Futility Closet - 059-The Wizard of Mauritius

Episode Date: May 24, 2015

In 1764 a French engineer on a tiny African island claimed that he could see ships beyond the horizon. In today's show we'll review the strange story of Étienne Bottineau and consider the evidence for his claims to have invented a new art. We'll also ponder a 400-year-old levitation trick and puzzle over why throwing a beer can at someone might merit a promotion. Sources for our feature on nauscopie, the purported art of apprehending ships below the horizon: Rupert T. Gould, Oddities: A Book of Unexplained Facts, 1928. Sir David Brewster, Letters on Natural Magic, 1832. J. Gregory Dill, "The Lost Art of Nauscopie," Ocean Navigator, January/February 2003 (retrieved May 17, 2015). Mike Dash, "Naval Gazing: The Enigma of Étienne Bottineau," Smithsonian Magazine, Oct. 13, 2011 (retrieved May 17, 2015). Chicago Tribune, "The Science of Nauscopie," Nov. 7, 1869. Greg's post on Samuel Pepy's "lifting experiment" appeared on Futility Closet on March 22, 2008. Further sources for that segment: Sir David Brewster, Letters on Natural Magic, 1832. The Diary of Samuel Pepys, July 31, 1665. Robert Conger Pell, Milledulcia: A Thousand Pleasant Things Selected from "Notes and Queries," 1857. Notes & Queries, July 3, 1852 (the original query). Notes & Queries, July 24, 1852 (Brewster offers his impressions). "Non-Wist," "Phenomenon of Levity in the Human Subject," The Zoist, January 1852. Two YouTube videos illustrate the modern technique: one, two The YouTube discussion mentioned in this week's lateral thinking puzzle is here (warning -- this spoils the puzzle). 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]. You can also 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 59. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. In 1764, a French engineer on a tiny African island claimed that he could see ships beyond the horizon. In today's show, we'll review the odd story of Etienne Batineau and consider the evidence for his claims to have invented a new art.

We'll also ponder a 400-year-old levitation trick and puzzle over why throwing a beer can at someone might merit a promotion. and puzzle over why throwing a beer can at someone might merit a promotion. Okay, this is an odd one. Mauritius is the name of an island off of Madagascar on the east coast of Africa. It's currently its own sovereign nation, but in the 18th century it was a colony of France, and in 1764 something strange began to happen there. A man began to predict that he could tell when a ship was approaching the island. Today, that's no big deal. We have the internet and satellites, and you can track ships all over the world if you want to.

But in 1764, you had to go down to the beach with a telescope and just stare at the horizon until a ship appeared. And this man said he could tell before that point when a ship would be approaching. The remarkable thing was that he began to win these wagers, and with such consistent success that the other officers started refusing to wager with him at all. His name was Etienne Bottineau, and he was just sort of a minor member of the engineering corps in the French Navy on the island. And it turned out that he'd been working, when he lived in France in 1762, it occurred to him that he might be able to develop this technique of detecting

when a ship was below the horizon, but on the approach, and had indifferent success in experimenting with this in France. But when he was posted to Mauritius, the air was clearer. And for whatever reason, he found he was much better able to do this successfully, which accounted for these winning wagers. So this wasn't like psychic powers or something. This was he had some technique. He had some technique. He was rather tight-lipped about what it was. He said because he thought it was valuable.

This is reasonable and fair. He thought it was valuable and didn't want to just part with it for nothing. He thought it might be worth something, for instance, to the government. So he was kind of murky about exactly how it worked. He called it noscopy, which he defined as the art of detecting ships at a great distance. And the most anyone could get out of him was that he said the sea was full of decaying vegetable and animal material. And when a ship's bow cuts through it, it releases

vapors that rise into the air and can be seen from a great distance to someone with a trained eye. That's as much as he was willing to say. He said just over a lot of trial and error over the years, he just worked out how to do this very well. That's what he said. He lived on the island for years. Fifteen years went by, and he just kept refining this technique and got better and better at it. By his own reckoning, between 1778 and 1782, he had announced the arrival of 575 vessels, many of them four days before they became visible, which is amazing. This sort of technique, if it's real, would be very valuable, not just in itself, because otherwise you can't see something approaching until it's over the horizon.

