Futility Closet - 043-Ben Franklin's Guide to Living

Episode Date: January 25, 2015

As a young man, Benjamin Franklin drew up a "plan for attaining moral perfection" based on a list of 13 virtues. Half a century later he credited the plan for much of his success in life. In this episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll explore Franklin's self-improvement plan and find out which vices gave him the most trouble. We'll also learn how activist Natan Sharansky used chess to stay sane in Soviet prisons and puzzle over why the Pentagon has so many bathrooms. Sources for our segment on Benjamin Franklin's 13 virtues: Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography, 1791. Gordon S. Wood, The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin, 2005. Dinah Birch, ed., The Oxford Companion to English Literature, 2009. Here's Franklin's list of virtues: Temperance. Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation. Silence. Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation. Order. Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time. Resolution. Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve. Frugality. Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself; i.e., waste nothing. Industry. Lose no time; be always employ'd in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions. Sincerity. Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly; and, if you speak, speak accordingly. Justice. Wrong none by doing injuries, or omitting the benefits that are your duty. Moderation. Avoid extreams; forbear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve. Cleanliness. Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, cloaths, or habitation. Tranquillity. Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable. Chastity. Rarely use venery but for health or offspring, never to dullness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another's peace or reputation. Humility. Imitate Jesus and Socrates. And here's a sample page from his "little book":   Related: As an exercise in penmanship, the teenage George Washington copied out "110 rules of civility and decent behavior in company and conversation," and Thomas Jefferson once sent a "decalogue of canons for observation in practical life" to the new father of a baby boy. Listener mail: Human rights activist Natan Sharansky's use of mental chess to keep himself sane in Soviet prisons is detailed in his 1988 memoir Fear No Evil and in this BBC News Magazine article. Greg's research queries: The authority on jumping up steps at Trinity College, Cambridge, seems to be G.M. Trevelyan, who became Master there in 1940. In his Trinity College: An Historical Sketch (1972), he writes: It is a well-authenticated Trinity tradition that Whewell, when Master, jumped up the hall steps at one leap, a feat that is very seldom accomplished even by youthful athletes. Sir George Young told his son Geoffrey Young that he had actually witnessed this performance; Sir George said that the master, in cap and gown, found some undergraduates trying in vain to accomplish the feat. He clapped his cap firmly on his head, took the run, and reached the top of the steps at one bound. In a letter to the Times on March 16, 1944, he writes, "On a recent visit to Cambridge, General Montgomery, on entering the Great Court at this college, pointed to the hall steps and said to me, ‘Those were the steps my father jumped up at one bound.’ The general’s father, Henry Hutchinson Montgomery, afterwards Bishop, was an undergraduate at Trinity from 1866 to 1870. He came here from Dr Butler’s Harrow with a great reputation as a runner and jumper." He adds, "Now we have a fully authenticated case of which I had not heard. Bishop Montgomery himself told his son the general, and the story was often told in the family. The general has asked me to send the facts to you in the hope that publication may elicit further facts." I don't know whether he ever received any. As far as I can tell, Swiss criminologist Karl-Ludwig Kunz's essay "Criminal Policy in Duckburg" was published only in a 2009 collection titled Images of Crime 3: Representations of Crime and the Criminal, which I can't seem to get my hands on. The fullest discussion I've been able to find in English is this brief 1998 article from the Independent. The program to distribute bananas to Icelandic children in 1952 is mentioned in science writer Willy Ley's 1954 book Engineers' Dreams. The credit "Diversions by Irving Schwartz" in the 1966 movie The Sand Pebbles is mentioned (but not really explained) in this 2007 Telegram obituary of character actor Joseph di Reda. MIT historian T.F. Peterson's 2003 book Nightwork: A History of Hacks and Pranks at MIT says that the legend IHTFP ("I hate this f---ing place") "has been unofficially documented in both the U.S. Air Force and at MIT as far back as the 1950s." This MIT page traces it as far back as 1960 and gives dozens of euphemistic variants. This week's lateral thinking puzzle was submitted by listener Paul Kapp. 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. Please consider becoming a patron of Futility Closet -- on our Patreon page you can pledge any amount per episode, and all contributions are greatly appreciated. You can change or cancel your pledge at any time, and we've set up some rewards to help thank you for your support. You can also make a one-time donation via the Donate button in the sidebar of the Futility Closet website. 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 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 43. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. In today's show, we'll learn about Benjamin Franklin's rules for living a moral and healthy life, his inventive system for learning to follow them, and which ones he personally had the most trouble with. We'll also learn how activist Natan Sharansky

