Futility Closet - 079-One Square Inch of the Yukon

Episode Date: October 25, 2015

If you opened a box of Quaker Oats in 1955, you'd find a deed to one square inch of land in northwestern Canada. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll tell the story behind the Klondike Big Inch land giveaway, whose bizarre consequences are still being felt today. We'll also hear about a time traveler who visited the British Museum in 1997 and puzzle over why a prizewinning farmer gives away his best seed to his competitors. Sources for our feature on the Klondike Big Inch land promotion: Jack McIver, "The Great Klondike Big Inch Land Caper," Ottawa Citizen, March 27, 1975. "The Great Klondike Rush of '55," Ottawa Citizen, Dec. 8, 1955. "Sgt. Preston Inspired Great Yukon Land Deals," Reading (Pa.) Eagle, Jan. 1, 1987. Dave White, "Quaker Oats Klondike Deed Scam Still Sizzling," Yukon News, Jan. 26, 1990. "Cereal Giveaway Now a Pain," Montreal Gazette, May 12, 1971. "The Klondike Big Inch," yukoninfo, accessed 10/23/2015. John Robert Colombo, Canadian Literary Landmarks, 1984. Big Inch deeds can sometimes be found on eBay -- here are two that sold in March. Sources for our feature on Enoch Soames, time travel, and literary memory: Max Beerbohm, "Enoch Soames: A Memory of the Eighteen-Nineties," 1916. Teller, "A Memory of the Nineteen-Nineties," Atlantic, November 1997. Chris Jones, "The Honor System," Esquire, October 2012. The Flickr photo of Soames is here, and there's a bit more background here. This week's lateral thinking puzzles are from Paul Sloane and Des MacHale's 1996 book Intriguing Lateral Thinking 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. Please consider becoming a patron of Futility Closet -- on our Patreon page you can pledge any amount per episode, and all contributions are greatly appreciated. You can change or cancel your pledge at any time, and we've set up some rewards to help thank you for your support. You can also make a one-time donation via the Donate button in the sidebar of the Futility Closet website. Many thanks to Doug Ross for the music in this episode. If you have any questions or comments you can reach us at [e-mail]. Thanks for listening!

Welcome to Futility Closet, a celebration of the quirky and the curious, the thought-provoking and the simply amusing. This is the audio companion to the website that catalogs more than 8,000 curiosities in history, language, mathematics, literature, philosophy, and art. You can find us online at futilitycloset.com. Thanks for joining us. Welcome to Episode 79. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. Quaker Oats launched a unique promotion in 1955. Each box of its cereal contained the deed to one square inch of land in northwestern Canada. In today's show, we'll learn about the Klondike Big Inch Land Giveaway,

whose strange consequences are still being felt 60 years later. We'll also hear about a time traveler who visited the British Museum in 1997, and puzzle over why a prize-winning farmer gives away his best seed to his competitors. This one starts with one of the best newspaper leads I've ever seen. This is from the Ottawa Citizen, March 27, 1975. This is a story about a bathroom, a Mountie, several hundred tons of breakfast cereal, a Canadian senator, a television game show, a murder, 21 million square inches of Yukon Territory land, a severe case of frostbite, and an advertising campaign that should have died 20 years ago but didn't. This is basically the story of one of the most successful sales promotions in North

American business history. I think it's slowly being forgotten now, but it was a huge deal at the time. It starts with a Chicago ad man named Bruce Baker, who was sitting in his bathtub in 1954, trying to think up a new ad campaign for his company, which represented Quaker Oats, their breakfast cereal. He needed a gimmick to compete with those of other cereal companies who were using things like offers of whistles and decoder rings and buttons and plastic airplanes, that kind of thing, just things that were included in the boxes to induce people to nag their mothers into buying breakfast cereal for them.

As he was sitting there at Bathtub, it occurred to him that Quaker Oats was the sponsor of a really popular show at the time called Sergeant Preston of the Yukon. It started out as a radio show and then became a TV show, which was about a Canadian Mountie who would mush his dog team across the frozen north and catch bad guys. So he hit on the idea somehow of buying a piece of the Yukon and cutting it up into tiny little pieces, I mean dividing the plot into little pieces, and distributing among the audience members so that if you opened your box of Quaker Oats, you'd get a little deed, a little certificate saying that you own part of the Yukon Territory. One inch?