And the horizon is actually closer than many people suppose. It's only about three miles away. But also strategically, because this was a French colony, and during these years, the American Revolution broke out, and France supported the colonies, which put it in conflict with Britain. So if you're on this rather vulnerable little French colony out in the Indian Ocean, it

would be useful to know if an angry British fleet of ships is coming at you with some advance notice before they actually just turn up on your doorstep. So as I say, for 15 years, Bottino just kept working on this alleged technique. Finally, in 1780, he wrote to the Minister of Marine Affairs in France, saying, I seem to be able to detect ships below the horizon. Would you like to talk to me about this? Thinking it might be valuable to the French government. The French government wrote back not to Bottineau, but to his boss, the governor of the island of Mauritius, saying, there's a man on your island who claims to be able to do this. We don't want to talk to him yet, but do me a favor, start keeping a register of his predictions. When he predicts a ship is approaching, just write that

down and then keep track of his batting average of whether the ship actually arrives, and let's just see how well he does, which seems reasonable. They did this. They began keeping the register on May 15, 1782, and on the very next day, May 16, Bottineau went down onto the beach, looked out to sea, and announced that three ships were approaching. Oh, so he can tell the number, not just that ships are coming, but the number of ships. That's what he said this time. And the other officers looked out to sea with their telescopes and saw nothing. But on May 17, the next next day, one lookout reported that the, the, just the very top of a vessel was appearing over the horizon.

A second appeared on the 18th and a third on the 20th. So he was right. So now the governor of the island who had been, you know, familiar with him from all these years of living in Mauritius and just watching him perform all this time, offered him 10,000 levers on behalf of the government and a further pension of 1,200 a year for his secret, and Bottineau turned him down, saying he thought he could do better than that. At the end of this trial with the register,

Bottineau wrote, I had announced 150 vessels in 62 informations, none of which had been found to be false. So in 1782, the governor of the island wrote again to the minister of the marine, saying, among other things, here's another example of his performance. Upon one occasion, he asserted that a fleet of 11 vessels was approaching the island. The announcement caused great alarm, and we had anticipated an attack from the English. A sloop of war was instantly dispatched to look out, but before she returned,

Monsieur Bertineau came to the governor and informed him that the signs in the atmosphere had disappeared and that the fleet had taken a different direction. Sometime after this, a vessel arrived here from the East Indies and reported that she had seen a fleet of 11 vessels, they turned out to be British merchant vessels, sailing toward Fort St. William, which is in India. So in that case, he announced the behavior, described the behavior of 11 ships that were never even visible from his location, if this account is right. They sent that letter to France and never got a reply. They think it got as far as the minister's secretaries, but didn't reach him himself. So finally, after all this, Bottino got frustrated and proposed just going to France himself to approach the minister with all this information. And his superiors agreed to let him do this

and in fact gave him affidavit certificates attesting to his abilities. He left, and interestingly, on the voyage itself from Mauritius around to france uh he successfully announced the approach of 27 vessels so he could practice this art even on shipboard and even more interesting than that he found that prior to this he'd been able to allegedly uh predict the approach of ships when he was on land but it turns out you can do the opposite as well, he said. He was on shipboard and could tell when they were approaching land on the ship. He said on one occasion he told the captain that they were not more than 30 leagues from land. The

captain said that that was impossible and checked his own calculations, found an error, and apologized. Allegedly, Bottineau successfully found land three times on this voyage, once at a distance of 150 leagues. Anyway, he reached France in June 1784, went to Paris, but the minister wouldn't see him. And the editor of a local paper began to sort of castigate him and ridicule his claims, saying he was seeing ships at sea, not ships at sea, but castles in the air. And then, unfortunately, just on the brink of all this, the French Revolution broke out, which kind of overslept everything. Yeah. And he wasn't able to get any kind of audience with the minister,

and the whole country was kind of in chaos at that point. He did win over Jean-Paul Marat, the radical journalist and politician, who later wrote a letter about him, which is some evidence in this case. politician who later wrote a letter about him, which is some evidence in this case. But he sort of disappears after that and apparently died in bitter obscurity, apparently in India many years later. So the question is, how much of this can we rely on? And that's what's really murky. The bones of it are true.

