Futility Closet - 061-The Strange Custom of Garden Hermits

Starting point is 00:00:00 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 61. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. In 18th century England, wealthy landowners would sometimes hire people to live as hermits on their estates. In today's show, we'll explore this odd custom and review the job requirements for life as a poetic recluse. We'll also learn about Germany's surprising passion for an Apache hero and puzzle over some very generous bank robbers.

Starting point is 00:01:01 very generous bank robbers. Our podcast is partly supported by advertising, and you can help us out by taking a quick five-minute survey to help us find the right advertisers for our show. Please go to podsurvey.com slash futility to take the survey. It takes less than five minutes, and it's completely anonymous. When you're finished, you can enter to win a $100 Amazon gift card. Long-time listeners may have taken our survey last year, but this is a new version, and it will help us find the most appropriate ads for our show.

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Starting point is 00:02:07 to live as hermits for years on their estates, which is an odd practice which has almost been completely forgotten, which makes it all the more mysterious. When Randy suggested that idea to me, it rang a faint bell and I went back through my own archives on Futility Closet

Starting point is 00:02:23 and found that I had briefly written about it. I had run across an item in my own sort of desultory reading in 2008, so this is, what, seven years ago, about an ad that had appeared, we think, originally in the early 1770s, although the original ad has been lost, but this description of it survives. H. Hamilton, once the proprietor of Payne's Hill near Cobham, Surrey, advertised for a person who was willing to become a hermit in that beautiful retreat of his. The conditions were that he was to continue in the hermitage seven years, where he should be provided with a Bible, optical glasses, a mat for his bed, a hassock for his pillow, an hourglass for his timepiece, water for his beverage,

Starting point is 00:03:02 food from the house, but never to exchange a syllable with the servant. He was to wear a camlet robe, that's a woolen robe, never to cut his beard or nails, nor ever to stray beyond the limits of the grounds. If he lived there under all these restrictions till the end of the term, he was to receive 700 guineas. But on breach of any of them, or if he quitted the place any time previous to that term, the whole was to be forfeited. One person attempted it but a three weeks trial cured him so he signed up for seven years and lasted three weeks but that's apparently a real thing that happened there the ad was actually placed and fulfilled however briefly

Starting point is 00:03:36 and the whole prop you know offer was a real thing that someone could come and live on an estate as a hermit so landowners wanted someone to come and be unwashed and unshaved and just live like a wild man on their premises for, what, romantic reasons? Well, this has all been lost, but there was sort of an aesthetic movement in Georgian England called melancholy, which has been entirely forgotten now, which is sort of the one thing that people today might remember that was sort of part of that. The most famous one is Thomas Gray's poem Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, where the poet is just sort of looking sadly at a

Starting point is 00:04:16 graveyard and ruminating on the fleeting transitory nature of life and sort of thinking deep, sad, noble thoughts. And that's all, today the world is spinning so fast that it's just even contemplating doing that is just completely out of the question. But that's where all this comes from, is not only would you be disposed toward reflecting nobly about life in that way yourself, but if you were rich enough, you could hire someone to act as a living symbol of that in your garden. So you wouldn't have to live like the hermit yourself. You could just hire someone to do that for you.

Starting point is 00:04:48 Basically, yes. To show how refined you were. It sounds odd now, and it's hard even to put yourself in those shoes, but that's basically what this was. Okay. I guess you'd have to say the world authority on this now is a man named Gordon Campbell who teaches Renaissance studies at the University of Leicester. He published a book, which I recommend, in 2013 called The Hermit in

Starting point is 00:05:07 the Garden, which is basically about where this came from and what it was and basically what it sort of developed into. The whole thing, I think, is fascinating. He's a fine writer. Basically, the hermits were encouraged to live on the estates of wealthy landowners in the Georgian period, which is between George I and the death of George IV, so very roughly the 1700s. In England mostly, but there were also a few of these in Scotland and Ireland, and less frequently in continental Europe. Basically, it started out with English country landowners would commission architectural follies, which are odd or unusual buildings on their estates.