One square inch, that small. He once told a reporter the kids could actually own a genuine piece of Canadian gold rush land. And besides these plastic whistles and things were worth about five cents each, I had to come up with something that didn't cost too much. So that was the plan, to go buy a piece of the Yukon and divide it up into literally one inch square segments and include deeds for those in the packages. And that's what they set about doing. In early October of that year, Baker and his brother chartered a plane and flew to the Yukon looking for a plot of land that they could do this with. They found an attorney up there named George Van Roggen, who actually later became a Canadian senator. Every piece of this story is crazy. Van Roggen loved the whole

project. He later said, as a staid lawyer, I found the antics of these ad guys from Chicago most entertaining, certainly more so than drawing up wills, which is what apparently he'd spent his time doing until then. So on October 7th, the three of them took a skiff three miles up the Yukon River from Dawson City and found a plot of land that Van Roggen had picked out for them. It was 19.11 acres on the West Bank. Baker, the ad man, said, it was the most exciting day of my life, but actually,

it was freezing cold at the time, and they didn't manage the trip very well. His feet actually wound up being badly frostbitten, and the complications led eventually to the amputation of his right leg by the knee. I told you every part of this story is just, I guess, colorful is the nice way to say it. Anyway, so they had the land picked out now, but they had to come up with some scheme for dividing it up into millions of little pieces. And would they have to keep track of who owned each little piece? Well, that is the key question. Van Ragen realized that since each piece is going to be one inch square, it was going to be a paperwork nightmare.

You need literally acres of paperwork just to cover the whole subdivision plan. So Van Roggen said, and this is sort of the key to how this develops, he said, in the U.S. there'd be very little legal difficulty in dividing land into one-inch parcels, but they wanted to know if in Canada you could give away deeds that couldn't be individually registered. We gave the opinion that you could, that they'd be legal. So you don't own a specific inch, because that would be a surveying nightmare to figure out exactly where your inch started and my inch was. And the next guy is, yeah, we'll get into that. That's the key question. It's going to become the key question. Anyway, they went, they hadn't quite crossed that bridge yet. Van Roggen and Bruce Baker's brother, John, who was also an attorney,

drew up these deeds. And Van Roggen said these deeds had to, John, who was also an attorney, drew up these deeds. And Van Roggen said these deeds had to be very carefully worded. He said everything had to be absolutely legal. The competition in the food business was so strenuous that your competitors would try to get you on any small technicality. So among other things, they excluded mineral rights so that you couldn't try to mine your one square inch of land. rights so that you couldn't try to mine your one square inch of land. And they stipulated that plot owners had to allow easement or perpetual access, meaning that if you own a square inch of land up there, unless you parachute straight down onto it, you're going to have to tiptoe through other people's land, and then you can be accused

of trespassing or claim jumping. So that was part of the deed, is that you had to allow people to cross it. You can't put up a little fence around your little one square inch. So they thought of that much. And then on the advice of its lawyers, the Quaker Company incorporated a division called the Klondike Big Inch Land Company Incorporated in Illinois to administer all this. They paid $1,000 for this 19-acre plot and divided it into 21 million inch square little, I don't know what you call them, parcels, I guess. And then they promoted it. On January 27th, 1955, 93 newspapers across America began running ads that read,

get a real deed to one square inch of land in the Yukon Gold Rush country, and you'll actually own one square inch of Yukon land. Quaker advertised the land as being located in what they called the heart of Sergeant Preston country and apparently immediately some aggressive kids became little miniature land barons and bought and traded certificates until they had amassed a whole you know scores of square inches sometimes perhaps hundreds and so driven by all this demand and enthusiasm for the whole project Quaker Oats actually sold out all 21 million deeds throughout North America in a matter of just weeks in the spring of 1955. The way it worked was you nagged your mom until she bought one of these boxes for you.