used chess to stay sane while a Soviet prisoner, and puzzle over why the Pentagon has so many bathrooms. Benjamin Franklin didn't publish his autobiography until 1784, near the end of his life. But when he did, it included an interesting detail in chapter nine about what he called a plan for attaining moral perfection that apparently he'd set out on achieving when he was a young man. It's not quite clear from the autobiography when he set out to do this. It looks like it was probably in the spring of 1731 when he would have been 24 years old. But anyway, he set out to create a systematic plan of his own devising to root out vices and perfect virtues in his own character and followed this with admirable discipline through at least

50 years. Basically for his his whole life, he followed this plan. It's interesting because it's informed by the whole Enlightenment project of self-improvement through reason. And it kind of shows a lot about, I think, Ben Franklin's character in coming up with a project like this and pursuing it with such discipline. I think I like it. And what's really neat about it is it's very crunchy. It's very sort of hardheaded. And he goes through in quite a lot of detail in the autobiography. He spends more time on this detail than in anything else in the whole autobiography about exactly how he went about it, specifically with the idea that other people would be able to emulate it. So I thought I'd explain how it works here. He said, I wish to live without committing any

fault at any time. I would conquer all that either natural inclination, custom, or company might lead me into. He tried at first doing this by simply resolving to do it, and like the rest of us, he found out that that doesn't work because it's just way too big and too complicated a project to undertake, and no one has that much discipline to try to just reform your whole character in one big swoop permanently. I don't think anyone's ever managed to do that. He said, I had undertaken a task of more difficulty than I had imagined. While my care was employed in guarding against one fault, I was often surprised by another. Habit took the advantage of inattention. Inclination was sometimes too strong for reason. So he concluded, finally, that just wanting to

achieve this wasn't enough to get the job done, and what he needed was some sort of actual systematic plan that he could pursue. So he came up with one and describes it in detail in the book. Based on his readings about morals, he drew up a list of 13 virtues and made a list of them in order and attended each with a little precept to describe what he meant by it. So I'm just going to read those now. One, temperance. Eat not to dullness, drink not to elevation. Two, silence. Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself. Avoid trifling conversation. Three, order. Let all your things have their places. Let each part of your business have its time. Four, resolution. Resolve to perform what you ought. Perform without fail what you resolve.

Five, frugality. Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself, i.e. waste nothing. Six, industry. Lose no time. Be always employed in something useful. Cut off all unnecessary actions. Seven, sincerity. Use no hurtful deceit. Think innocently and justly, and if you speak, speak accordingly. Eight, justice. Wrong none by doing injuries or omitting the benefits that are your duty. Nine, moderation. Avoid extremes. Forbear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve. Ten, cleanliness. Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, clothes, or habitation. Eleven, tranquility. Be not disturbed at trifles or at accidents common or unavoidable. Twelve, chastity, rarely use venery but for health or offspring,

never to dullness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another's peace or reputation. And thirteen, humility, imitate Jesus and Socrates, which is a hugely ambitious one at the very end there. Jesus and Socrates all at once. Right, yeah. Well, it's interesting because that comes at the end. This is very well thought out because he's put them in this order because he wants to attack them in that order, thinking that, for instance, the first one is temperance.