Starting point is 00:05:40 Many of those included hermitages, and they filled those with, at first, imaginary hermits, and then gradually sort of graduated to actual real live hermits. These weren't religious figures, I should say. They were secular, just what you think of today as a hermit, sort of just someone who's retreated from society into a life of, I guess you'd say, contemplation. Some of the landowners provided for an actual occupant who was given a hut or a grotto and a few meals a day, and they just put him in a picturesque corner of the property and he'd live there. The typical term was seven years, which is quite a long time. That is quite a long time. I don't know how they settled on seven. The hermits would be encouraged to dress like druids. This is sort of what I pictured in my head before I even started learning about this. It's exactly the way

Starting point is 00:06:24 I pictured it. It turns out to be accurate. And they were typically required to refrain from cutting their hair or washing. I guess because that's sort of part of the ideal of what you want a hermit to look like. Although after seven years, I'm not sure what that would... Would you want to get too close to the guy? And they'd live permanently on these instates, so they'd be fed, cared for, and consulted occasionally for advice or viewed for entertainment.

Starting point is 00:06:46 But the whole conceit behind this wasn't humorous or facetious. This was taken seriously as sort of a poetic or noble expression of fine sensibility, like we were talking about. A sort of fine sensibility, one keen to the spiritual benefits of privacy, peace, and mild woe. That whole thing has gone by too. Gardens in general, with or without hermits, used to be thought of as places of somewhat retreat or contemplation. And that's, we've still got a bit of that now. But again, life is so busy now that I think even that's starting to fade away.

Starting point is 00:07:19 But that's part of the same spirit of this whole enterprise, I guess you'd call it. So you'd go sit in your garden to contemplate, knowing that there was this dirty, wretched, your hermit, a few hundred yards away in his little hovel, contemplating too. And it's funny how this thing evolved, because it has its antecedents that Campbell goes through in the book, but basically the appearance of these hermits, this movement. At first there was no hermit.

Starting point is 00:07:47 There would just be a hut, and then they'd leave these sort of props lying around as if there was a hermit, and he just stepped away for a moment when you happened to show up. So they'd lay out a table with a chair and reading glasses and a classical text to suggest that he had been there and has just stepped away for a second. But then later they'd sort of stepped up to actually employing actual people.

Starting point is 00:08:10 And in some cases they'd be asked just to stay entirely apart from any human interaction, even with the servants who fed them. But in others, occasionally, if you had, say, houseguests, you'd bring them down triumphantly to visit them. View your hermit. And he would look wise and sad and answer questions or serve wine or something. Sort of depends on the deal you'd set up. So some of the little evidence that's come down to us about any of this, because the

Starting point is 00:08:34 actual hermits are long gone and most of the hermitages are as well, are the advertisements that sort of the commerce end of it, where, where a landowner had to find a hermit, or in a few rare cases, some poor young man would try to appeal to get a job like this of a landowner, which is interesting in either way. So here are a few examples from Campbell's book of just descriptions that survived. The first one, this was published in 1924 by Osbert Sitwell. It's not clear which house is specified here, but this seems to be an accurate account. At one great house in England, the accounts disclose a half-yearly payment of 300 pounds to a hermit who had, for this commensurate salary, to remain bearded and in a state of picturesque dirtiness for six months in the year in an artificial cave at a suitable distance

Starting point is 00:09:22 from the house. Just far enough, but not too far, for the fashionable house party, with its court of subservient poets and painters, to visit, walking there in the afternoons, peering into the semi-darkness with a little thrill of wonder and excitement. But that captures what we're talking about, that they're just trying to inform the sensibility. You could go visit this guy and sort of partake in the spirit of it.

Starting point is 00:09:41 If people were advertising for them, then I guess if you were one of these house guests, you would either have to pretend that you didn't know this guy was just playing a part, or maybe you would be unaware, maybe you weren't aware that they'd hired it for your entertainment. Or you might be. I mean, he's sort of an actor playing a part,

Starting point is 00:09:58 but everyone buys into that, just to sort of participate in the spirit of the thing. Yeah. And if the hermit played his part well, which apparently some of them did, it wasn't hard to sort of suspend your disbelief. There's another advertisement referenced in Sir William Gell's A Tour in the Lakes, made in 1797, that reads,

Starting point is 00:10:15 The hermit is never to leave the place or hold conversation with anyone for seven years, during which he is neither to wash himself or cleanse himself in any way whatever, but is to let his hair and nails, both on hands and feet, grow as long as nature will permit them. And presumably someone fulfilled that, at least part of it as well. I can't decide myself how hard a job this would be.