And you got out of it came this seven by five inch legalistic looking deed saying you own the square inch of land. And there's a line you could sign your name on to become a, quote, grantee of the second part, owner of a numbered tract of Yukon land comprising by ad measurement one square inch more or less. More or less. So almost immediately, Quaker says the whole thing, quote, began as an ad man's dream and is ending as a lawyer's nightmare. It's called it a royal pain in the neck. Kids who receive these deeds continue to contact, for decades afterward, continue to contact the Quaker company. And thousands of owners have written to UConn officials about this, about all the legal ramifications. Do I really own an inch square of land and can I do this or that with it? Do they wonder if they can vote maybe?

Like, I own land there. Can I vote? Letters have been sent to Canadian consuls general in the United States, the Yukon, and even the Prime Minister's office in Ottawa. And there's all kinds of news stories I found about this, about the poor Canadian officials who are having to deal with this constant stream of inquiries. Cheryl Lefevre, a land office clerk who maintains the Yukon's files on the matter, which are now 18 inches thick, says, please tell them to stop. says please tell them to stop. Vern Thomas of the Quaker Legal Department said, the problem is not with those who first got the deeds in the serial packages,

but with those people who have gotten them secondhand and believe they're worth something, which is the important part. These deeds look sort of official. They have all this legal language on them. And the instructions on them read, keep this authentic deed in a safe place. So people did. They stored them in safe deposit boxes and with insurance policies and wills. So what would happen is I would get one of these when I'm 10 years old and store it with, you know, give it to my mom,

and she'd store it with the important papers. And then when I die, you have to go through my stuff. Yeah, I come across this. And say, did Greg own land in the Yukon? And you have to call the officials in the Yukon and ask them. And what would happen is the Yukon Register of Land Titles would explain to you patiently, no, Greg didn't own this and he never did. The reason for that is that, this goes back to what you were saying before, the individual deeds weren't formally registered. I'm not an attorney,

but I think I understand this. If you want to own something in the eyes of the law, a piece of land, you have to assert a formal claim of ownership. Like if we wanted to buy a piece of land, if I wanted to, I'd have to go to the title office and say, here's the exact plot of land I'm talking about. Here's my name. And they look at all the deal and the setup. And if it looks ship-shaped, they say, yes, you do own it. And it's sort of officially registered in the eyes of the law that I own it. If you don't do that, you don't own the land. So what happened here is that this 19-acre plot that they had bought, the Quaker company had bought, that much of it was legitimate, but this business of dividing it into millions of little pieces wasn't registered with any official recognizing legal authority in Canada.

So then the Quaker company still really owns all of it? Yes. The best explanation I've been able to understand is that sort of the most the kids could claim is that they were tenants on someone else's land. Oh. But they didn't. Even though the deed said explicitly, you now own a little square inch of the Yukon, they just didn't. Okay.

But the problem is there's 21 million of these certificates now floating around the world. And they look like they mean that you own it. And they all look official. Yeah. And the only people who can explain that it's not official is these poor people up in the Yukon who have to keep answering the phone. On top of that, this Illinois division that they set up to administer all this, the Klondike Big Inch Land Company Incorporated, has gone out of business. And on top of that, in 1965, they realized they'd forgotten to pay their property taxes on this parcel of land.

They didn't pay $37.20 that they owed. And so the crown just took the land back anyway. Oh. So sort of three times over, this just is not going anywhere. People who think they own a square inch of land actually don't. So Quaker doesn't even own it. Right. That's right. A Quaker Oats spokesman in Chicago claims the company never received the tax bill. Just for the record, they're not delinquent. They just didn't realize they owed it. But in any case, the whole thing is just, in the eyes of the law, it's just a fiction now. One explanation I saw of this says that if you wanted to go and try to collect anything from this,

it would be like trying to sue a dead person who has left no assets. There's just nothing to recover. One Quaker lawyer said, The deeds are worthless. They have never been of any value except as a promotional gimmick by our merchandising people. But the wonderful thing about this whole story is that people are people, and there are all kinds of zany stories about things they've tried to do and different ways to exploit this offer to benefit themselves. And I have made a list here of miscellaneous oddities compiled from different sources. In no order.

