Futility Closet - 072-The Strange Misadventures of Famous Corpses

Episode Date: September 7, 2015

What do René Descartes, Joseph Haydn, and Oliver Cromwell have in common? All three lost their heads after death. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast, we'll run down a list of notable corpses whose parts have gone wandering. We'll also hear readers chime in on John Lennon, knitting, diaries and Hitchcock, and puzzle over why a pilot would choose to land in a field of grazing livestock. Sources for our feature on posthumously itinerant body parts: Bess Lovejoy, Rest in Pieces: The Curious Fates of Famous Corpses, 2013. Edith Sitwell, English Eccentrics, 1993. I'd written previously about Descartes, Haydn, Cromwell, Bentham, Einstein, and Juan Perón. Thanks to listener Alejandro Pareja for the tip about Goya. Listener mail: Barney Snow's documentary about Gerald and Linda Polley is Where Has Eternity Gone? QI, "Knitting in Code." Douglas Martin, "Robert Shields, Wordy Diarist, Dies at 89," New York Times, Oct. 29, 2007. Listener Christine Fisher found Charles Thomas Samuels' interview with Alfred Hitchcock in Sidney Gottlieb's 2003 book Alfred Hitchcock: Interviews. It appeared originally in Samuels' 1972 book Encountering Directors. This week's lateral thinking puzzle is from Kyle Hendrickson's 1998 book Mental Fitness Puzzles. 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. Enter coupon code CLOSET at Harry's and get $5 off their starter set of high-quality razors. Please consider becoming a patron of Futility Closet -- on our Patreon page you can pledge any amount per episode, and all contributions are greatly appreciated. You can change or cancel your pledge at any time, and we've set up some rewards to help thank you for your support. You can also make a one-time donation via the Donate button in the sidebar of the Futility Closet website. Many thanks to Doug Ross for the music in this episode. If you have any questions or comments you can reach us at [e-mail]. Thanks for listening!

Welcome to Futility Closet, the 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 72. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. What do Rene Descartes, Joseph Haydn, and Oliver Cromwell have in common? All three of them lost their heads after death.

In today's show, we'll tell the stories of the strange misadventures of the corpses of famous people. We'll also hear readers chime in on John Lennon, knitting, diaries, and Hitchcock, and puzzle over why a pilot would choose to land in a field of grazing livestock. I can't believe that we've done more than 70 episodes of this show already. When Greg and I started the podcast, we weren't really sure whether it was going to work out for us or not, and really the main reason it has worked for us has been because of our patrons.

Yeah. And really, the main reason it has worked for us has been because of our patrons. We get a little bit of money from advertising, but it doesn't begin to cover the amount of time that it takes us to research and put together this show. So if it weren't for our patrons, we really would not still be doing this. So thank you, everyone, who has been supporting us. Thank you everyone who has been supporting us. And if there's anyone else out there that likes the show and wants to make sure that it can continue, please check out our Patreon campaign at patreon.com slash futilitycloset or see the link in our show notes. Okay, back in episode 51, I mentioned that I've been doing Futility Closet for 10 years now, just gathering odd facts.

And over the years, two things, I've noticed two patterns in the stuff that I've gathered. One of them back in March in episode 15-1 I mentioned is this weird correspondence between poets and doppelgangers, which I describe in episode 15-1. If you want to hear more about that, just listen to that episode. The other thing that I promise to cover someday is the odd habit of the body parts, particularly the heads and brains of famous people to get bounced around Europe and the world after their death, like these sort of odd, gruesome relics. It's not rational at all for the most part, but it happens so much, I'm not even that observant, and I kept noticing over and over again with different famous people this has happened to them. So I made up a list here. This is by no

means exhausted, but here's just an example of what I'm talking about. René Descartes died in 1650 at age 53 in Stockholm and was buried there, simply enough, and lay there for 16 years. But his reputation was rising, so in 1666, his native France wanted him back, and they buried him in a church in Paris. That would have been fine, except that in 1792, a mob of revolutionaries attacked the church where he was kept, and his bones were moved to the new Museum of French Monuments,

where his remains lay in an Egyptian sarcophagus for a few years, believe it or not. A few years later, officials decided to rebury his body in the oldest church in Paris, but when they opened the sarcophagus, they found that most of his remains were missing, and they remain missing today. No one knows what happened to René Descartes' body. The skull may have been found. We're not even sure about that. In 1821, a Swedish chemist named Jans Brasilius read in a newspaper that the skull of the famous Cartesius, as he was called, was being sold at auction, and he managed to buy it.