A man named Etienne Baudelau did exist on Mauritius in the French Navy. He did claim to be able to do this, and he did convince his superiors there well enough for them to send him to France to try to convince the French government of his abilities. And then the French Revolution overtook him, and he died in obscurity. That's all established. The problem is that most of the originals of the documents supporting this are lost. What we have are his own accounts, either from his own lifetime or quoted elsewhere later, and a letter that Marat wrote to a man named Mr. Daly later on, sort of describing this secondhand. So it's all sort of—it depends how jaundiced an eye you want to take.

I find I keep saying this in one of the various features that we've done here. It should be said in Bottino's favor that his claims were never contravened. No one ever caught him being anything other than what he claimed to be. He was never caught cheating or lying or anything like that. The problem is that there's just not a lot of really hard evidence that's come down to us that supports this incontrovertibly. I mean, if he did have a secret, it died with him. He never trained anyone else to do it. And we certainly don't know how to

do it today. So it can't be studied empirically. Yeah. Nobody else ever seemed to twig on to what it was he was doing. Right. He told Marat at one point that he could teach him to do this in an hour on the beach and within a week he'd be a master. So it wasn't really difficult, but no one's ever figured out how to do it since then. So it wasn't really difficult, but no one's ever figured out how to do it since then. So it depends how you want to look at it. There are two ways, I think. You can look at it romantically or skeptically. The romantic view was taken by Rupert Gould. I first read about all this. Rupert Gould was a lieutenant commander in the British Royal Navy who, in the 1920s, wrote a couple of books about unexplained oddities like

this. And he's well regarded among people who collect this sort of thing because he has, I think, the right stance. He sort of does some intelligent research and he's not too credulous and just lays out the facts and says, this seems odd, make of it what you will. His point was that maybe this happens, this sort of thing happens more often than we think it does, that someone discovers some new technique and gets up to the point of just announcing it when some accident of history, in this case the French Revolution, just overtakes him and then the whole thing's just kind of lost and forgotten. Because he had some novel insight that nobody else has had, which is, I suppose, plausible.

Which is plausible. He points out, Gould points out, that the Scottish physicist Sir David Brewster writes glancingly about Bottino in a book that Brewster published in 1832 called Letters on Natural Magic. But the interesting thing there is that Brewster writes in that book about this as if it's common knowledge. He doesn't go to the trouble of explaining who Bottino was or what his backstory was. was or what his backstory was. So Gould says, well, maybe this was just sort of much more common knowledge at the time in the early 19th century, and it's just kind of been lost. Again, with the idea that maybe this sort of thing happens more often than we think, and that would be kind of a disaster. I mean, not just for Bottino, but for all of us, that these techniques are often discovered and then lost before they can be publicized.

I'm also wondering if he might not have had some special abilities that he wasn't aware that he had. I mean, they're doing research now finding that a very, very small percentage of the population sees way many more colors than most people do. Yeah, I just saw that. It's sort of the opposite of color blindness. And so, for example, if he had that sort of like extra, extra vision that most people don't have and he didn't realize he had it, then he might think, well, anybody could do this. But it could be possible that no, not anybody could, but he wouldn't know that. That's a good point. Because one of the things that kind of sticks with me about this is he claimed to be able to

see these vapors, whatever they were, at a distance of 200 leagues. That's almost 700 miles. And it seems very hard to believe. That's hard. And he didn't use a telescope or any other instrument. He just would go down to the beach and look out to sea and see these things. And so it's hard for me to believe you could see gases in the air at 700 miles with a naked eye. But maybe it goes with this color thing because my understanding is that most people might see something

that looked all the same color, but people with this special ability might see as many as 100 different colors where we see one. So maybe he could see variations that other people couldn't see. I don't know. It's possible, too, that he himself didn't understand the mechanism. Right. There was some technique that he'd uncovered and he did figure out firsthand how to do it, but he himself didn't quite understand how it worked. So this notion of gases in the sea, that might be mistaken, but it doesn't mean he wasn't able to do it. That's true, too. That's a good point, too.