Here we go. One boy sent a piece of string and four toothpicks to the Quaker company, asking them to fence in his land. You had the same thought. A man from Lincoln Park, Michigan offered to donate his three square inches as a national park. National park for ants? I guess.

The promotion made the front page of a Buffalo newspaper. A man on trial there was on trial there for murdering his wife with an ice pick. And the defense was apparently getting very expensive. And his lawyer wondered whether he'd be able to pay for it. And the man said, don't worry, I have land in Canada. And it turned out he had a thousand Quaker Oats deeds saying he owned a thousand square inches of Canada.

So the lawyer was trying to be allowed to withdraw from the case. I don't know if he actually made it out. On the television game show Truth or Consequences, which is an old show where you had to try to answer a trivia question and if you didn't succeed, which usually you didn't, you had to perform some humiliating stunt, a contestant pulled a deed from a box of puffed wheat and his consequence was to be flown to the Yukon and panned for gold on a square-inch property, which he did, and a film of this was shown on network television afterward. This is an odd one. In 1965, two men from Cedar Rapids,

Iowa sent a letter to the territorial commissioner declaring that their four square inches were henceforth, quote, free and independent from the Yukon Territory and should be referred to as the Republic of Xanadu. On January 4th, 1965, the Commissioner of the Yukon and the Prime Minister of Canada received letters from Iowa residents Stephen Spurl and John Zook, saying, this is to inform you that certain areas located between Dawson and Whitehorse, hereafter to be referred to as Xanadu, hereby declare themselves free and independent from the Yukon Territory, the Dominion of Canada, and the British Commonwealth of Nations.

And apparently they had to take the seros. Commissioner G.R. Cameron took it seriously enough to write the Federal Department of Northern Affairs and National Resources to inform them that a state of emergency now exists between the Dominion of Canada and the state of Xanadu. This is in the record books somewhere. They even prepared a news release to be prepared for the local newspapers just to avoid alarming the populace.

I don't know what happened with that. Canada was at the time the second largest nation in the world, and Xanadu was four square inches. You could almost put your shoe over it. Presumably a lot of these problems just evaporated when the authorities looked into it and realized that there was no legal basis for these claims to ownership of the little square inch plots. But as you say, this is somebody's time and effort every time one of these things goes through, you know? Over and over.

There's also apparently one American gentleman who traveled all over the United States collecting these deeds until he had 10,880 of them. I can't imagine how long that took. And he figured that amounted to about 75 square feet of land and wrote to the Quaker Oats legal department wondering if he could consolidate them into one big chunk. He said he would prefer a piece of land, quote, near the water and as quiet an area as possible and was, needless to say, quite perturbed when he found out that the deeds were worthless. Also, the company claimed that the deed of land didn't say that the square inches were adjacent,

so it wouldn't necessarily be possible to consolidate them that way. But even so, 75 square feet, that's like 7 by 10. You could pitch a tent on that, but I don't know what more he had in mind. He's going to go camp on his land. Quaker, for its part, no longer even markets to kids. They say the cereals that they sell are no sugar, salt, or additives. So they're aimed at babies or the diet conscious. Also, it's worth noting that the promotion was 60 years ago. So the kids who got this, most of them, I should think, are still around and are maybe nearing the age now. I mean, those are baby boomers. So there's

a lot of them. And I think they're nearing the point where they're going to start passing away. And so I'm sorry to think that more and more of these certificates are probably coming to light. I mean, you would think after 60 years, this whole thing is blown over. But I think maybe it's possibly just beginning. And there's no way to recall these certificates because they're out there. And, you know, that's a good point. Even if you call the authorities and they explain it to you, if you don't destroy the certificate, then it's just going to pass into someone else's view and they'll be just

as confused by it. A few last oddities about this. A statistician at the Ottawa Citizen newspaper figured out that if all the land were deeded and all the property holders gathered together, the people would cover an area of 4.5 square miles and the combined properties would only cover 1 32nd of a square mile. So just the people who own this stuff cover much more land than the land itself. Also, each of the deeds that you pulled out of the cereal box measured 7 inches by 5 inches, which means that each deed was 35 times larger than the piece of land that it represented.