It had been sold to a casino owner who was planning to use it as a decoration in his casino. Berzelius found that the skull bore signatures of former owners all over its surface. Apparently, it had been bouncing around Europe for a while. With people signing it? Yes. Okay.

That's what I'm talking about. This is weird. Maybe there's a term in anthropology for this. It's like baseballs. You know, you sign a baseball? Exactly. I don't know. I didn't know you signed skulls.

That's a weird analogy, but it's really apt. Anyway, the Academy determined that the skull had probably been stolen by the captain of the squad of soldiers that had been hired to guard Descartes' body back when it was exhumed in the first place in Sweden in 1666. Mildly ironic. But the Academy, they decided it was genuine, but there are at least four competing skulls of René Descartes around the world. So not only are the rest of his bones completely missing, but we're not sure which head is his. If any of them, truthfully. Yes, right, exactly. But that's an example of what I'm talking about, that it's, why, what the, what the heck?

And that's certainly not the only example of it. Joseph Haydn, and a lot of them are really famous. I mean, Descartes and Haydn. Joseph Haydn died in 1809 at age 77, and his skull was stolen by one of his own friends, an accountant named Joseph Karl Rosenbaum, who was interested in phrenology, which was the idea abroad at the time that different areas of your brain correspond to different traits in your personality, and that by studying the brain, you can learn something about someone's character, which has since been debunked, but it was popular at the time.

So that's why Rosenbaum was interested in getting Haydn's skull. He thought it might show some reflection of his musical genius. He had it cleaned up and returned to him and then kept it in a black case topped with a golden lyre. A decade later, this gets kind of comical, I'm afraid, in 1820, Prince Nicholas Esterhazy, who was Haydn's main employer, resolved to bring Haydn's body to Eisenstadt to his own family crypt. But of course, when the workers opened up the tomb, they found only a wig where Haydn's head should have been. The prince was furious, and an inquest pointed to Rosenbaum, who in fact had taken the head. Rosenbaum blamed his doctor, thinking quickly,

because his doctor had recently died and couldn't deny it. Then Rosenbaum handed them a fake skull, got caught in that, admitted it, handed them a second fake skull, and they accepted it. He really wanted that skull. And the prince took that second one and buried it with Haydn's body in the crypt. After Rosenbaum died, he passed the skull on, and it sat for a few years on a piano at the Society for the Friends of Music in Vienna. Finally, the Esterhazy family realized they'd been duped and it wasn't until June 1954, believe it or not, that Joseph Haydn's skull joined the rest of his body and this mysterious second fake skull in the Esterhazy church in Eisenstadt. And you have to wonder where he was getting these other skulls from.

Yeah. You have a collection of skulls lying around. It's just so, you just think, you want to think that when someone dies they just rest in peace or everybody,

at least if you're kind of famous or have a reputation it seems like the odds go down. This next one I have to thank listener Alejandro Pareja for. Francisco de Goya,

the Spanish romantic painter, died in France in 1828. In 1901, the Spanish government decided to rebury him beneath the Madrid church whose frescoes he had painted. But when the Spanish consul to France had him exhumed, they found actually

two skeletons, one of which was lacking a skull. So he wasn't sure what to do. He sent a telegraph to Madrid saying, Goya skeleton without a head, please instruct me, which is probably the first time that telegraph has ever been sent. The ministry wrote back, send Goya with or without head. Okay, probably the first time that's been sent, too. They weren't sure which skeleton had belonged to the painter,

so they put the whole jumble of bones into the tomb in Madrid. And they don't know who the second person is. Right, yeah. This is somebody who's maybe lacking a head and gained an extra body. That's right. Maybe it's good news for some people. Eva Peron, the former First Lady of Argentina. Oh, I should say, I've ordered these in increasing outlandishness, roughly.