Anyway, that's the romantic view, is that it was some actual technique that he'd uncovered, and it was sadly lost, and he died in obscurity. The skeptical view is this is an extraordinary claim. It requires extraordinary evidence, and we just don't have that. Most of the quote-unquote evidence for it comes from Bottineau's own hand when he was avowedly trying to sell information to the French government.

So you can hardly account, you know, use it for that. He rubbed shoulders with Marat, who mentions him in this one letter. And Marat, apart from being a revolutionary, was also a doctor and scientist. So he was hopefully at least somewhat minded skeptically toward this sort of thing. And would require some evidence.

One of the compelling pieces of evidence that we do have is that when Bottineau went from Mauritius to France, he carried with him four affidavits, four certificates from high-placed officials on the island sort of vouching for him so he could bring those along with him and present them to the government. And those are quite strong, I think. One comes from the governor of the island himself, dated April 18th, 1784. And an excerpt from that is, it is in order to be useful to his country that he is about to visit France, and he would experience much regret were his discovery lost to the world, a discovery with which he alone is acquainted and which others have, in vain, attempted to unfathom. It consists of announcing the presence of one or several vessels at a distance of 100, 150, or even 200 leagues. Is this the result of study or the application of the principles of some science? By no means. All his science is in his eyes.

What we can certify is that Monsieur Bottineau was almost always right. Here's one other. This is from the Colonel of the Infantry on Mauritius. The undersigned Chief Officer of Engineers of the King in the Ile de France, that's what Mauritius was called at the time, certifies that Monsieur Bottineau has at different periods announced to him the arrival of more than a hundred vessels, scarcely without ever being mistaken, that he announced these vessels two, three, and even four days before the coast signals, and moreover, that he stated when there was only one or when there were several vessels. He has two more, one from the Naval Commissary General, who swore that he predicted the arrival of 109 vessels and been wrong only twice, and then another from the Attorney General. So if he was a fraud, he was really good at

convincing people somehow of what was going on, including the highly placed people on the island. But again, most of the evidence we have is just sort of secondhand magazine articles written in the early 19th century or the letter from Marat or his bottinos on account. So make of this what you will. At a minimum, you'd have to say that he was able to fool many of the most senior officers on Mauritius well enough for them to be willing to send him to France to make his case. I figure there's three possibilities. One, he really could do this.

Two, he could fake it convincingly somehow, I guess by getting the information somewhere else, but it's a bit hard to see how he would pull that off. Or three, he was just an outright fraud trying to curry favor or position her money from the French government. Even that, though, I think is a bit hard to see because if it was all hot air, what was his endgame going to be?

Like if he, suppose the minister of the marine in France finally said, okay, here's 5,000 livres. Let's hear it. What's your secret? What was he going to say? If you're selling a secret, you have to have a secret to sell. They're not just going to give you money in return for nothing. It's sort of hard to see, even if he was a fraud, what he thought he was doing.

So we have to leave it there. That's about all you can say about this case. It's intriguing. It occurred to me that if this is a real technique, the fact that it was lost with Bottineau doesn't mean that it's lost forever. Someone can still rediscover it. And maybe someone will and will be carving statues of him in 50 years' time. But for now, I think we just have to leave it in the undecided column.

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That last feature mentioned David Brewster's book, Letters on Natural Magic, and that puts me in mind of another oddity, I guess you'd call it, that I've been sort of tracking on and off for years, and it's always sort of mystified me to some extent. It's a stunt or a feat that kids often do at slumber parties, but adults have done it too. Basically, in a nutshell, what you do is one person sits in a chair and is surrounded by four other people who try to lift him with one finger, fail, and then do some ritual or other, and then try again and succeed. So all four people are using one finger.

So there's like four fingers. Yeah. I mean, there's slightly variations, but that's basically it. Okay. And the ritual varies too. And I've been digging into this. I don't even remember how this came into my mind. I guess I just ran across it mentioned somewhere, maybe in Brewster's book.