Starting point is 00:10:34 Part of it sounds kind of appealing, that you just get to withdraw and read books and think wise thoughts all day. But if people are dropping out after three weeks, I'm probably pretty sure I would change my tune pretty quickly. Yeah, I think you, after like 24 hours, you'd be really bored. Some of the other hermits were asked to refrain from wearing shoes, or they would, as I said, sometimes entertain guests. They'd give personalized poetry readings when asked, or sometimes serve wine.

Starting point is 00:11:00 It all came down to what the landowner wanted them to do. There's one particularly interesting one at the Hawkstone estate in Shropshire, which belonged to Sir Richard Hill. This is from a guide that was written in 1784. You pull a bell and gain admittance. The hermit is generally in a sitting posture with a table before him on which is a skull, the emblem of mortality, an hourglass, a book, and a pair of spectacles. The venerable barefooted father, whose name is Francis, if awake, always rises up at the approach of strangers. He seems about 90 years of age,

Starting point is 00:11:30 yet has all his sense of admiration. He is tolerably conversant and far from being unpolite. That's interesting in itself, but what's even more interesting is a few years later, apparently Francis died and they replaced him with an automaton that did pretty much the same thing. Sir Richard Colt Hoare visited Hawkstone in 1801, and he describes a hill on which there is, quote, a building wherein is the figure of a hermit who moves and speaks. The face is natural enough, the figure stiff and not well managed. And then in the same year, Thomas Martin actually visited and went inside to interact with this, it's basically a puppet, I guess you'd call it, of a hermit, a full-sized, I guess, effigy that would interact and speak, which is kind of impressive given it's 1801. Martin's description runs like this,

Starting point is 00:12:15 we were now conducted to the hermit's cell, which is certainly the best representation of what the poets described that I ever saw. You ring a bell and the door immediately opens of itself and discovers a venerable barefooted old man seated in a recess with a table before him on which is a skull, an hourglass, a book, and a pair of spectacles. He rises as you approach and bows. On your putting questions to him, his lips move and he answers in a hoarse hollow voice, coughs as if almost exhausted. He told us that he was 100 years of age and that he had resided there the greatest part of his life. Over the recess was memento mori, which is a Latin phrase meaning remember that you must die. In large letters, but there being some other lines which I could not make out for one of light, he was asked

Starting point is 00:12:53 if he could repeat them, and he expressed himself as follows, and reads this little verse. Far from the busy scenes of life, far from the world, its cares and strife, in solitude more pleased to dwell, Martin's description continues, the eyes and lips move and the figure rises it is certainly a mere automaton over the door is written pro cool oh pro cool sd profani which is a quotation from the uh ennead that means keep away keep away oh uninitiated ones so that one graduated from or descended i guess you'd say from an actual human hermit to sort of uh puppet that was operated by the gardener. I guess it was just an additional duty that he had. We went from imaginary hermits to real pretend hermits. To stuffed hermits.

Starting point is 00:13:53 Yeah. Which is how these things, I understand, that's generally the progression, generally in England, that's how this whole thing went. They started out with imaginary ones, and then after, as the things started to fade they would just resort back to uh stuffed figures which is just as strange from our perspective but makes a certain amount of sense it's interesting what this finally devolved into it it was all over shortly after 1800 it kind of just this whole interest in melancholy kind of faded away with the advent of i guess the industrial revolution but one of the reasons it died with the advent of, I guess, the Industrial Revolution. But one of the reasons it died was the advent of abolitionism, a movement for the abolishment of slavery.