Okay. So hold on to your hat. Eva Peron, when she died in 1952 at age 33, was subjected to this elaborate embalming procedure with chemical baths and injections that made her body basically immune to decay, sort of like permanently okay. At first they were planning to make it part of a massive funeral monument, but then her husband, Juan Barón, was deposed in a coup, and the new regime planned to bury her at first in a cemetery,

but then the head of military intelligence instead hid her in his attic for a year. This is what happens to you when you're sort of beloved and famous. Finally, she was buried in a secret location in Italy. Then she was exhumed and returned to Juan Perón, who is now in exile in Spain, who, according to dinner guests, put her on display in the family dining room. In 1972, she returned to Argentina where new plans were made for a giant memorial. But then there was another coup in 1976, and finally she was returned to her family, which buried her in a cemetery in Buenos Aires, 20 feet underground in a steel vault. I think people eventually learned the lesson here. There's a bonus attached to that one. Her husband, Juan Perón, the former president of Argentina,

in 1987, some anonymous vandals broke into his grave and sawed off both of his hands, then sent a ransom note demanding $8 million, which the government refused to pay, and to this day the crime has never been solved and the hands remain missing. So that's two in that family. I wonder why the hands. I don't know. Not the head. I don't know.

It's so hard to... But you see what I mean. I picked these up and sort of assembled them piecemeal going along, just doing miscellaneous research, minding my own business. And there's just scads in them. I'm not even covering half of them. It just goes on and on. Thomas Paine, the hero of the American Revolution, died in 1809 at age 72,

was buried, modestly enough, on his farm in New Rochelle, New York, but an English admirer named William Cobbett dug up the remains in 1819 and brought them to England, hoping to get him wider recognition. He just admired him. Unfortunately, Cobbett's plans fell apart, and he had to leave the bones in a corner of his house. Then Cobbett died in debt in 1835, and his goods were auctioned off,

except for the trunk that contained Payne's remains because the auctioneer wouldn't touch that. So the truck went to Cobbett's neighbor, who had no idea what to do with it, and in 1844, the neighbor sent them to Cobbett's former secretary, a man named Ben Tilley, who was now a tailor and used the trunk as a stool. So the trunk that contains Thomas Paine's remains was used as a tailor's stool for some years. Finally, desperate for money, he auctioned it off, and most of the remains disappeared, but it turned out eventually that Tilly had saved the remains of Thomas Paine's brain as a souvenir.

At this point, it was just a hard black lump, but it was Thomas Paine's brain. We know this because he'd kept it in a cloth with a label, and when he died, both the brain and its label were found in his rooms. I don't know what the label said. I hope it didn't say Thomas Paine's brain. Finally, the American abolitionist Moncure Conway bought the brain

and brought it to America and in 1905, the Thomas Paine National Historical Association buried it in an undisclosed location on the grounds of Paine's old farm in New Rochelle where it had started out all those years ago.

I mean, and it's probably, you know, there's this desiccated lump of tissue. I mean... It's sad. It is very sad. And the association is trying to find

more bits of pain in order to bury them together with the brain. If you know where any of the whereabouts of Thomas Paine's other parts are, please contact them.

That's the other thread that runs through this is often when they finally do claim someone and bury them, they bury them in a somewhat undisclosed location

just to keep this from happening again, which it would. Oliver Cromwell, this gets worse and worse, was buried in Westminster Abbey, but when the English monarchy was restored in 1660, Charles II wanted to punish those who were responsible for killing his father, Charles I, including Cromwell. So get this, Parliament ordered Cromwell's body exhumed, hanged at Tyburn, where common criminals were executed. Then the body was cut down and its

head was cut off and impaled on a 20-foot oak spike and mounted on the roof of Westminster Abbey where it remained for 20 years as a warning to those who would oppose the monarchy. It's not clear how it came down off the roof again. One story goes that a storm in the late 17th century blew it down at the feet of a guard who stashed it in his flue. We're not sure about that, but it does pop up here and there at other known locations. It appears next in 1710 in the collection of Claudius Dupuis, a French-Swiss calico printer. Then it passed through the hands of Samuel Russell, a failed comedian who exhibited it in a London stall around 1780. Then to John Cox, a jeweler who basically swindled it out of Russell's hands in 1787.