The deeds themselves, as I say, they're all over the place. I suppose there's still millions of them, unfortunately, floating around. They have no value as records of ownership of anything real, but in themselves, they become collector's items. I was just going to think that, yeah. And have been, apparently, for decades now. Bruce Baker, the ad man who started all this, used to take special delight in pointing out that in 1975, the deeds were worth about twice as much as a share of stock in the Quaker Oats Company. And I've noticed just in researching this this

week that just last March, someone on eBay paid $40 for two deeds in mint condition. So they're still worth something, but I think the Quaker Oats Company hasn't heard the last of this. our podcast is supported primarily by our fantastic patrons whose donations make it possible for us to keep making this show it has taken us almost a year but we are finally almost at the goal we set for continuing the podcast a lot of work goes into researching and making each episode so if you like futility Closet and want to support the show we could use your help in return for your contributions we offer some rewards we have a podcast activity feed where you can find outtakes

extra lateral thinking puzzles and behind the scenes peeks into the show we also offer special thank yous and a weekly email telling you what the upcoming topics will be on the show. For our super patrons, we have a monthly bonus episode where Greg and I try to stump each other in a brain-teasing game that you can play along with us. So if you want to help us keep making Futility Closet, check out our Patreon campaign at patreon.com slash futilitycloset or see the link in our show notes. Or see the link in our show notes. A couple weeks ago, I guess now, on October 14th, on Futility Closet, I ran an item about a relatively obscure short story by H.G. Wells that he published in 1932 called The Queer Story of Brownlow's Newspaper,

which is about a man who receives a newspaper unaccountably dated 40 years in the future. Wells mostly used that premise as a way to springboard into making predictions about what the world would be like in 1972, but it got me thinking about another sort of literature-related time travel anecdote that I think hasn't gotten as much attention as it deserves because I really like this one. This one concerns the British writer Max Beerbohm, who published a short story called Enoch Soames, A Memory of the 1890s in 1916. He published it in 1916, but purports to tell a story that he says happened in 1897. In the story, Enoch Soames is a struggling poet who feels that he's not appreciated in his own time. He thinks he's greater than people recognize and just hopes that as time rolls on, his

reputation will grow in the eyes of literary history. So he makes a pact with the devil. In exchange for his soul, he'll get to travel 100 years into the future to precisely 2.10 p.m. on June 3rd, 1997, where he'll appear in the round reading room at the British Museum, where he can look up whatever entries have been written about him in 1997 to see how history regards his literary reputation. He does that. He vanishes, and Beerbohm waits for him, and he comes back and looks dejected and explains basically that history's basically forgotten him. The way the story reads, it says, he's explaining this to Beerbohm. He says, they stared at me, I can tell you. I attracted a great deal of attention. I think

I rather scared them. They moved away whenever I came near. They followed me about at a distance wherever I went. The men at the round desk in the middle seemed to have a sort of panic whenever I went to make inquiries. He says in all the research he was able to do in the reading room, he wasn't able to find any entries that had been written in the reference works about himself. He did find an entry about Beerbohm, the writer of this story, that mentioned him, the poet, in passing. In the article on Beerbohm, it said, quote, he portrayed an imaginary character called Enoch Soames, a third-rate poet who believes himself a great genius and makes a bargain with the devil in order to know what posterity thinks of him. So, after looking that up and being disappointed, he gets pulled back to 1897,

and the devil laughs and carries him off to hell, and that's basically the end of it. But wouldn't that mean he'd found out that he was a fictional character? Yes. Well, we get into that in a second. Okay. That's a good question. I'm trying to follow that. Okay. As I say, Beerbone published this in 1916, published in the May 1916 edition of the Century magazine,

and it was reasonably well-received, and then as the years went on, it gradually faded from memory. When you read the story now, and I'll put a link in the show notes, two things strike you about it, or struck me anyway. One is, as you say, Beerbohm insists that Soames is a real person, not a fictional character. But in the story, he... In the reference work where he looks it up, apparently history regards him as so insignificant that he's not even a real person. I see.