Starting point is 00:14:32 Because this wasn't outright slavery, but it was sort of the same objection could be made where someone just owns your life entirely and can tell you how to live it. Yeah, well, it sounds like an indentured servant, because my understanding is those terms were usually seven years. I was wondering if that's where the seven years came from.. Yeah, well, it sounds like an indentured servant, because my understanding is those terms were usually seven years. I was wondering if that's where the seven years came from. For all I know, it was. So it's similar to an indentured servant. I thought that was an interesting objection.

Starting point is 00:14:51 Yeah. But surprisingly, one thing that remains from this, we don't have hermits anymore, but they sort of devolved through these stuffed figures into figures that were just kept in the garden. And now, Campbell says, one of the remnants that we have still today is garden gnomes,

Starting point is 00:15:07 which descended from the whole thing. Oh, really? I mean, garden gnomes have other antecedents, but it's one of the few vestiges of that whole thing, which I thought was interesting. I mean, as strange as it sounds to have a hermit in your garden today, someday people will look back on the fact

Starting point is 00:15:21 that we have these artificial figures that we put in our gardens and no one thinks it's strange. And someday that's going to seem very strange indeed. Anyway, if anyone is interested in hiring me as a hermit, I'm willing to give it a shot. It still sounds like it might be at least interesting. Yeah, especially if you get all the books you want to read. That's right.

Starting point is 00:16:27 Our podcast is supported by our phenomenal patrons. Thank you. We really appreciate every donation we get. In Listener Mail this week, we got several listeners directed us to an article on the Somerton Man that appeared in the California Sunday magazine last week. The Somerton Man is an unidentified corpse that was discovered on a South Australian beach in December 1948. We covered the whole story in our episode 25 if you want to hear the whole thing. I also heard from Derek Abbott, who's a physicist at the University of Adelaide, who's one of the leading modern investigators in the case, and he started a campaign on Indiegogo to fund a serious effort to identify the man.

Starting point is 00:16:55 He says, We are continuing to solve the case and will produce informational videos and perform historical searches, DNA tests, and isotope tests. The whole thing is getting very interesting. They're inferring some genetic information based on the Somerton man's descendants, and it looks like the Somerton man may have been American, perhaps from Virginia, and there are some links to Thomas Jefferson's family tree. What they really want to do is exhume the Somerton man's body to extract some autosomal DNA.

Starting point is 00:17:23 So far that's been opposed by the Attorney General of South Australia, who says there needs to be public interest reasons that go well beyond public curiosity or broad scientific interest. But there's now an online petition to try to get him to change his mind. If they can get the autosomal DNA, then they can start using genealogical databases, which gives them a lot more firepower in just identifying who this man was. If you're interested in any of these things, I'll put links to all of it in the show notes. In episode 47, Greg told us about travel books that were written by Victorian author Favele Mortimer, who had very negative things to say about many other countries. And on that subject, Hanno Sola wrote in to say,

Starting point is 00:18:03 On the podcast, you reported about an author who wrote a series of mean books about the peculiar traits of other countries that she never visited. Well, there is a similar author in Germany. Karl May wrote several adventure and travel books about places he never went to. His most influential series is about Venitu, the heroic, noble, and pacifist chief of a Native American tribe. He befriends Old Shatterhand, a German-born immigrant to America in the Wild West era, who works as a trapper and surveyor for a railroad company. It's a romanticized version of the struggles between immigrant Europeans and Native Americans in the Wild West. Both Vinitu and Old Shatterhand are depicted as outsiders who try to work towards peace between warring tribes and hateful immigrants.

Starting point is 00:18:48 And Greg and I found this all very interesting, especially as we had never heard of Karl May. I looked into it and learned that Karl May is one of the best-selling German authors of all time. His books have sold more than 100 million copies. That's astounding. Yeah, and most Americans have never heard of him, but apparently almost all German adults know of Karl May and his most famous and very beloved characters of Vinotu and Old Shatterhand. So he's actually writing about America and completely known in Germany and almost completely unknown in America. And beloved, yeah.