If you haven't licked temperance, then you're going to have a lot of trouble with all the rest of them, he thinks. Temperance promotes vigilance and clearness of head, so you can get that bit down and the rest of them become that much easier. So you wouldn't actually have to imitate Socrates until the end. Since he decided it was inadvisable to attack all 13 at once, what he did was set them up in this order, and then he got a little book, which he describes, and I'll put an image of this in the show notes. Basically, you can picture it in your head. It's divided, each page is divided into seven columns, one for each day of the week, and 13 rows, one for each of these virtues that I've just read. And so you're trying, your goal is on each, so each page is a record of the week's progress

of how many virtues and vices you accomplished, however you want to put that. So at the end of Wednesday, you sit down with your little book and go through your head each of the vices. And if you say you failed in cleanliness, say you have to put a little black dot under Wednesday on cleanliness. And your goal is to keep the whole page clear of dots, which is almost impossible, at least in the beginning. But it's not that simple. He says what you should do is try to keep the whole page clear, but when you're starting, start focusing in particular on the first line, temperance. So

you're going to put most of your effort into just conquering that one first virtue, and once you've got that down, then keep it clear in subsequent weeks. He says, I determined to give a week's strict attention to each of the virtues successively. Thus, if in the first week I could keep my first line marked T clear of spots, I suppose the habit of that virtue so much strengthened and its opposite weakened that I venture extending my attention to include the next, and for the following week keep both lines clear of spots. So on the second week, you're still going to keep temperance clear and now you're going to try also to to pursue silence and the nice thing about this is because there are 13 uh virtues that you're working on you'll

go through the whole cycle four times in one year and if you want to be really extreme about it you can keep a record of these and all these successive books and note your progress over the course of the years if you want to which at least he did in the beginning um he says i was surprised to find myself so much fuller of faults than i had imagined but they had the satisfaction of seeing them diminish so he doesn't make any claim to have actually perfected his character but it shows you where your weaknesses are which isn't necessarily clear i think uh as he went along, because once he got through each set, each cycle, he'd have to go back and erase all his little black dots and start over again. So eventually the book grew rather ragged and he replaced it with a memorandum book

whose leaves were made of ivory and ruled in red ink. So now he could just go through and do it essentially with what today we'd call a felt-t tip marker and then just wipe it clean with a sponge when he was done. He says, after a while, I went through one course only in a year and afterward only one in several years till at length I omitted them entirely being employed in voyages and business abroad with a multiplicity of affairs that interfered. But I always carried my little book with me. And he says, he wrote this when he was almost 80 years old, wrote it up for the autobiography, attributes most of the successes in his life to following the system. He says, it may be well my posterity should be informed that to this little artifice, with the blessing of God, their ancestor owed the constant felicity of his life down to his 79th year in which this

is written. He ascribes to temperance, his long-continued health, to industry and frugality, his early successes in business and acquisition of his fortune, and he says, and all that knowledge enabled him to be a useful citizen and obtain for him some degree of reputation among the learned. He attributes to sincerity and justice the confidence of his country in his activities as a statesman, and so on. He can trace most of the successes in his life back to battling vices and promoting virtues in this system that he just sort of came up with from scratch. As I say, he spends more time in the autobiography on describing the system in chapter nine than in any other single point, and he hoped to pass it down not just to his children, but to publish it in a book

that he planned to call The Art of Virtue that he never found the time to actually publish. Notably, he kept out any mention of religion from it. Obviously, a lot of these precepts are found in a lot of religions, but he wanted to keep it somewhat secular so that any person of any faith, or of no faith, could follow the same system. It wouldn't sort of be pigeonholed into one faith tradition. So it's kind of sad, given all this great success that he found in it, that he wasn't able to publish the system itself, but it's out there now in the autobiography. I tried this actually myself about 15 years ago,

and I only got as far as memorizing everything, which is to say, not at all. But it does seem like it's a smart system, because you couldn't possibly attack all these. I think they're all worthy goals, but you couldn't possibly accomplish all this if you just didn't want to go. So I like how systematic it is. What Franklin discovered about himself is there are two advices in particular

that he was prone to. The first is order. He just had a lot of trouble with that. Part of which he says is justifiable because he was running a printing business when he was getting all this going. And there's just a lot of chaos in printing. You're dealing with exigencies that you couldn't possibly have known would come up and people come into the shop and want things. And you just, it's just hard to, to plan your day at the beginning and actually follow that plan. Also, he said his memory was good enough that he'd never had to find a place for everything

and keep it there. He just always remembered where he'd put something down. So then it's interesting that he came up with the idea that he had to be doing this. I mean, I wonder where he got the idea from. He just decided, I should have everything in a place, even though it was working for him not to. That's a good point. He doesn't say that. He says, this article therefore cost me so much painful attention and my faults, and it vexed me so much, and it made so little progress in amendment and had such frequent relapses that it was almost ready to give up the attempt. But you're right.