He sold it to three brothers named Hughes, and then it went to a private collector named Josiah Henry Wilkinson of Kent. You would think after all that pinball, it wouldn't turn out still to have been Oliver Cromwell's head, but miraculously, it is. In 1875, an Oxford professor declared that the Wilkinson skull really was Oliver Cromwell's head. In 1934, the statistician Carl Pearson and anthropologist G.M. Morant made a close study and agreed with him that that really was Cromwell's skull that had gone through all that.

In 1960, the Wilkinson family arranged to have the skull buried on the grounds of the Cambridge College that Wilkinson had attended, and that, too, its precise location is a secret, probably, for good reason. Thomas Hardy, the English poet and novelist, died in 1928 at age 87. He was the last in a long line of, in a romantic tradition, of burying one's heart in a treasured spot. There was kind of an unfortunate conflict here. His will directed his body would be buried in his hometown of Stinsford, Dorset, but his friends wanted his ashes to be interred at Westminster Abbey, so they fought

about this and compromised in the only way that you could. The night after Hardy's death, a local surgeon cut out his heart and carried it home in a biscuit tin, and then both got their way. The heart was buried intact in Stinsford Churchyard. There's an untrue rumor that it was eaten by a cat.

And then Hardy's ashes of the rest of him were interred in Westminster Abbey. Jeremy Bentham, the philosopher who came up with utilitarianism, died in 1832 at age 84. He wrote a treatise

called Auto Icon or Farther Uses of the Dead to the Living. Jeremy Bentham was as progressive as it is possible to be. He argued that corpses should be preserved for the use of future generations, because they don't do anyone any good if they're underground.

They could be employed as stage props or as adornments to the home or garden. As stage props! Or you could arrange them in a posthumous hall of fame. Okay. I want to be mounted after I'm dead in a sort of animatronic pose in our living room. Okay, I'll keep that in mind. He wanted to be the first example of this. He wanted to turn his own corpse

into the premier example of an auto icon, which is what he called these things. So he got his friend Thomas Southwood Smith after his death. Smith removed all of Bentham's organs, stripped the skeleton of its flesh, dried it out with an air pump and some sulfuric acid,

then fitted it into one of Bentham's favorite suits, added some hay and straw around the bones, and seated the body in one of Bentham's favorite suits, added some hay and straw around the bones, and seated the body in one of Bentham's favorite chairs. And he put one of Bentham's favorite walking sticks into one of his hands, which is kind of sweet. It is. Because he gets to spend eternity that way. Unfortunately, the sulfuric acid had left Bentham's head looking rather scary,

so they had to hire a sculptor to create a wax head instead. But that pretty much worked. The stuffed Bentham remained in Smith's office for a number of years, and they held parties periodically in his honor. And then in 1850, the body moved the body to the Anatomy Museum of the University College London, where it is today. It's encased in a cabinet of mahogany and glass in the south end of the school's cloisters. In fact, for the 100th and 150th anniversaries of the college, they actually brought it to a meeting of the college council, where Bentham was listed as present but not voting.

Present but not voting. Well, see, okay, he had a nice one. He wasn't like just, you know. Yeah, and it was kind of his idea. Yeah. So we'll give him some credit. At least he knew that this was going to happen to him. That's not true of Albert Einstein.

Uh-oh. Who died in 1955 at age 76 before his cremation, most of him was cremated, his body was autopsied at the hospital where he died, and the pathologist, a man named Thomas Harvey, kept the brain. That sounds outrageous because the family didn't know about it, but apparently at the time it was somewhat common for that to happen, for a pathologist to keep a body part that had some particularly remarkable characteristics. Well, I was going to say Einstein's brain, yeah.

