Futility Closet - 052-Moving Day in New York

Episode Date: April 6, 2015

For centuries, May 1 brought chaos to New York, as most tenants had to move on the same day, clogging the streets with harried people and all their belongings. In this episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll review the colorful history of "Moving Day" and wonder how it lasted through two centuries. We'll also recount some surprising escapes from sinking ships and puzzle over a burglar's ingenuity. Sources for our feature on Moving Day, New York City's historic custom of changing residence on May 1: Kenneth A. Scherzer, The Unbounded Community: Neighborhood Life and Social Structure in New York City, 1830-1875, 1992. Elizabeth Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent, 1785-1850, 1991. William Shepard Walsh, Curiosities of Popular Customs ... Illustrated, 1897. "Expressmen and Cartmen's Charges -- The Laws Relative Thereto," New York Times, April 14, 1870. "Rich Are Homeless This Moving Day," New York Times, Oct. 1, 1919. "Rain Adds to Gloom of City Moving Day," New York Times, Oct. 2, 1919. "May 1 Moving Rush a Thing of the Past," New York Times, May 2, 1922. In 1890 the New York Times published a list of the maximum prices that city ordinances permitted cartmen to charge: Sources for our feature on oddities in maritime disasters: "Andrea Doria Tragedy Recalled by the Survivors," Associated Press, July 24, 1981. "A Remarkable Maritime Disaster," Scientific American, Nov. 24, 1888. "A Remarkable Collision," New Zealand Herald, July 26, 1884. This week's lateral thinking puzzle was contributed by listener Ken Murphy. 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]. And you can finally follow us on Facebook and Twitter. 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 52. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. By tradition, apartment leases in New York City all used to expire on May 1st. So each year, thousands of New Yorkers had to move their belongings to new quarters on the same day. In today's show, we'll review the colorful history of Moving Day and wonder how it lasted through two centuries. We'll also review some surprising escapes from sinking ships and puzzle over a burglar's ingenuity.

A quick reminder that we've set up a Patreon campaign to support this podcast. Greg and I spend many hours a week researching and creating each episode, and we need your help to keep making the show. So if you value the podcast and want to help keep it going, check out our Patreon campaign at patreon.com slash futilitycloset. If you pledge at least a dollar an episode, you get access to the podcast activity feed, where we post bonus material, comments about our work on the show, and outtakes. Thanks so much to everyone who has contributed so far. We really appreciate every donation we get. Moving Day refers to the unbelievable fact that for most of its history, everyone in New York City moved house at the same time. It's funny,

most people don't remember this now, but the tradition lasted from colonial times up through World War II. It ended only, you know, what is that, 70 years ago. Which I just, it's hard to believe that a tradition like this would run at all, let alone for that length of time. The way it worked is this. Traditionally, most of the apartment leases in New York City ran from May 1st to May 1st. So if your landlord decided he was going to raise your rent, he would come to you in January or by February 1st and say, I'm going to raise your rent when your lease is up on May 1st. If you accepted that, then fine, you're done.

But if you didn't want to accept it, that left you the early spring to go around the city and try to find a better deal or better accommodations or whatever you were looking for. And then on May 1st at 9 a.m., every residential lease in the city would expire simultaneously. And there was just bedlam by all accounts everyone would try to hire a cartman a horse and cart to drag all their uh belongings through the streets to their new apartment all at the same time all doing this at the same time and you can imagine be hard enough to do that now but just with trying to do it with horses and buggies basically there weren't nearly enough of them and and it was just it couldn't possibly succeed and this happened year after year

every single year. It put a standstill to all other activity in the city and people knew it was coming every year but there was no getting around it. The streets were just clogged with this throng of people trying to get all their possessions into their new residences and half the

time when you got there, the old tenants in your new apartment were refusing to leave and so your friends and acquaintances would line up opposite theirs and you'd all yell at each other and it was just chaos for a whole day. As I say, this tradition lasted,

no one actually knows when it started. It's that old. And it ran, as I say, up through World War II. At the height of it, in the early 20th century, a million New Yorkers were all changing residents at the same time, which is... That's just so hard to picture. Like, I'm just trying to picture that. I'm sorry anyone ever had to go through this,