If his life was working well for him being somewhat disorganized, why reform that? I guess he just held it up as an ideal to attain. Yeah. He gives a neat little sort of parable or anecdote about this that he used to tell his friends in France about a man. He was tempted to give up the whole thing. This particular one was really vexing him because he just couldn't conquer it. And he tells a story about a man who brings an axe into a merchant to have it sharpened. He wants the whole surface of the axe to be as bright as the edge of the blade.

So the merchant says, I'll tell you what, you turn the wheel and I'll hold the axe against it and we'll just keep going until the whole thing is bright. And it turns out this is a lot of work for the man, for the customer with the axe, because he has to turn this big heavy wheel so they can sort of burnish the blade. And eventually he stops and the merchant says, we're not quite done yet. It'll be bright by and by, but right now it's still only speckled. And the man says, yes, but I think I like a speckled axe best, which is sort of sympathetic. I think a lot of people feel that way. You can maybe take these things too far and kind of become over-disciplined in trying to pursue virtue. But Franklin seems to think that that's kind of a cop-out, that you

actually should pursue this with as much discipline as you can and conquer each of these things. The other vice that he had a lot of trouble with was vanity. He was intending originally to include only 12 virtues in the list, but a friend took him aside and said he was beginning to acquire a reputation for pride. He was sort of overbearing and insolent in conversation and just one-upping people and sort of reveling in his cleverness and getting kind of reputation about that. So he set out to reform that in particular and did that through language, which I think is interesting.

He said instead of asserting a fixed opinion with words like certainly, undoubtedly, he adopted instead phrases like I conceive, I apprehend, or I imagine a thing to be so or so. And he said that actually made things go a lot more smoothly for him. be so or so and he said that actually made things go a lot more smoothly for him just that one small reform in how he expressed himself uh changed not just his own outlook on the world but his reputation and just getting along with people in general um he says and this mode which i at first put on with some violence to natural inclination became at length so easy and so habitual to me that perhaps for these 50 years past no one has ever heard a dogmatical expression to escape me. But even there, he acknowledges that pride would always, just because of his makeup, he would

always have trouble with pride. He says, even if you manage to conquer it, eventually, he says, I should probably be proud of my humility. Well, it's interesting that, I mean, he, it sounds like he really saw the benefits of though, of trying to be more humble, like that he just got along better with people and he could see that that was really working for him. And it sounds like he really saw the benefits of trying to be more humble, like that he just got along better with people and he could see that that was really working for him. And it sounds like a lot of these he saw the benefits for. Yeah, even if he didn't conquer them, it's useful just as an exercise just to see which ones give you trouble

because it's something to be more mindful about as you go through your life. But I was just wondering, I was wondering about a couple of them, his silence and his industry. I mean, first of all, I was wondering what he would make of Facebook. You need to be industrious all the time and don't speak unless you have something really good to say. I can't imagine what he would think of social media. But don't you think you can overdo some of those? Yes, certainly.

I mean, I think your relationships with people are going to suffer if you only speak when you have something really important to say. I mean, I would think virtue even itself a sort of a means to an end you could spend your whole life at the extreme you could spend your whole life just making this dogmatic effort to just live up scrupulously to all these you'd come to the end of your life realizing you hadn't spent your life doing anything else but just trying to live up to these ideals right and that's not a worthy goal, I don't think. I would think most psychologists would say, you know, you need a little free time or a little time to be spontaneous, you know. Yeah. Certainly there has to be a happy medium somewhere in there, but. Yeah, that anecdote of the speckled axe, I was, I expected him to say, so I sort of saw the wisdom in that, that it's okay to have an axe that's a little speckled. But he says, no, it ain't. So I

just disagree with him there. I think it's worthy to set these as goals, but just to realize that you'll probably never attain them and that that's okay. Yeah. We'll have Franklin's list of virtues as well as similar lists associated with George Washington and Thomas Jefferson in our show notes at futilitycloset.com. So as of Saturday afternoon, when we're recording this, 155 of you have joined our Patreon campaign so far, and we appreciate each and every contribution we've gotten.