Einstein's son objected at first, but eventually the family sort of relented and gave permission for Harvey to study the brain as long as it was used only for scientific study and the results were published only in scientific journals. That would have been fine, except that Harvey wasn't actually a neuroanatomist himself, so what wound up happening is that the brain sort of languished in obscurity, preserved in formaldehyde and sliced into more than a thousand pieces and kept in a glass jar. He just carried with him from job to job, from New Jersey to Kansas to Missouri and back to New Jersey, and kept inside cardboard boxes, beneath beer coolers, and in closets under socks. There were finally, he was wise to wait in

one sense that the whole neuroscience sort of blossomed toward the end of the 20th century so it was possible to do more sophisticated work which wasn't the case when he died right but and several studies were published in the late 1900s but unfortunately they were all criticized because the sample size was one i mean you can study his brain and make some observations about it but you can't really draw many conclusions from it because it's just one person's brain uh in 1998 harvey returned what remained of the brain to Princeton Hospital. So scientists can still study it. It's still there.

But after all this time and handling, it's not clear how useful that would be. Yeah, that's a shame. As I say, there are many more of these things. I didn't go looking for these. They kind of came looking for me. And I just kind of made a list of them. If you want to see more of these, there's a good book by Best Lovejoy called Rest in Pieces, The Curious Fates of Famous Corpses.

It came out in 2013. I don't know if there's a moral to be drawn from this. I sure don't know what it is. I guess if you're famous, get buried in a steel vault somewhere. And perhaps there's a term in anthropology, maybe this is a well-known phenomenon that I haven't heard of. But wow, it seems really common some of them as i say there's some rationality to it like bentham came up with his own fate uh some people's body parts become religious relics and like phrenology explains haydn but there's still a lot of them it just seems like people just want a souvenir

yeah that was once owned by a famous person that's really what it comes down to if you have any comments about any of this you can write to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com this episode is brought to you by our patrons and by harry's which asks when did shaving get so expensive you have the inconvenience of driving to the drugstore and waiting for the clerk to unlock that little case, and even if you do that, you have to choose between paying, frankly, too much money for a higher quality razor, or getting the cheap kind that cuts up your face. Harry's has solved that problem for you.

Harry's.com was started by two guys who were passionate about creating a better shaving experience for all men. They bought a razor factory in Germany that's been making some of the world's highest quality blades for almost a century, and they ship directly to you. By cutting out the middleman, Harry's offers a great shave at a fraction of the price of drugstore brands. Shipping is free, and the blades come straight to your door

at factory direct prices. I agree with him. I think ordinary blades are overpriced, and I don't want to have to pay a premium just to get good razor blades. But cheap blades can give you a bad shave and can cut your face. Harry's sent me a sample kit. The blades are great and I really like the convenience. Everything's shipped to your house for free, which is really valuable if you're as busy as we are. The starter set is a great deal. For $15, you get a razor, three blades, and your choice of Harry's shave cream or foaming shave

gel. And if you go to harrys.com now, they'll give you $5 off if you type our coupon code CLOSET with your first purchase. With that code, you can get an entire month's worth of shaving for just $10. So get a superior shave now for a great price. Go to harrys.com and enter coupon code CLOSET at checkout for $5 off the starter set. That's h-a-r-r-y-S dot com and start shaving smarter today. In episode 67, Greg talked about a London widow who claimed that she received new compositions from several dead composers, such as Beethoven and Chopin. Dan Green wrote in to say, Hi, Feutilizers. When I heard this episode, I immediately thought of a documentary I saw more than a decade ago. Where has eternity gone? Good question, eh?

The film is about a U.S. couple named Gerald and Linda Polly who were involved in a number of beyond-the-grave endeavors. Polly claimed to channel songs from the spirit of John Lennon. Wow. I hadn't actually heard about this before, but according to the Wikipedia article, the Polly's claimed to be in contact with a number of well-known figures, including Jesus and Mohammed, as well as Princess Diana and Bach. They were very well connected.