But I've just gotten interested in it and have dug into it. And it goes back at least as far, believe it or not, as the 17th century in the diary of Samuel Pepys, the famous English diarist. In his diary for July 31st, 1665, he was talking to a friend of his, speaking of enchantments and spells. And his friend tells him that once in Bordeaux, France, he witnessed four little girls doing this, whatever you want to call it, feat. In that case, they had a Latin incantation that they would repeat to each other before they did it. It's all very mysterious. But the way Pepys writes it up, he says he saw four little girls, very young ones, putting each one finger only to a boy that lay flat upon his back on the ground as if he was dead. At the end of the words, they did with their four fingers raise this boy as high as they

could reach, which Pepys thought sounded nuts, and I thought sounded nuts, but his friend, Mr. Brisbane, insisted that this was the case. In fact, Mr. Brisbane thought it was nuts, and so he went and found the cook of the house, who he calls a very lusty fellow. He was actually the cook of Sir George Carteret, if anyone's keeping track. Anyway, he said this man was, quote, very big, and the way Peep starts it up, he says, they did raise him in just the same manner. Peep says, this is one of the strangest things I ever heard, but he tells it me of his own knowledge, and I do hardly believe it to be true. And then he just wanders on from there. It's just strange to think that, especially little girls, could raise a man using only their four fingers.

Yeah. So that's 1665. You jump ahead almost 200 years, you get to Brewster's book, Letters on Natural Magic. Brewster, again, is a Scottish physicist and not prone to believing odd things without warrant. But he writes in that book, one of the most remarkable and inexplicable experiments relative to the strength of the human frame is that in which a heavy man is raised up

the instant that his own lungs and those of the persons who raise him are inflated with air. So it's the same stunt, the same feat, but in this case, he thinks the trick is that you have to, everyone involved, for some reason, has to inhale, and inhaling makes it possible. Okay. Here's how he describes it. It's basically the same thing.

The heaviest person in the company lies down upon two chairs, his legs being supported by the one and his back by the other. Four persons, one at each leg and one at each shoulder, then try to raise him, and they find his dead weight to be very great from the difficulty they experience in supporting him. When he is replaced in the chair, each of the four persons takes hold of the body as before, and the person to be lifted gives two signals by clapping his hands. At the first signal, he himself and the four lifters begin to draw a long, full breath, and when the inhalation is completed, or the lungs filled, the second signal is given for raising the person from the chair. To his own surprise, and that of his bearers, he rises with the greatest facility as if he were no heavier than a feather, which sounds like an exaggeration,

but people do this on YouTube, and you can tell by their faces, they themselves are surprised at the difference. What strikes me is that... They do this this on youtube do they do this breathing in thing no that's the thing i'll get to that in a second what strikes me this is so it's almost 400 years people have been doing this whatever you want to call it and the basic task is the same where four people are trying to raise one out of a chair but this little ritual or business in between changes which makes you think it's some psychological expectation effect or something. So if you just think you can do it, you can do it. Well, that's what I don't know.

That's what I'm trying to find out. The next mention I can find of this is in the scholarly journal Notes and Queries. This is in 1852. There's just an exchange there. Notes and Queries, it's been around forever. It's sort of like back then it was interestingly similar to an internet forum. You could write in an anonymous question and people who knew it would then write back. It would be published in the next number.

It had exactly the same social function as an internet forum. It's just interesting. Anyway, someone anonymously wrote in there and said, a living man lying on a bench extended as a corpse could be lifted with ease by the four fingers of two persons standing on each side, da-da-da-da. They just explained the same standard setup and finish by saying, the fact is undeniable, I have never met with anyone who could explain it. Has it ever been or can it be accounted for?

And David Brewster himself, who was still around at this point, this is 1852, wrote in and just said it was his theory that what was necessary was that the lifters had to inhale. He was still stuck on inhaling. It didn't matter what the person in the chair did, but if you're lifting, you have to lift. And his theory was that this is some physiological thing. If you want to lift a heavy weight, and I find myself doing this sometimes myself, if you want to lift a heavy weight, sometimes you find yourself tempted to hold your breath because you seem to be able to lift a bit more weight that way.