but the descriptions, if you read them today, are quite entertaining. The Evening Post said, May Day is a day of horror. The New York Mirror in 1825 said, The spirits of anarchy and confusion might have roamed with delight through our streets on the 1 day of horror. The New York Mirror in 1825 said the spirits of anarchy and confusion might have roamed with delight through our streets on the 1st of May. One editor wrote that there scarcely could have been greater confusion had the news suddenly been circulated that the British had landed on Coney Island. Frances Trollope, who's the mother of the novelist Anthony Trollope,

wrote in her 1832 book Domestic Manners of Americans, On the 1st of May, the city of New York has the appearance of sending off a population flying from the plague or of a town which had surrendered on condition of carrying away all their goods and chattels. Rich furniture and ragged furniture, carts, wagons, and drays, ropes, canvas, and straw, packers, porters, and draymen, white, yellow, and black, occupy the streets from east to west, from north to south on this day. Everyone I spoke to on the subject complained of this custom as most annoying, but all assured me it was unavoidable if you inhabit a rented house. And Davy Crockett, of all people who normally stayed well away from the city, came there in 1834 to be the guest of honor at a dinner for the Whig Party and wrote afterward,

By the time we returned down Broadway, it seemed to me that the city was flying before some awful calamity. Why, said I, Colonel, what under heaven is the matter? Everyone appears to be pitching out their furniture and packing it off. He laughed and said this was the general moving day, such a sight nobody ever saw unless it was in this same city. It seemed to kind of frolic, as if they were changing houses just for fun. Every street was crowded with carts, drays, and people. So the world goes. It would take a good deal to get me out of my log house,

but here I understand many persons move every year. As I say, no one knows how this began, but it's very old. It probably goes all the way back into the 1600s. Here's an excerpt from a letter in 1759, so this is already well before the American Revolution. We have moved from our former house in the Broadway into a new one just built in Horse and Cart Street, for which we are obliged to pay yearly a rent of 20 pounds. But it is a fine house, and so after all, the rent is not so dear. All the houses here are hired according to an old custom from the 1st of May, and on that day all the farmers from Nassau Island and the Jerseys

come over to let out their wagons for the citizens to move their goods with. We had three, for which we were forced to pay the large sum of 18 shillings for the day, so great is the demand for them then. Some people here move every year and seem to do it only for pleasure. I am hardly satisfied with my experience in it, and as both Margaret and myself and the children are pleased with the new house, I think I will remain in it. So that's 1759, and it's already being referred to as an old custom.

Wow, then that really would be old then. It started, the pace of life obviously way back in colonial days was much slower. Most tenants then held leases of 21 years. And back then you were generally tied, your work was tied to where you lived, in part because if you were a hired hand or a slave way back, then you were tied to sort of the master household. And this didn't affect you so much. And so the people who were moving from apartment to apartment, there were relatively few of them. Also, way back in those early days, the city itself was only the southernmost mile or so of Manhattan. So there's many fewer people were affected. But obviously,

especially through the 19th century, as the city grew really quickly, this was like an ill-fitting suit that you just had to keep wearing and people couldn't get rid of. So it got worse and worse with emancipation and with the demise of the household labor system. It was just a tradition that everyone had sort of grown to accept and that no one really wanted to be doing anymore. Well, it makes some weird sense because you think about it, if you want to switch apartments, you need the other person's lease to be up pretty much the same time your lease, or you guys, you can't switch. I think that was the thinking.

Yeah. But it was such bedlam that there were good reasons not to do it. As I was researching this, I kept thinking of daylight saving time, which there are certainly good reasons to have started it and, I guess, to continue it. But there seem to be some pretty compelling reasons not to do it. And yet we're all sort of tied to the system, and every year people say again. Every year people complain about it, but there seem to be some pretty compelling reasons not to do it. And yet we're all sort of tied to the system and every year people say, Every year people complain about it, yeah. Why are we doing this to ourselves? It's just this arbitrary convention that we're all following.