Yeah, thanks very much to everyone who's contributed so far. It's been wonderful to hear the good wishes and to get the support for the show. We work really hard on this thing. Yeah, we put a lot of hours into this. During the week, we are researching it and trying to put it together, and then we spend too much of the weekend actually doing the recording and the editing. We work on it until we run out of time, and then I edit it.

So while it's great that so many of you have joined the Patreon campaign and sent in donations using the donate button and the website, we're still not really at our goal, and we really do need some more help to be able to keep bringing the show to you. Yeah, it's encouraging so far. It's been a little more than a month, I guess, since we launched the campaign. And it's wonderful the amount of contributions and support we've had so far, but we're not there yet and just need some more help. If you want to learn about the Patreon campaign, you can go to patreon.com slash futilitycloset, or we'll have a link in the show notes. Thanks again to everyone who's contributed and to everyone who will consider giving us some more help.

In episode 41, Greg posed a puzzle to me about a Polish chess grandmaster who found a unique use for his facility for blindfold chess, which is chess played without sight of the board. Shari Hillman wrote in to say, Thank you for your always enjoyable podcasts. Regarding the episode 41 puzzle about the blindfold chess player, Natan Sharansky recounts in his autobiography, Fear No Evil, how he played chess in his head while in solitary confinement as a prisoner of conscience

in the Soviet Union. A recent article focused on this facet of Sharansky's fascinating life story. And Shari included a link to a BBC News Magazine article from January 2, 2014 entitled, Natan Sharansky, How Chess Kept One Man Sane. I read the article and browsed through his memoir of his time in prison, and it really is a great story. Ukrainian-born Natan Sharansky was a human rights activist who campaigned for the rights of Jews, including himself, to emigrate to Israel from the Soviet Union in the 1970s. In 1977, the Soviet government imprisoned him on a fabricated charge of spying for the U.S., and he spent the next nine years in a Soviet prison and a Siberian labor camp.

For half of those nine years, he was in solitary confinement, and he spent more than 400 days in what was called a punishment cell, which was a tiny, empty, miserably cold cell with very little to eat. And Sharansky had been a chess prodigy as a child and would play both simultaneous and blindfold chess, usually against adults. He won a chess championship in his teens,

but then drifted away from chess and ended up studying applied mathematics. He always thought his ability to play several games simultaneously without seeing a board was a flashy, but pretty useless skill, and that was until he was imprisoned. Sharansky said if he's playing solitary chess in his cell, what chess did was help preserve my sanity. Really early in his imprisonment, when he was in a regular cell, he successfully argued to be given a chess set, although they basically said, who are you going to play with? Because he was by himself, and he was like, never mind, just give me the set. He played game after

game against himself, just sort of frantically playing game after game to try to calm himself down and help himself start to think more clearly about his situation. Later, when he was in much worse conditions and he didn't have a set, he would then mentally solve chess problems or work out repeated variations of lines of play to try to find the best ones. So he'd be lying on the floor of his frigid punishment cell, weak and dizzy, and he would mentally play through variations over and over again to finally figure out how he should have responded to a line of play that had cost him a chess game many years earlier. Sharansky had been involved in what could be considered anti-Soviet activities, but nothing nearly as serious as the trumped-up espionage and treason charges brought against him. But he had been involved, for example, in smuggling information

out to human rights groups in the West about the difficulties that Jews were facing in trying to leave the Soviet Union. He also helped disseminate contraband texts, such as Jewish prayer books, textbooks, newspapers, and journals from abroad. In the Soviet Union, photocopy machines were closely guarded, and it was a crime to use them for private purposes. So books that were to be circulated had to be photographed page by page, and then the film privately developed so the photographs could be passed around. Sharansky notes in his memoir that when he finally got to Israel,

one of the things that just amazed him was how anyone could just photocopy anything they pleased. Like, that was an amazing freedom. Sharansky faced 125 interrogations by the KGB during his imprisonment, during which the KGB attempted to manipulate, intimidate, and deceive him into implicating himself or his friends. As Sharansky anxiously awaited his first interrogation, he realized that he was facing a dilemma in how to refute the false charges against him without saying anything that would actually incriminate himself or others. As a student, he'd written a thesis called Simulating the Decision-Making Process in