Starting point is 00:19:22 May's books on Vinotu were written mostly in the late 1800s and were beloved by Kaiser Wilhelm II, Albert Einstein and Albert Schweitzer, Franz Kafka and Hitler. They were adapted into an extremely successful series of movies in the 1960s, which regenerated their

Starting point is 00:19:39 popularity. And according to Rivka Galchin, who wrote an article on Mai's popularity in Germany for the New Yorker magazine, in 2002, in a copyright case before the German Federal High Court, it was held that Vinatou was no longer a mere character in a novel. He had become the name for a certain human type, that of the noble Indian chief. Michael Kimmelman, writing for Spiegel International, said, to Germans, Vinotou is like Paul Bunyan, Abe Lincoln, and Elvis rolled into one.

Starting point is 00:20:13 That's like as American as you can get. It's just astounding that generally Americans haven't heard of him. Yeah. Hanno wrote, from a personal perspective, I cannot stress how influential Karl May is here in Germany. Everybody, and I mean everybody of my age knows Vinotou. His stories are the basis for much of what Germans think they know about the Wild West. I'm born in the early 70s. I never read his books, but when I was young, the Vinotou movie adaptations, with its maddening earworm of a theme song, were on German TV all the time. We didn't play Cowboys and Indians. We played Old Shatterhand and Vinitu. This is all the more interesting because Carl My never actually visited the U.S. until much later in his career after writing most of the Vinitu books. And even then, he didn't get any further west than Buffalo, New York. But still wrote well enough or convincingly enough about it to sell 100 million books.

Starting point is 00:21:01 Exactly. My was born in 1842, the fifth of 14 children, into a rather poor family. He later claimed that he'd been blind until the age of six when he was mysteriously cured. He was kicked out of school for stealing and served several jail terms for stealing and other crimes, including

Starting point is 00:21:20 pretending to be an American ambassador. He began writing in his 30s, mostly crime stories, romances, and American ambassador. He began writing in his 30s, mostly crime stories, romances, and travel tales. He often wrote using a pseudonym, which allowed him to publish and then get paid for the same story published in different magazines under different titles. In 1893, at age 51, Mai published his first Vinotu and Old Shatterhand novel, and this proved to be his big break. The Vinotu novels were written with Old Shatter Hand being the first person narrator of the stories. Venetoo calls Old Shatter Hand Charlie,

Starting point is 00:21:51 or the German approximation of Charlie, a nickname of Carl, which was Mai's first name. So he's sort of a, that's interesting. It's like his alter ego. Many readers in Mai's time thought that Mai actually was old shatterhand, and Mai helped this confusion along by commissioning a gunsmith to make him two distinctive rifles that were described in the novels, by often wearing a fringed leather frontiersman jacket and wide-brimmed felt hat and a necklace made out of bare teeth, and by claiming that he could understand more than 1,200 languages and dialects. Eventually, he went so far as to specifically say that he really was old Shatterhand and had experienced everything in his stories.

Starting point is 00:22:33 Galchin notes that after Mai became famous, when actual American Indians came through Germany in Wild West shows, Mai not only avoided them, but defamed them as outcasts from their tribe who played vile, lying roles. And that's because meeting with these Indians could have proved troublesome for Mai, especially if he didn't speak their language as he claimed he could. But he still wrote, I keep coming back to that, he still convinced millions and millions of people. I don't know. Despite his successes, Mai had many difficulties in his later life.

Starting point is 00:23:06 His marriage fell apart, and he had difficulties getting royalty payments for some of his earlier works. He was attacked for having written articles for Catholic magazines, despite being a Protestant, for having tried to cover up his criminal history, and for having lied about what places he'd actually been to. Galchin says that Mai never escaped financial and reputation problems, and a lot of his money ended up going to lawyers, and his last years were spent trying to defend his integrity. But none of this seems to have had much impact on Mai's popularity in Germany. Mai's continuing legacy there is evident in the much-visited Karl-Mai Museum

Starting point is 00:23:40 and in the extremely popular Karl-M Festivals that still continue to this day. Many German and Austrian towns host such festivals, but the largest is in Bad Siegerberg, Germany, which is visited each summer by 300,000 people. And this is more than 100 years after he wrote it. Exactly. At the festival grounds, you can find faux log cabins with signs such as Pony Express,

Starting point is 00:24:10 Sheriff's Office, and Saloon, as well as teepees and places where you can pretend to pan for gold. You can buy toy guns and tomahawks and feathered headdresses, as well as all of Carl My's writings, including the distinctive volumes printed by the Century Old Press

Starting point is 00:24:24 that prints only books by and about My. I mean, that's how popular he is. He has his own press. And as you say, more than 100 years after the original printings. The main attraction at the festival is the amphitheater, where they stage the Venitu and Old Shatterhand stories. And they stage them complete with live horses and chickens, gunfights and flaming spearfights, staged for the thousands of children in the audience dressed in face paint and feathers. That sounds so American.