But Beerbohm says, there's a section of the story where he says, again, I examined the screed, imaginary, but hereolmes was no more imaginary, alas, than I. The second odd thing is this queer specificity of time and place. It would have been easy in the story just to say he made a pact with the devil so he'd go 100 years in the future and just see what his reputation turned out to be. And he came back and said, I've been forgotten. That would have worked fine. But that's not what happened.

Beerbohm wrote specifically he was going to be sent to precisely 2.10 p.m. on June 3, 1997 in the round reading room at the British Museum, which is just a little peculiar. But as the century, the 20th century wore on, some readers and fans of Beerbohm, I guess, began to think, well, hang on, there's a way to check this. If Beerbohm is contending that Soames was a real person who really traveled to the future, the way to confirm that would be to turn up at the reading room on that time and date appointed just to see if anything happened. And in 1997, that's what happened. In that reading room that afternoon, about a dozen people turned up just to be on hand if anything unusual took place. about a dozen people turned up just to be on hand if anything unusual took place. And sure enough, at ten past two, a man appeared out of the stacks and began to scan the catalogs and speak to librarians looking puzzled and upset. He matched Beerbohm's description, quote, a stooping, shambling person, rather tall, very pale, with longish and brownish hair.

And he was dressed as described in what Beerbohm had called, quote, a soft black hat of clerical kind but of bohemian intention, and a gray waterproof cape which, perhaps because it was waterproof, failed to be romantic. And the man did everything that Enoch Soames had done in Beerbohm's story. He searched the room confusedly before disappearing into the stacks, looking dejected. As I say, there are about a dozen people watching this when it happened, and one of these was Teller, the smaller, quieter half of the magician duo Penn and Teller. And Teller wrote about the experience for the Atlantic that November, so we have a record of

what happened that day. Teller has never claimed to have arranged any of this. He was probably just a spectator. This was probably a real time traveler. But if Teller had been involved, that would mean that he had been anticipating this day for 34 years, ever since he had first heard the story from a teacher in high school, and had planned all the events of that afternoon, hiring an actor and dressing him in a soft black hat and a gray waterproof cape, and telling him what to do, just for the poetry of it, to see a fictional story come true on a summer afternoon in 1997, knowing that he himself might be the only witness. And that would have been a beautiful thing. The reading room closed later that year. In fact, its closing had been planned

for a long time, but had been delayed for various reasons, almost as if events were arranging themselves to hold it in existence just so all this could take place. But it's gone now, and today it's almost as if the whole thing had never happened. Or so I thought until I started researching this. It turns out that someone took a photograph of this happening. As far as I can tell, there's one photograph. Teller's account in The Atlantic describes these various other people who had turned up in the reading room to see what happened that day.

And one of the ones he mentions in passing is what he calls an angular man, about 50, casually holding a tiny camera. And he says at one point, the man with the camera leans forward and takes a snapshot. Well, in looking into this, I found that there's one photograph, and it's on Flickr. I'll include a link in the show notes. Apparently someone, a researcher who was working there at the time on a book, had a camera, and I guess he knew about the Enoch Soames incident because he saw the man and managed to take a photograph. In the photo, I should say, you don't actually get to see the man's face.

He's turned away from the camera, but you get to see a man wearing a gray cloak trying to look himself up in the catalog. The description on Flickr says, The strange incident involving the man in the cloak in this photograph occurred while I was working on a book in the Old British Museum reading room in June 1997. The description on Flickr says, with an American man whose face seemed vaguely familiar. He told me of his interest in the Max Beerbohm story and how he had traveled from the U.S. for this encounter. At 2.10 p.m., the caped figure in the photograph appeared as if from nowhere, silently examined a volume for some time while being watched in awe by the small crowd

and then disappeared. The American then told me about a small exhibition about the Beerbohm story in the library annex, but I later found that it had closed. However, I then remembered the identity of the American I had been speaking to. He was Teller, the half of the magician Act Penn and Teller, the one who never speaks. I consider myself lucky to have heard his voice. So I'll put that, I'll link to that photo in the show notes just so people can see it.