Conflict Situations Based on the Chess Endgame. And it occurred to him that he could try to prepare himself for the interrogation using the same process. So he grabbed a piece of toilet paper and sketched out a diagram of goals and sub-goals and conditions for attaining each, similar to how you would use decision analysis trees for chess end games. He says that doing this helped give him a sense of order and control in a very fraught situation. And in Fear No Evil, he frequently compares the games he felt the Soviets were playing with him to chess, and he was just determined not to lose. BBC News quotes him as saying, the KGB hoped that I would feel weaker

and weaker mentally. Actually, I felt stronger and stronger. Sharansky was released in 1986 as part of a prisoner exchange and finally was able to emigrate to Israel where he became active in politics. The BBC News article notes that Jews faced institutionalized discrimination in the Soviet Union and Sharansky learned from his parents that the only way to combat anti-Semitism and succeed was to be supreme in whatever career he chose. He originally wanted to be the world chess champion, but when he realized that that wasn't going to happen, he moved into the field of math. And when it became clear that he wasn't going to be the best in that in the world, Sharansky jokes, I decided to become the number one political prisoner. So thanks so much to Shari for writing in about this. Our listeners frequently amaze us

with the things they send to us, things that we just never would have come across for ourselves. So thank you so much. And if you have any questions or comments for us, please send them to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. or comments for us, please send them to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. This is just a batch of items from my database. I'm constantly doing research for Futility Closet, and I think I've done this before. I save up a bunch of items that are sort of in limbo because I can't exclude them and I can't confirm them, and they just kind of sit there forever. So I've started just reading them on the podcast. This batch in particular are ones that I'm pretty sure are true,

but that I haven't been able to fact-check conclusively, so I'd be particularly grateful if there's anyone out there who can shed any light on any of these. So in no particular order, here we go. The Divi Divi tree of the Caribbean famously contorts under trade winds. You don't see Divi Divi trees standing straight up. They tend to be bowed over because they're under constant pressure from the winds there. I have read that that makes it a natural compass that you

if you're lost in Aruba, for instance, and you come across a Divi Divi tree that's bowed over, it's almost certainly pointing west and you can use that to orient yourself, but I haven't been able to confirm that. So that would be very useful if it was true. Yes, I hope it is true. Also, for whatever it's worth, the word Divi Divi is spelled entirely with Roman numerals.

That's another stupid little pointless fact that's in my notes. Number two, I am not... Jane Carlyle, in a letter to her husband, who is the Scottish writer and historian Thomas Carlyle, apparently once wrote, I am not at all the same sort of person you and I took me for.

Which is a very striking sentence, but I haven't been able to confirm it or find out where she wrote it or what the circumstances were. What she was referring to? Yeah. That is pretty dramatic. Yeah. So if anyone knows anything more about Jane Carlisle or why she wrote that, please let me know. Vladimir Nabokov taught a literature class at Cornell in the 1950s called Masters of European Fiction, which was somewhat famous, both because it was popular with the students and because he forbade the publication of his notes. So it's sort of a legend now. I think

they were published eventually, but I haven't got my hands on them. It caught my eye because at the end of the book, apparently, are some sample exam questions that are just terrifying. They're about Dickens' novel Bleak House and Flaubert's Madame Bovary, the two examples I have. They're terrifying because they're very specific and very open-ended at the same time. The two I've got are, The features of Fanny Price and Esther are pleasantly blurred, not so with Emma. Describe her eyes, hair, hands, and skin. And did Emma like her mountain lakes with or without a lone skiff?

So if anyone knows anything more about these Cornell exam questions that Nabokov posed to his students, please let me know. I really want to know more about that and how the students did. That is kind of terrifying, like to read a novel and be expected to remember really specific questions like that. Yeah, I mean, it's just about impossible. This next one's been in my notes for years and years. Apparently there's a Swiss criminologist named Carl Ludwig Kunz who studies crime in Duckburg. Duckburg is the city where Donald Duck lives.