But there are so many interlocking accommodations and provisions that you can't just drop it. Or it's hard to do that. Like you and I, we used to live in Indiana. And in Indiana at the time they didn't observe daylight settings time. So if you bought a clock, you just put it on the wall and you never touched it again. It was paradise. But I worked for a company whose headquarters were in Illinois. So I still had to do all the math in my head because they were changing times, you know? Right. And if we were going to call people back East, we had to remember whether they were on the same time schedule as us or a different time schedule.

So it's the same thing here. Once everyone's doing it, it's hard for everyone just to let go of it. So as I say, especially through the 19th century, the city was really growing quickly, and the streets were increasingly gridlocked on moving day when everyone was trying to move at the same time. There were city ordinances that set the maximum rates that these cartmen could charge, but they didn't always observe that. It was said that some people paid up to a week's wages to be moved in the space of six hours between 9 and 3, which is insane.

There just weren't enough cartmen to handle the traffic. As I mentioned earlier, there were local farmers, I mean, people around the city who would come in just to try to help out and earn some money getting people moved. Yeah, I mean, if you could earn a week's wages for lending out your cart for the day, that would be great. Yeah, I mean, if you could earn a week's wages for lending out your cart for the day, that would be great. And if you arrived at your destination and refused to pay the cartman, he would just take the cart to police headquarters. Apparently this happened so often that it was sort of a tradition. And the city was growing screamingly fast. In the 45 years following 1830, New York grew from 200,000 people to more than a million.

So it's fivefold in the space of less than half a century. So just, it was untenable quickly and drew increasingly criticism. Here's George Curtis in Harper's Magazine in 1855. There is no day more dreary and disgusting than moving day. And why should there be this insane conspiracy of every man against his neighbor's convenience? Why every lease should begin and expire upon the same day does not appear. It might be more pleasantly arranged, more wisely, and more profitably. But, we repeat, great is the force of bad habit, and great is

the misery of moving our households as we do everything else in the most awkward, shiftless, and expensive manner. But there is one thing that an American will not do, and that is learn. He will bungle his way out if he can. If not, he will be apt to call his way the best. By 1856, despite the ordinance, there were some people who were moving a few days early, and moving days sort of became moving week, just because it had to go somewhere. And after the Depression of 1873, there was more housing built,

so that reduced the price of housing, and it reduced the need to move so frequently, but the tradition was still in place. By 1922, I'll put some links to some newspaper stories in the show notes, there were new rent laws that protected tenants so there was less danger of having your rent increase each year, so there was less pressure on people to move. But finally, it was World War II that kind of forced an end to all of this. And that's because all the able-bodied men who would normally be moving people were overseas fighting the war and were just unavailable. So as a practical matter, it was just impossible to move on that day during the war.

And then after the war ended, all those men came back and started families in the city, and there was just a huge increase in the population, and a consequent housing shortage, which made it practically impossible to do this anymore. It was just there wasn't enough housing to accommodate all the moves. One headline read, housing shortage erases moving day. So the housing shortage was really what put an end to it. And as I say, since World War II, it's just been kind of a curious note in the city's history. I should add that it wasn't all just chaos and agony, although I think it mostly was. Some people saw it as sort of this annual ritual of renewal. There were bonfires in the streets and dancing. Some people changed houses

every year, as I mentioned, just for variety or just for fun. I mean, if you have to do it. Seems like a lot of work to go to, but okay. Or seeking the optimum rent. If you were really an optimizer, you could make a project of this. But even as visitors to the city were wondering at how irrational all this was, it sort of forged the city's modern personality of being able to get through anything that you see now during blizzards and blackouts. It's sort of that modern New York sensibility of getting through things like this. And ultimately, in a larger sense, I think it helped promote the city's growth because you're sort of shaking up this box of people every year.