Starting point is 00:24:55 It sounds like this ought to be wildly popular here. You know what I mean? Yeah. I mean, what I was reading was that, you know, to Germans, this is so exotic. The American Wild West is so exotic. And here it is. Yeah, if his books had been set,

Starting point is 00:25:07 I read one person who said if his books had been set on another planet, they probably would have been more popular in America. But yeah, because it just strikes the Germans as just so different than anything that they've got in their country. For decades, most of Germans' knowledge about the Western U.S. came from the Venetoo stories, particularly in East Germany, where travel was very restricted.

Starting point is 00:25:28 Hanno says, Today, his cultural meaning is fading fast now that the history of the Wild West is much better explored and people actually listen to Native Americans when they call out racist depictions of their heritage. While Mai's writing, as I understand it, was fairly positive, it's also highly inaccurate and received lots of criticism from U.S. Native American interest groups who were bewildered to find Germans dressing up as Native Americans based on an invented character. Mai's fans in Germany today are often inspired to learn more about Native American history and cultures, often with the goal of correcting Mai's inaccuracies. So many of his fans can carefully explain why, for example, although Vinatu is an Apache,

Starting point is 00:26:08 his characteristics really suggest those of a Sioux. Galchin says part of being a Carl Mai fan, it seems, is correcting Carl Mai. She goes on to make the sad but true point that Carl Mai fans enjoy discussing his inaccuracies because of their extensive knowledge of the actual history of American Indians, whereas most Americans know almost nothing on the subject, Although Mai is primarily remembered for his Vinitu novels, he did write many other works, including a successful series set in the Ottoman Empire, whose narrator protagonist's name was Kara Ben Nemsi,

Starting point is 00:26:44 which translates to Carl, son of Germans, and which Mai also claimed as his own experiences. So apparently he traveled extensively in the American Wild West and the Ottoman Empire. And there's even a series of travel books set in Africa, which apparently he did too. Rivka Galchin says, in his autobiography, he cites two books as having been most influential in his life. One was a collection of folktales that his grandmother read to him. The other was a tale of a split soul given to him by a good priest while he was in prison.

Starting point is 00:27:13 Neither book exists, it turns out, though both almost certainly were big influences on him. That's the other odd thing about that story is that there's so much deception in his life. Yeah, he spent a lot of his life apparently confabulating and perpetrating frauds. And it's interesting. But, I mean, people just love him in Germany, just love his writings. And this world he created seems to resonate as so true to people that it's lasted all these years. Yeah, and I mean, he did do research. He based apparently a lot of his writings on James Fenimore Cooper, who had written earlier in the 19th century and had

Starting point is 00:27:50 been very popular. And he looked at maps and read travel books that he could find. And apparently it's accurate enough, at least in some places, that I found forums on the internet where his fans were passionately defending him saying, you know, he couldn't have known this detail or that detail. He must have been to America and it just wasn't documented. Like he must have had this trip where he had seen these things. But I don't know. Then again, there are a number of inaccuracies, too. So apparently he had a very good imagination.

Starting point is 00:28:18 That whole story is just fascinating. So thanks so much to Hanno and everyone else who writes in to us. And if you have any questions or comments, you can send them to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. So time for a lateral thinking puzzle. Craig's on the hot seat, so he's already nervously laughing. Craig's on the hot seat, so he's already nervously laughing. I'm going to give him an odd-sounding situation, and he's going to have to try to deduce what's actually going on, asking only yes or no questions.