Whether that's true, I don't know, but that was his theory about why you succeeded the second time if you were inhaling. I thought maybe it was the person being lifted had to inhale and just be extra buoyant for all the extra air in their lungs or something. Well, that's what the person who wrote in said. I admire their effort to think about this rationally, but the whole thing is so irrational, it's just hard to know how to make sense of it. So anyway, I wrote up that much of this research in March 2008 and published it on Futility Closet in a post just saying,

I don't know what to make of this, here you go. I closed the post by saying, I haven't tried this myself, and for all I know it's a joke or a stunt, but the accounts of Peeps and Brewster appear earnest and independent, and it seems unlikely that young girls could, or would, master a sophisticated delusion. I offer it here for whatever it's worth. And a number of people wrote back and said, it's definitely not a hoax. I've done this myself.

Kids do this at parties and just to amuse themselves. And as I say, I've seen this. I'll put a couple videos in the show notes. There's a lot of people on YouTube just demonstrating this explicitly. Here's how you do it. What's interesting is when it's done today, commonly, the technique is, I mean, it's the same task. You're trying to lift someone in or out of a chair, but this ritual business in between has changed again. Here's the description of one person who wrote to me. Here's how she wrote it. Each lifter clasps their hands with the first fingers extended

and four lift a fifth seated person from a chair by having their first fingers under the knees and armpits. On the first attempt, they will not achieve it. The lifters are then to stack their hands in the air above the head of the seated person. That's the new change. And hold them there for 30 seconds, concentrating on the person being light and easy to lift.

Then repeating their attempt, they will lift him quite high and with little effort. I do not know why it works, but I have never seen it to fail. And that's what I'll show you in some of these YouTube videos. That's what happens. I mean, even the people who are doing this are surprised at how strongly it works. What's entertaining about the YouTube business is that in the comments,

everyone has sort of a glib, dismissive explanation like, oh, well, obviously this is X. And there's no consensus among them of what X ought to be. The most common one is that if you're dividing the weight among four people, then the actual task of lifting is much lessened, which makes a great deal of sense, but if that were the full explanation, then they should succeed

on the first try, and they typically don't. I mean, even if you think you're only lifting a quarter of a person, that's still more than I could lift with one finger, I'm quite sure. Yeah, so I'm just throwing this out there to the listeners in case somebody knows more about this than i do i can't find anyone who's looked at this you know rigorously i guess i'm not surprised that it happens but i am interested in the in the mechanism of like what how it's got to be a psychological effect and i'm just curious about what exactly it is also if anybody knows

this is very doubtful, how all this got started, it at least dates from 1665. If anyone knows of any other historical instances... Like who thought to even try it in the first place? Yeah. I should say I haven't tried this myself. If you try it yourself, please be careful. Don't do it near active volcanoes or

mandating tigers. And if you come up with anything, please write to us. You can reach us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. Greg's going to be trying to solve a lateral thinking puzzle. I'm going to give him a situation and he's going to try to figure out what's going on, asking only yes or no questions. This puzzle was sent in by David White, who has sent in a number of great puzzles for us to use. Great. David says, I had a true story converted into a lateral thinking puzzle for you that seemed just wonderful. But as I researched it, I found that it may not be true after all.

Still, although it may not have actually happened, it's conceivable that it could have. So here it is in all its urban legend glory. Okay. A drunken passenger in a truck sees a man walking on the side of the road. As the truck approaches and passes the man, the passenger leans out of his window and throws his half-empty beer can at the man, hitting him in the head. Wow. The man cries out in pain as the truck drives away. The next day, as a result of his actions, the passenger who threw the beer can is given a promotion at work and a pay raise by his boss. Why?

All right. Okay, I was gonna ask if this really happened, but we're not quite sure. We're not quite sure. It could have. It could have. Are these people's specific identities important? One of them has a specific identity that you would have heard of, but it's not essential to solving the puzzle to figure that out. Okay. One of the people. That's an interesting answer.