I haven't got my hands on the paper. Apparently it's called Criminal Policy in Duckburg. I'll put the whole citation in the show notes. in the show notes. Apparently, I think what he did was go through old Donald Duck cartoons and comics and kept track of criminal activity over the years just to study the trends there. The only hint of this that I've been able to find is there's a brief article in The Independent from December 2, 1998 that says, The level of crime has risen astronomically in Mickey Mouse comics since the 1950s,

but at the same time, the distinction between good and evil has become sharper, a Swiss professor said yesterday. Carl Ludwig Kunz, a professor of criminal law at Bern University, said the best character is Donald Duck with all his human frailties, but added that the duck and his family became involved in over seven times more crime between 1952 and 1995. An alarming trend. Interestingly, Mickey Mouse in 1952 committed seven criminal acts,

and by 1995 had cleaned up his act and become a respectable private detective. So there's all kinds of interesting things afoot there. Anyway, as I say, I'll put the citation in the show notes. If anyone can get their hands on this paper, I'd love to learn more about this study. This next one is just a brief thing. The science writer Willie Lay in his 1954 book, Engineer's Dreams, says that in late summer of 1952, the government of Iceland, one of the oldest democracies on the globe, decided to make a present to the native children. Each boy and girl under six years of age was given five bananas, which

had just been harvested. I do know that they cultivate bananas on Iceland, strange as that sounds, but I haven't been able to confirm whether actually the government gave them out systematically to the children there in 1952. If anyone knows about that, please let us know. We'll find out if we have any listeners in Iceland. Yeah, I bet we do. This next bit I've corresponded with a few readers about. I don't know why I'm obsessed with this, but I sort of am now. It concerns a set of steps at Trinity College, Cambridge, which I've never been to. It's specifically the semicircular set

of eight steps leading out of Great Court up to the hall. The reason I'm interested in it is that there's a history of men trying to jump up the whole flight of steps with one go, which is amazing because reportedly the whole flight of steps

is 10 feet long and four feet high. Over the years, I've managed to find records of two men who are pretty well attested as having pulled this off. One of them is William Hewell, believe it or not, the famous English polymath of the early 19th century. Apparently in a cap and gown, he came across some undergraduates trying in vain to do it. And this account I found says, quote, he clapped his cap firmly on his head, took the run and reached the top of the steps at one bound. This was witnessed by Sir George Young, who told his son, who told G.M. Trevelyan, who was eventually master of the college.

So that's got a pretty good stamp of approval on it. The second man who apparently pulled it off is Henry Montgomery, who later became an Anglican bishop. He apparently did this jump the steps while an undergraduate there, which would have been sometime between 1866 and 1870. And it said that there's a legend that it had only been done once before, which must have been Huell, so it all nicely neats up there. Trevelyan actually added in a 1944 letter to the Times. He says, quote, I have heard that the feat was accomplished once or twice in this century, meaning the 20th century.

Once I was told an American succeeded, but I have not the facts or names. It certainly has been done very seldom. So if there's anyone at Cambridge or elsewhere who knows anything about this, including the identity of this putative American or anyone else who's managed to jump up the steps in one go, I'd love to hear about it. Also, if there's anyone who has a photograph of the steps, I'd love to get them. I've just heard about this through sort of hearsay and legend,

and I don't even know what they look like. I just think it's very interesting for some reason. Just a couple more. The credits to the 1966 Steve McQueen movie, The Sand Pebbles, include the line, Diversions by Irving Schwartz. I'm trying to find out what that refers to.

Some sources say it's a mysterious writer whose letters raised the morale of the cast and crew while they were shooting in Taiwan and Hong Kong. In 2007, one of the character actors in that film was named Joseph DiRetta, and he died in 2007. And his obituary in the telegram says, quote, In addition to his playing the role of Red Dog Shanahan in The Sand Pebbles, Joseph was known for his off-screen antics. the role of Red Dog Shanahan in The Sand Pebbles, Joseph was known for his off-screen antics. Robert Wise, director and producer,

created a special movie credit entitled Diversions, Irving Schwartz, in honor of Joseph, who kept the crew's spirits up during the arduous location shoot in China. But that doesn't really tell us what the antics were or why he was credited as Irving Schwartz when that wasn't his character's name or his own name. It just seems like there's a story there that I haven't been able to unearth.