If you look at the history of New York, it started out as essentially a unified town without class, and moving day helped it sort itself into business districts and neighborhoods based not just on business, but on ethnicity, religion, trade, and economic class, sort of reinventing itself geographically through all the uproar and growing pains of the 19th century in particular, which made it sort of more agile in sorting itself out and organizing itself as an entity, as a city, particularly through the 19th century, which made it probably more effective in some way. So it was a whole lot of pain for the people who had to move houses,

but it also made the city sort of more dynamic in a way that's really unique to New York City. If you're looking for more quirky entertainment, check out the Futility Closet books. Both are filled with hundreds of small bites of mental candy. Oddities and curiosities, quotations, offbeat inventions, and brain-teasing puzzles. Perfect for whenever you want a few minutes of cerebral amusement. Look for them on Amazon and discover why other readers have called them a fascinating compendium of interesting bits of information and fun

books that can really be enjoyed by all. This is a trio of oddities connected with maritime disasters, just from my notes and in no particular order. The Andrea Doria, famously, was an Italian ocean liner that sank in 1956 off the coast of Massachusetts after it was struck by a Swedish liner called the Stockholm. It was huge news at the time. 52 people were killed, which makes it the worst maritime disaster in American waters in the last hundred years. But there was one interesting, odd story attached to it. One of the people on the Andrea Doria was a 14-year-old girl named Linda Morgan. She was an American. She was returning with her family. They'd spent the

last four years in Spain, and they were returning to the U.S. And at the time of the incident, she and her half-sister were asleep in their room on the Andrea Doria. And afterward, the Andrea Doria was struck amidships and then remained afloat for 11 hours and finally capsized and sank, but she didn't turn up on any of the rescue ships, and there was no sign of her, and so it was feared at first that she'd been killed in the disaster, but then a strange story came out. It turned out that shortly after the collision, a crewman aboard the Stockholm, the ship that had rammed the Andrea Doria, had heard a young girl calling out for her mother in Spanish from behind a bulwark. And he looked and found a girl, this Linda Morgan, 14-year-old American girl, lying on a mattress

behind the bulwark. And she said to him in Spanish, I was on the Andrea Doria. Where am I now? And it turns out that apparently what had happened is she and her half-sister were asleep in their room, and the Stockholm crashed into their room. I mean, tore open the room, basically, and somehow managed to scoop her off her bed on her mattress and withdraw with her. Her sister, who was just a few feet away, was killed, and her stepfather was killed, and her mother was badly injured. But she suffered only a broken arm, which is amazing. In fact, she settled later in San Antonio, Texas, and her husband became mayor there in 2007. That's one of those things, again, that, you know, if you saw it in a movie, you'd be like, oh, come on. Yeah, it's hard to believe. The odds of that being able to happen. I guess there'd be like, oh, come on. Yeah, it's hard to believe. The odds of that being

able to happen. I guess there will be just statistically some strange things like that connected with any such dramatic event, but it's still hard to believe. Here's another one that's quite similar, though, actually. In 1888, there were two sister steamships, Danish ships called the Thingvala and the Geyser, that used to go back and forth on the same line between New York and Copenhagen. And in the early morning, about 3.30 in the morning on August 14th, 1888, those two collided off the coast of Nova Scotia. In a stormy night, the Thingvala's prow struck the Geyser amid ships. It's sort of the same situation. And the geyser sank in seven minutes. In this case, the second officer of the geyser,

the ship that had been struck, a man named Jorgensen, similarly was asleep in his bunk and was awakened by what he called a frightful crash. But in this case, he was awake and could understand what was happening, which must have been terrifying. This is how he described it afterwards. He said, I rolled out of my bunk just as the bow of the Thingvala

crashed its way through the walls of my stateroom, making an enormous hole and blocking the door so I couldn't get out. I grasped the Thingvala's anchor chain, which was hanging over her bow just in front of me, and climbed up to her deck just as the geyser gave one last lurch and went down out of sight

with her decks covered with shrieking, despairing people. So at one moment he was asleep and then witnesses the whole ship he'd been on just sink into the sea. He said, I believe there were many others who failed to get out of the cabins at all for less than seven minutes elapsed from the time the geyser was struck until she sank. As near as I could judge from a hasty glance, the entire starboard side of the geyser from the stern to forward of the mizzenmast was crushed in, while the Thingvala's nose was ripped completely off, clear back to the first bulkhead. It was a huge disaster, but he was unscathed. He says, it looks like the Thingvala's boats rescued 14 passengers and 17 crew members, leaving 126 people unaccounted for and presumed

dead. Most of the passengers just died in their bunks. So he was just another lucky person who happened to be... It's actually lucky that the ship went into his cabin. Right, as if the ship, in both cases, as if the ships had been intent, the ramming ships had been intent on trying to save one person before the rammed ships sank. And this last one is just kind of an oddity. It's a somewhat different story. I don't know how to characterize this. This is just a few years earlier than the last one. This is on March 19,