And they put together a body of work, including songs and drawings that they claimed they had channeled from various spirits, including John Lennon's. that they claimed they had channeled from various spirits, including John Lennon's. Dan sent a link to a documentary about the Polly songs that are supposedly channeled from Lennon, and we'll include that in the show notes. Dan says, spoiler, John Lennon's songwriting ability seemed to have taken a sharp downturn in quality post-mortem. He's also gotten quite conservative politically since becoming dead. But I suppose that could happen to you, I guess. Yeah, people change. People change, right? Death must change you some. In episode 68, Greg mentioned that in World War II, the U.S. Office of Censorship

apparently banned sending various materials through the mail that could contain coded information, and that this supposedly included knitting instructions. Greg asked whether anyone knew anything more about this, and Julian Bravo wrote in about it. Julian let us know that the BBC quiz show QI had written an article on knitting, and this article mentions that during World War II, the British censors banned sending anything through international mail that could be used to convey secret messages, and this included knitting patterns. That includes almost anything. I mean, you'd just be paranoid.

Well, if it's war, I mean, you know, you've got to be paranoid, sure. QI notes that there is a character, Madame Defarge, in Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities, who is supposedly encoding names in her knitting. But there's no evidence that this kind of thing actually did happen during the French Revolution, despite other authors apparently suggesting this also. That would have been interesting if it had. But QI does say, there is some evidence that knitting really can be used for code. During the Second World War, the Belgian resistance recruited old women whose windows overlooked railway marshalling yards to note the trains by knitting different stitches for different trains.

That's fascinating. I wasn't able to find a lot of confirmation on this. All the reports that I could find seemed to trace back to one BBC program. So, I mean, maybe it's really happened, but I couldn't find a lot of evidence on it. But Julian, who seems to know a heck of a lot more about knitting than I do, does seem to find it plausible. Julian wrote, the case they cite is rather simplistic. As a knitter and a bit of a cryptography nerd, and I have to say, I have to wonder how many knitters and cryptographers there

are out there, but Julian says, I can tell you that there are hundreds of ways to hide a message in knitting patterns, especially when that pattern is written out as knitting abbreviations obscure what the final project may look like. And then Julian described several ways that codes could be hidden in knitting patterns, either that would show up in the final knitted works or that could be hidden in faked knitting instructions, where even an experienced knitter might have to actually try knitting the pattern to see that the instructions weren't really real. That's really interesting. So, you know, it does seem that knitting patterns were legitimately banned during the war.

Thank you. That's really fascinating. In episode 68, I'd noted that the Yale scholar Wilmarth Sheldon Lewis spent half a century editing the correspondence of the 18th century man of letters, Horace Walpole. Walpole was a gigantically energetic letter writer. The published collection of his letters that Lewis amassed over half a century runs to 48 volumes. The historian J.H. Plum had written, It's an odd thought that we know more about the facts of Horace Walpole's life than we know about any other human being. I like that quote, but he

wrote it in 1960, which is now more than 50 years ago, and I asked, who holds the modern record for the most well-documented life if it's not Horace Walpole? Listener Adam Baring wrote, Greg and Sharon, your latest podcast reminded me of Robert Shields, who was credited with having kept the longest modern diary. He made entries in five-minute intervals from 1972 until 1997, which sounds impossible, but it's true. I'd written briefly about Shields on Futility Closet in 2006, but I'd forgotten about it and had never updated it. Shields was a high school English teacher in Dayton, Washington, who died in 2007. He left behind a diary of 37.5 million words that fills 91 boxes. 37.5

million words. For comparison, War and Peace is about half a million words. Shield spent four hours a day recording his life in five-minute segments. I don't quite understand. I haven't been able to find any kind of, like, how you can hold down any kind of job or live a life at all. I mean, every five minutes, did he

stop? I mean, I can't... I think what that means is he had, evidently, what he actually did was, on his back porch, he had six Remington typewriters, and he'd go up there at the end of the day and sit down in his underwear and type up the day. So I think he just kept it in his head and then wrote it down. That's my understanding.

