical characteristics that I need to know about? Like he's blind? Okay, he's blind. Yes.

Yes, okay, that was the next guess. The bell that rang, do I need to know why it rang? No. Was it supposed to be some kind of cue for him? Can you rephrase that question? Did he believe that the bell was a cue for him? Yes. And the bell was not a cue for him? Yes. And the bell was not a cue for him?

Right. Okay, so he heard a bell that he thought was some kind of cue, and it was not what he thought it was. That's right. Okay, so was the bell supposed to let him know what direction he was supposed to be heading? Yes. Okay. Was he heading towards a ship? When? Okay, did he believe he was heading towards a ship? When? Okay.

Did he believe he was heading towards a ship because he heard the bell? No. Did he believe he was heading towards land? Yes. But he actually wasn't. Oh, oh, oh, a ship's bell. A ship's bell rang, and he thought that was the direction that land was in, and so he headed the wrong direction, and so he was heading away from the shore yes

that's okay do i need to figure out what this bell thing is any more than that like no but he had a system worked out for him yeah you basically got it he's a blind swimmer who's training for a competition and his trainer is on the shore with a bell which is supposed to signal him when to come in but a buoy or a channel marker also had a bell on it that he mistook for the trainer started swimming toward it and lost. And he lost his way and drowned. Oh, that's very sad. It is very sad. Okay, but a very nice little puzzle.

Thank you. Yeah, thank you, Megan. If you'd like to send in a puzzle for us to use, you can send them to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. That's another episode for us. If you'd like to help support our show so that we can keep on making it, there are a few things you could do that would really help us out. First of all, thanks to everyone that has been helping spread the word about us. Continuing to recommend us to others is actually a really big help to us.

And if you or someone you know would like to be a sponsor or buy ads on the podcast, please write to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. Another way to help support us is to click on the donate button on the sidebar of the website. If you're looking for more Futility Closet, check out the book on Amazon or visit the website at futilitycloset.com where you can sample over 8,000 phrenic beguilements, perfect for filling five minutes or 50. At the website, you can also see show notes for the podcast and listen to previous episodes. Just click podcast in the category list. If you have any questions or comments about the show, you can reach us by email at podcast at futilitycloset.com.

Our music was written and produced by Doug Ross. Thanks for listening and we'll talk to you next week.