1884. A French refrigerated cargo ship called the Frigore Fique was cruising through the Bay of Biscay. That's the gulf between France and Spain. Cruising through heavy fog when a British steamer called the Rumney just loomed out of nowhere and struck it amid ships and wounded it, they thought, fatally. The whole crew on this French cargo ship scrambled aboard the Romney, the ramming ship, and their own ship, which is now empty, just lurched off into the darkness, and they assumed it was going to sink. The Romney, the ship that now held everyone, was itself sinking, and so they were lowering the ships into the water, and they were still alongside it, when another ship hove out of the fog

and struck it amid ships. At first they thought this was the third ship, but it turned out that it was the empty Frigri Fic, the original French ship. It had been rammed, everyone abandoned ship, and its rudder was jammed in the collision, and so it went lurching around in a big great circle and came back and struck the Romney. So it struck the ship that they were all trying to be rescued on. Yeah, as if for revenge.

It's hard not to see it that way. So the Romney then sank immediately and that left the people just alone in their lifeboats out in the middle of the sea trying to chase this empty circling cargo ship, which is all they had left to get to. And they caught up to it eventually. It sank as well.

And that didn't go anywhere. The two parties sued each other, but a judge found that neither one of them could really prove negligence on the part of the other, so they just had to pay their own cost. So that's just sort of a senseless tragedy, but it's kind of funny to see. It's as if the two ships were out to kill each other and the humans are just these fleas trying to get from one to

the other and remain safe. There are probably more stories like this in my notes. I'll go through them and see if I can make some more collections. This week, Greg's going to be trying to solve a lateral thinking puzzle. Allergies aside, we'll have to cut him a lot of slack. He's been suffering with allergies here in springtime. I like slack cutting. I'm going to give him a puzzle to solve, and he has to try to do it asking only yes or no questions. This week's puzzle comes from Ken Murphy.

Okay. Thank you, Ken. Thank you, Ken. A burglar gets a tip that a particular building has a lot of valuables inside, so he starts casing the place. On the first night, he observes a person arriving at the building, unlocking a garage door, and going inside. After a few minutes, the person leaves, closes the door, and relocks it with a padlock, carefully scrambling the combination. When the coast is clear, the burglar takes a closer look at the lock

and sees that it's a multiple dial combination lock, you know, the type with the multiple rotating discs with numbers, okay? For the next couple of weeks, the burglar continues to observe every night, and the same thing happens. Every night a person arrives at the building and follows the same routine as the first night, okay? But then finally, one night after the visitor departs, the burglar walks up to the building, unlocks the combination lock, and robs the place blind. How did he do it?

Okay. Did this really happen? Not that I'm aware of. Maybe Ken did it himself. I don't know. Do I need to know anything about the building itself? No. Okay.

And what the valuables are? No. So this is really just a puzzle about how do you get into a padlocked garage? Yes, exactly. By unlocking the padlock. Yes. I don't need to know the burglar's identity. Nope.

There aren't other people involved. Correct. Okay. Okay. So a burglar observes. All he's doing is observing. Correct. Okay. Okay. So a burglar observes. All he's doing is observing. Yes. And I can't remember what you said.

Is it the same guy who enters the building each time? Does that matter? It doesn't matter. No. Okay. So a burglar repeatedly watches someone. Yes. Enter a locked building.

Right. That's locked with a combination lock with multiple dials right and doing that and nothing else he gathers enough information to enable himself to unlock the lock is that the whole puzzle pretty much yeah good so far so good I can't remember what you said. The guy, on the first night, he sees the guy unlock the lock? Yeah, he sees the person unlock the door, go inside, come back out, relock it with the padlock, carefully scrambling the combination. All right. And it's not just so simple that he can see clearly enough that he can just look over the guy's shoulder and see what... Right. He has to be at a discrete distance, so he's too far away to see what the guy is putting into the combination lock. Okay.