Because otherwise, I mean, you couldn't even have a conversation. You couldn't watch a TV show. In his best years, he produced three million words a year. In his worst years, he produced about a million. In 1994, he told National Public Radio that stopping the diary would be like, quote, turning off my life. He just couldn't face it. So when he had his second stroke in 1997, and that ended his ability to type, he wound up giving the diary to Washington State University under the condition that it not be read for 50 years. And that's where

it is now. When he died, the New York Times wrote an obituary on him that described the diary. They say he regularly recorded his body temperature and blood pressure, critiqued newspapers, and described all the junk mail he got and the cost of almost everything he bought. He had three dozen ways, none obscene, to describe his urinations, all recorded. He slept in two-hour stretches in order to record his dreams. Among other things, Mr. Shields taped nasal hair into his diary for DNA study by future scientists. I don't think Walpole did that. He said he did not know why he started keeping a diary in 1972. He just knew he could not stop. He described himself as a nut and said, quote, we were driven

by compulsions we don't know. He hoped historians would find the details of his life useful. He said in an interview with the Seattle Times in 1994, maybe by looking into someone's life at that depth every minute of every day, they'll find out something about all people. I don't know no way to tell. Just imagine what he would have done with Twitter. Oh, wow. He was just a little too early for his time. He could have tweeted out about every urination he had. Yeah, I don't, I don't imagine anyone's going to, I shouldn't even say this, break that record. I guess someday somebody will. It's hard to see how you even could. Anyway, I like the last paragraph of the New York Times

obituary. It's kind of dry. Apparently what happened was he had two strokes. The second one in 1997 ended his ability to type, so he couldn't keep doing the diary himself but between that point and the point where he just gave up and donated the diary to the university he tried to get his wife he wanted to dictate the diary to her and have her write it down she tried that for a while and said no this is not going to work but the new york times obituary ends by saying three years earlier when an interviewer had asked her about her husband's fixation on posterity she replied good old posterity. I think I would feel the same way.

I don't know how long they were married. And finally, this next one goes all the way back to our very first episode, which was what, March, April last year? Yeah, more than a year ago. I had mentioned in the first episode a puzzling sequence of events in Alfred Hitchcock's film Vertigo and asked readers for their thoughts. And listen to the early episodes if you want to follow that train. But I mentioned in that that a number of sources about Hitchcock mentioned the phrase an icebox scene, which refers to a scene in a movie that doesn't actually make sense, a plot hole

or something, motivation that just doesn't make sense. Somehow when you're watching the movie, that seems plausible. But then later on at home, when you're thinking about it, you realize that just doesn't make sense. Somehow when you're watching the movie, that seems plausible. But then later on at home, when you're thinking about it, you realize that just doesn't hold up. Hitchcock reportedly called those icebox scenes because they occur to you when you're getting something out of the icebox

in the middle of the night. Or so I thought, but I asked listeners because I hadn't been able to actually verify that quote anywhere coming from Hitchcock. Well, listener Christine Fisher just wrote in with an answer. She found a 1972 interview with Charles Thomas Samuels

in which Hitchcock discusses the unanswered questions that appear in Psycho rather than Vertigo, but it's the same idea. In Psycho, there are some unanswered questions, and at the end of the movie, a psychiatrist appears and explains all of them, just to tie up the loose ends. So in this interview, Samuels asked,

why did you end the film with a psychiatrist's explanation? And Hitchcock said, because the audience needed it. Otherwise, they'd have a lot of unanswered questions. You'd run afoul of the icebox trade. The interviewer said, The icebox trade? And Hitchcock said, The people who get home after seeing a movie go to the icebox and take out the cold chicken.

While they're chewing on it, they discuss the picture. In the morning, the wife meets the neighbor next door. She says to her, How was the picture? And the wife says, It was alright, but we discovered a number of flaws in it. Bang goes your word of mouth. So Hitchcock actually did say it, and it actually did mean what I thought it meant.

So thank you very much, Christine, for figuring that out. She writes, so Hitchcock was actually using the term to talk about people who go home at night and dissect movies only to find flaws that they later report to people who've yet to see the film. Box office killers. In his mind, the icebox trade was a reason to try to remove unanswered questions with a plot device that allows explanation. It's why you should generally sum up a film at the end and not leave people guessing about too many things. That's a good point.