And finally, I'm trying to learn more about the phrase or legend IHTFP, which is associated with MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. That legend shows up. It's written in various places by students all around the campus. And I understand it stands for

I hate this f***ing place. But in trying to learn more about the origin of it, one book at least says that it's apparently been associated with some U.S. military academies. One book says it's been unofficially documented in both the U.S. Air Force and at MIT as far back as the 1950s. So if there's anyone who knows anything more about that little motto or its origins, I'd love to hear from you. You can write to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. Okay, it's my turn again to try to solve a lateral thinking puzzle. I can't believe it's already been two weeks since I did the last one. Boy, that goes fast. Okay, so that

means Greg's going to give me some kind of interesting scenario, and I have to try to figure it out asking only yes or no questions. This one is submitted by listener Paul Kapp. The Pentagon building, among its many peculiar characteristics, has twice the number of bathrooms and toilets that an office building of its size and capacity would normally have. Why? Twice the number of bathrooms. twice the number of bathrooms i don't know is it i don't know just so people aren't waiting to use the bathroom and wasting time no that would be very thoughtful well that's like you really need to be efficient don't spend time waiting to get to the body um okay twice the number of bathrooms oh is it because um they have some kind of extra special bathroom, like for handicapped people or nursing mothers?

No. No. Okay. Twice the number of bathrooms. Is this in any way related to the fact of what the Pentagon is used for? No. No. Is it related to when the building was built?

Yes. Oh, when was building was built? Yes. Oh, when was the Pentagon built? Was the Pentagon built in the 1900s? In the 20th century. Not in the first decade, necessarily. No, I meant, yeah, in that century. Okay, just making sure it wasn't built some strange time. Okay, do I need to know more specifically when the Pentagon was built?

Would that help me figure it out? Like what, decade? Yeah, I think it would help. Before the 1950s? Yes. Oh, before the 1950s. And this wasn't because they had bathrooms for black people versus white people, so they needed twice as many?

Yes, it was. Oh! You nailed it. That's amazing. That's less than two minutes. Paul sent this excerpt from the Wikipedia entry for the Pentagon. Construction of the Pentagon was done during the period of racial segregation in the United States. This had structural consequences to the design of the building.

Under the supervision of Colonel Leslie Groves, the decision to have separate eating and lavatory accommodations for whites and blacks was made and carried out. The dining area for blacks was put in the basement, and on each floor there were double toilet facilities separated by gender and race. These measures of segregation were said to have been done in compliance with the state of Virginia's racial laws. The Pentagon, as a result, has twice the number of toilet facilities needed for a building of its size. President Roosevelt had made an order ending such racial discrimination in the U.S. military in June 1941. When the president visited the Pentagon before its dedication, he questioned Groves regarding the number of washrooms and ordered him to remove the whites-only signs. Until 1965, the Pentagon was the only building in Virginia

where segregation laws were not enforced. Oh, that's interesting. So the buildings in Virginia said they were following the laws on the books in Virginia at the time, but Roosevelt said that for military buildings, they should be integrated. Well, good for Roosevelt. I smiled when I got this from Paul Capp because I actually, I grew up outside D.C. and my

father was in the Air Force, and so one day when I was a little kid, he actually took me to the Pentagon, and that is literally my only memory of the Pentagon, is the bathrooms are huge. Oh. They're gigantic. So there's not only a lot of them, but they're very large bathrooms. I mean, I was only a little kid, so that was probably the only observation I was capable of making. But I still remember it 40 years later.

So thank you very much for sending that in, Paul. Yes, and if anybody else has a puzzle that they'd like to send in for us to use, please send them to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. That wraps up another episode for us. If you're looking for more Futility Closet, check out our books on Amazon. Or visit the website at futilitycloset.com, where you can sample over 8,000 charming diversions. At the website, you can also see the show notes for the podcast and listen to previous episodes. Just click Podcast in the sidebar.

If you'd like to support Futility Closet, please consider becoming a patron to help keep us going. You can find more information at patreon.com slash futilitycloset. You can also help us out by telling your friends about us, by leaving a review of the books or the podcast on Amazon or iTunes, or by clicking the donate button on the sidebar of the website. 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.