All right. Then let's talk about this lock. It's a padlock? Yes. Do you know how many dials? No, I don't, and it doesn't matter. Oh, really? Some number of dials?

Yes. Each dial has a series of numbers on it? Yes. So you can set a dial, say if it's enough from 1 to 10, you can set it to 8, for example. Sure. So what we're looking for, are they numbers? Yes. This is sort of like the combination locks on like a briefcase or a suitcase where you just set it.

Exactly. Okay. Yeah. So there's these rotating, separately rotating dials, and you have to have them all in the right sequence. So in that sense, the combination that he's looking for is a number. Yes. Or a set of digits. A number with a certain number of digits.

Right. And you don't even know how many digits. I don't know how many, and it doesn't matter. Okay. All right. Well, this is proceeding very well. So the question is, how do you, without actually seeing it, how do you infer the sequence of numbers that's being used?

Yeah. Okay. Because he's an exosome. Can he hear something? No. Is he using some other sense? No. Does he have any equipment that he's using? No.

So he's just standing by or hiding nearby. Yes. While a guy manipulates, scrambles the lock. Right. Each time. Right. And then he can go look at it if he wants. Afterward.

Afterward. Okay. But he can't see it while the guy's doing it. Okay. Fair enough. So let's, on the first night. Yes. The guy leaves the garage, locks it, spins the dials.

Right. Let me think about this. And he leaves and then the burglar tiptoes up to the padlock. Yes. And looks at it. Yes. And sees it's set to some sequence of numbers. Right. Let me think about this. And he leaves, and then the burglar tiptoes up to the padlock and looks at it and sees it's set to some sequence of numbers. Right. That it is unlikely to be the actual combination. Right. Exactly. So the burglar, at that point, all he knows is that the lock has been scrambled and that it's presenting some sequence of numbers.

Right. But there's no other information he can possibly get that I can think of. Right. That's the only information he gets. Okay. So he writes that down and records it somehow. Sure. And you say this happens on successive nights a certain number of times.

You don't know exactly how many. Don't know exactly how many. But precisely the same thing happens. Yes. The guy leaves, scrambles the lock, and the burglar comes up and reads the scrambled sequence. Yes. scrambles the lock, and the burglar comes up and reads the scrambled sequence. Yes. So all the burglar's got at this point is a list of seemingly random numbers, sequences of numbers.

Mm-hmm. Okay, let's stop right there. Okay. So he's got that list. Yes. And then on the night when he's able to get in, he approaches the lock with that list alone. Yes. And then on the night when he's able to get in, he approaches the lock with that list. Yes. Alone. Yes. And using that information alone. Yes. He unlocks, he spins in the correct sequence. That's exactly right. And that's what gets him in. You're doing great. You don't know

what you've got, but you're on the right track. All right. I'm just, because this is, you know, these lateral ones tend to be, you know, there is a monkey on the roof or something. No monkeys involved. Okay. So we don't, all right. So what it comes down to is how do you come up with a sequence of numbers if all you have is a list of wrong sequences of numbers? Exactly.

That's right. Very good. That doesn't sound as promising as you make it sound. It is, though. It is. Okay. That's exactly right. Think that through, what you just said. All right. Okay. Can we say safely that all the numbers on his list are incorrect? Yes. In other words, if he entered each of them in turn, none of them would open the lock. That is correct. Is it just the case that he looks for the one sequence of numbers that was never used? Yes. Yes, that's it.

That's it. Oh, good for me. Yeah, good for you. Because he knows if the guy is purposefully scrambling it each time, that none of the digits will be the right ones. Right? So like on the first dial of a four, never is one of the scrambled digits. Right.

And everywhere on every other number is. That's actually good. Because I was thinking, well, it's possible if you scrambled it and were very unlucky, you'd walk away having left exactly the right number. But he never let that happen. Right. So the burglar could be sure that all the ones on his list were red herrings. Very good.

Very good. So thanks to Ken Murphy. Yes. And we've just told everybody how they can go out and commit a crime. Right. If they want. Go to it. And 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're looking for more Futility Closet, you can check out our books on Amazon. Follow us on Twitter or Facebook, or visit the website at futilitycloset.com, where you can sample over 8,000 captivating tidbits. 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.

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