And by identity, you mean like, you know, his actual name, not like occupation. One of these people has a name that you will know. Wow. Okay. So a drunken passenger, you say a say passenger meaning he's not driving the truck. Correct. Throws a beer can at a pedestrian. Yes.

Hits him in the head. Yes. And then the next day, as a result of this, what's the reward again? He's given a promotion at work and a pay raise. Okay, so I need to know his occupation. Yeah. Actually, that would help. And he says as a result of his actions. Yeah.

Meaning the actions you just described, not something else. Correct. The results specifically of those actions. Of throwing a beer can at a guy and hitting him in the head. Yeah, yes. Okay. So, okay, do I need to know the occupation of the guy who was hit? Both of them have the same occupation there's a hint because i thought maybe he was a criminal or something and he got you know

caught and id'd some right both of them you would say have the same occupation were they doing their jobs at the time yes they were both doing oh are they actors yes holy cow well wait i'm not done yet no you're not but good for you okay so so right, when you say the drunken passenger, was he really drunk or was just his character was drunk? He was actually really drunk, supposedly. All right, this is getting more and more interesting. So they're both acting in a scene, is this like a movie? Yeah.

Okay, two actors are playing a scene in a movie. Yeah. Is the pedestrian drunk, I have to ask? No, his pedestrian isn't drunk. So the pedestrian is just an actor who's been paid to walk down the street. Yes. Minding his own business. Was he in the scene?

Was the beer can supposed to be thrown? Is that part of this? No. Oh, really? All right. This is getting worse and worse. So they're just in the scene. Was it just supposed to, the vehicle's just supposed to

pass a pedestrian? Like he's an expert or something? Yes. Yes. Yes. And that's all that was supposed to happen? Right. Okay.

But the actor was drunk. Yes. And threw a beer can. Yes. Which wasn't in the script. Right. And hits the guy. Yes.

But he gets a raise for this. Yes. I was like, I'm on board with that all the way through to the end there. So as a result of throwing the beer can and hitting the guy in the head, he gets, you said, a promotion in a race? Yes, yeah. Does that mean like a bigger part? Yeah, that's basically he raised himself to a bigger part.

In the film? Yeah. Because he showed the ability to throw a beer can actually? Not exactly. Oh, I thought I had it. He did something more besides throw a beer can. He threw a beer can and what would totally change your status in a film um if you were just supposed to ride by in a car

what would change your status um there's a big distinction oh oh did he say something yes because i think you get paid more if you have a speaking part. You do. Yep. So we said something and the director decided to keep it in the film. And he got paid. Oh, wow. So here's the story, supposedly. The drunken passenger was actually an extra on the set of a movie, which you got that very quickly. As the story goes, this took place during the filming of a highway scene in the movie Being John Malkovich.

The driver and passenger of the truck were extras in the cast, who presumably had some low-paying, non-verbal role to play in the film. However, the truck passenger had gotten drunk during the filming of the scene where John Malkovich, who plays himself, I told you you would have heard of him, is walking on the shoulder of the road. As the extra was being driven past the actor, he yelled out, hey Malkovich, think fast, and threw his beer can at him, hitting John Malkovich in the head

and making him yell in pain. And that's in the movie. The director was apparently pleased with this unexpected moment of painful slapstick and decided to include it in the film. I'm reading this as David sent all this. As a result, rather than getting fired for assault, the drunken passenger was promoted from non-speaking extra to actor!

This entitled him to receive his Screen Actors Guild card Wow. David says, It's a great story, and there's a YouTube clip purporting to be from the commentary track of the movie where director Spike Jonze describes the whole scene. But there's also claims that the whole backstory and commentary track are entirely made up and that the beer can throwing scene was part of the script from the start oh i see so it's hard to know that's a great story it is a good story so thanks so much to david that was really fun uh and if anybody else has a puzzle they'd like to send in for us to use you can send it to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. That's another episode for us. If you're looking for more Futility Closet, 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 delightful distractions. At the website, you can see the show notes for the podcast and listen to previous episodes. Just click podcast in the sidebar. If you'd like to help 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 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. Thank you.