Well, I wish more people would do that now, because a lot of movies now, like, ambiguities become a virtue, and it's just, they don't wrap them up, and I find that frustrating sometimes. Isn't it amazing the things that our listeners know, though? Yes. Yeah, it's worth asking the questions because I would never have found that. I'd never have found that on my own. So thank you, Christine. And to everyone else who wrote in, if you have any comments or questions, you can reach us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. It's my turn to be trying to solve a lateral thinking puzzle. Greg's going to give me an odd-sounding situation, and I'm going to have to see what I can make of it, asking only yes or no questions.

This one's from Kyle Hendrickson's 1998 book Mental Fitness Puzzles. Okay. A pilot was in an emergency situation and needed to land his aircraft in unfamiliar territory. He immediately spotted two possible landing sites, the first of which was a flat and open field. The second site was inhabited by grazing livestock and had a rough terrain. Why then did he choose the latter? Because if you land on cows, it breaks your landing. No, that's a nasty answer. Okay, a pilot. A pilot of an airplane? Yes. Okay. Does it matter what kind or size of airplane? No, I guess not. Okay.

A pilot who's like inside of an airplane. He's actually in this aircraft. Correct. Okay. And he needs to make an emergency landing of his airplane. Yep. And he chooses a field with livestock grazing in it. That's right.

Okay. Does it matter what the livestock are? Not really, no. No. And the other field that was like open, did it have some feature that made it look more dangerous or problematic? No. No.

Did he deliberately choose this field because it had livestock in it? Yes. Oh, the cows are going to break his landing. That's a perfectly good answer, I suppose. But that's not the one I'm looking for. Okay. So he chose this field because there were livestock in it. Yes. Oh, well, that is confusing, isn't it? And you said it doesn't matter what the livestock are. Right. So the presence of livestock, the presence of livestock implies the presence or absence of something else? Yes. Somewhat.

Because there would be people nearby that he could get help from? No. No. Okay. The presence of livestock implies the absence of something else, and he's hoping for this absence? No. No. Okay. The presence of livestock implies the absence of something else and he's hoping for this absence? Yes. Okay. The presence of livestock implies the absence of something dangerous? Yes. Something dangerous in general as opposed to dangerous to somebody in a plane? Something dangerous in general? Yes, I think. Or he's

trying to avoid something dangerous to a pilot in a plane. No, not specifically. Okay, so does it matter where this is all located? Yes. In a specific country? No. In a specific

area with specific features? That's... The presence of snakes? No. There are cows. There must not be snakes. No.

Well, the way that's worded, I have to say it's whatever. Okay, let's back up. Is he trying to avoid other living creatures? No. No. Is he trying to avoid some kind creatures? No. No. Is he trying to avoid some kind of geographical feature? No. No.

Is he trying to avoid something man-made? Yes. Oh, is this during a specific time period? Uh, no. No, so it's not like during a particular war, during a war. Yes. It is during a war. Yes. It is during a war. Yes.

Oh, but it doesn't matter which war. Generally, no. Okay, well, if the livestock are peacefully grazing, then there aren't, like, enemy combatants nearby? Uh, no, that's not it. No, that's not quite it? Okay, all right. Oh, then there aren't landmines. How?

God, you're so good at these. Yes. The pilot was flying in a war zone. He had been instructed to look for grazing animals as an indication of a safe landing area. If landmines had been present, the animals would most likely have set them off as they grazed. And I looked into this deeply enough to find out this is actually an unorthodox method of demining. If you want to get rid of landmines in an area and can't afford any other way to do it, you can graze livestock.

Wait, wait, and then let them explode the mines and be killed? That's my understanding. Oh, that's not very nice. Anyway, it's not a totally crazy puzzle. Alright. If anybody else out there has a puzzle they'd like to send in for us to use, please send it to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com That's another episode for us to use, please 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 or visit the website at futilitycloset.com where you can sample over 8,000 captivating tidbits. 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 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.