Starting point is 00:28:53 This puzzle comes from Edward Harshman's Fantastic Lateral Thinking Puzzles. That sounds promising. So it should be fantastic. Here's your puzzle. Mugsy and Butch hunched over a table in a dingy basement. They drew floor plans of a bank and sketched its burglar alarm. They heard a car approach. Butch got up, looked out the dirty window,

Starting point is 00:29:15 and recognized the car as belonging to an off-duty police officer. The car stopped and the officer got out. Shortly there came a knock at the door. Hello, Rocky. Muggsy greeted the officer got out. Shortly, there came a knock at the door. Hello, Rocky, Muggsy greeted the officer. Rocky surveyed the plans, gave them a few more ideas on how to break into the bank and wish them luck.

Starting point is 00:29:32 There's 5,000 in it for you if this works, Muggsy promised him. Their work paid off handsomely soon after and sure enough, Muggsy gave Rocky the $5,000. But no crime was committed. Explain. Muggsy gave... Rocky is the police officer? Yes. So they gave $5,000, but no crime was committed. Explain. Muggsy gave, Rocky is the police officer?

Starting point is 00:29:47 Yes. So they gave $5,000 to the police officer? Yes. They gave five, all right. These are all human beings. These are all human beings, yes. And they're planning to break into a bank, so it would seem. Is that correct? Is that a question?

Starting point is 00:30:05 Are they planning to break into a bank, so it would seem. Is that correct? Is that a question? Are they planning to break into a bank? No. Are they... See, I was thinking they were being paid to test the soundness of a bank's defenses. Is that what's happening? No. That's a good guess, though.

Starting point is 00:30:19 No, but see, then they wouldn't pay the cop. He would pay them. All right. Okay, so they're examining a bank's defenses. Can we say that? Okay. By bank, we mean an institution that holds money for people? Yes.

Starting point is 00:30:32 Okay. And, um, okay. So they're, but you say they don't actually rob the bank. That is correct. Do they rob any bank? No. No crime is committed? Correct.

Starting point is 00:30:48 Do I need to know, are they criminals? No. In any way? No. See, I don't get, all right. So I missed the point where they pay Rocky eventually $5,000. They do. Let's look at that.

Starting point is 00:31:04 He's a police officer. Yes. And he's aware of what they're doing. Yes. Can you give me the dialogue in the description again? Uh, hello Rocky. Muggsy greeted the officer. Rocky surveyed the plans, gave them a few more ideas on how to break into the bank, and wished them luck.

Starting point is 00:31:19 There's $5,000 in it for you if this works, Muggsy promised him. If this works, and that doesn't refer to a break-in. Correct. Do we need to know their occupations? Yes. Is this fiction? Is it like a movie or something?

Starting point is 00:31:32 Yes. Oh, thank God for that. I was really stumped otherwise. Is the whole thing fiction? Is it all just a scene in a movie? No. That still doesn't explain it. No, it's not.

Starting point is 00:31:42 Okay. Okay, so Rocky is a police officer. Yes. In real life's not. Okay. Okay, so Rocky is a police officer. Yes. In real life. In real life. The other two are actors? No. All right.

Starting point is 00:31:56 This is a movie, though. No. I didn't say it was a movie. I said it was fiction. It's fiction. All right. Yes. Okay, what's fiction?

Starting point is 00:32:04 Is the dialogue fiction? No. though okay what's fiction the the is the dialogue fiction no is the whole scene fiction no the break-in is fiction yes they're planning are they writers yes okay they're planning to write well i'm still not there yet i haven't oh they're planning to write a screenplay or a novel or something yes about a break into a bank yes but i don't understand why they're paying the cop because he's a consultant yes okay yes he basically looks over their plans and helps them come up with more ideas it says how to break into the bank and then they tell him that they'll pay him if it succeeds if their novel that they're writing succeeds so they pay him for his ideas on doing that.

Starting point is 00:32:46 That's good. Yay. So good for you. And if anyone 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, 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 beguiling tidbits.

Starting point is 00:33:13 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 or by clicking the donate button on the sidebar of the website. If you have five minutes, please take our survey at podsurvey.com slash futility to help us find advertisers to support the show. 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.

Futility Closet - 061-The Strange Custom of Garden Hermits

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