One other thing about this, if you read the story, sort of imagining that you're reading it in 1916, the point of it seems to be that it's a satire on the sort of self-important young writers of Beerbohm's own day. He's basically saying, if you think you're unappreciated now, just wait 100 years from now. People won't even remember that you existed. They won't even believe that you really did exist. Right. But it's interesting if you think about it because towards the end of the story, he starts to lean more and more heavily on the idea that this whole story that he's written

will be confirmable by people in the future. Basically, Beerbohm's literary reputation today is secure, but he couldn't have known that in 1916. So one way to secure your reputation is to write a very specific prediction about a future event. And then people keep it alive as they wait to see if it happens. So he writes toward the end of the story, this is a quote, I like to think that sometime between 1992 and 1997, somebody will have looked up this memoir and will have forced on the world his inevitable and startling conclusions. And I have reason for believing that this will be so. You realize that the reading room

into which Soames was projected by the devil was in all respects precisely as it will be on the afternoon of June 3, 1997. You realize, therefore, that on that afternoon, when it comes round, there the selfsame crowd will be, and there Soames will be, punctually, he and they doing precisely what they did before. The fact that people are going to stare at him and follow him around and seem afraid of him, which is exactly what they did, can be explained only by the hypothesis that they will somehow have been prepared for his ghostly visitation. They will have been awfully waiting to see whether he really would come, and when he does come, the effect will, of course, be awful. So, you can certainly read this as a satire of other writers, but you can't help

realizing that this led Beerbohm to think about his own reputation and how he might secure it, at least fleetingly. So if there are any struggling poets who listen to this podcast, and you'd like to be at least briefly remembered in the future, one way to do that is to make a very specific prediction about a future date. I'm going to be trying to solve a lateral thinking puzzle. Greg is going to give me an odd-sounding situation, and I have to work out what's going on, asking only yes or no questions. This is from Paul Sloan and Des McHale's 1996 book, Intriguing Lateral Thinking Puzzles. A public library suddenly announced that each member could borrow up to ten books and not return them for up to six months. Why?

Hmm. Oh. Was the library going to be moving and they wanted to get the books out of circulation so they'd have fewer to move? Yes. Oh! The library is moving to new premises but had very little money for the move. By giving the borrowers extra time, it ensured that borrowers moved most of the books. Want to try another one?

We seem to have some time. Here's another one. A farmer wins first prize for his wheat each every year in an agricultural show in stiff competition with his neighboring farmers however after the show is over he sends each of his fellow competitors a bag of his best wheat seed why is this is it important that they're his neighboring farmers yes because he wants them to oh i don't know enough about plant biology here He wants them to plant the seeds and that's going to help cross-pollinate his own seeds or hybridization for his own seeds? Mostly. Okay.

He wants the farmers to plant his wheat seeds? Yes. That he sends them? Yeah. And this is important that they're nearby. I'm trying to think. But he still thinks he's going to have an edge on them, even though they're planting his wheat seeds. I'm trying to think.

Okay. No. He wants them to plant his wheat seeds, and he thinks that's going to help him. That's going to benefit him. That's right. Right. And I'm trying to figure out how planting his... And are these the same seeds that he'll be planting himself? Basically the same seeds that he'll be planting on his own fields?

I'm actually... It would be complicating things to say no, so I'm trying to just say yes. Uh-oh. Complicated question. All right. Okay. things to say no sometimes it just say yes oh complicated question um all right okay hmm i feel like i'm trying to remember my 10th grade biology here or something but um he wants his he wants the neighboring farmers to plant very specific wheat seeds and he thinks that's going to help his own crop yes sort of yes halfway yes grimacing you're grimacing is that something to do with um pollinators like bees or something are there insects involved that i need to know about no no no there aren't insects involved uh but it has something to do with pollination? Yes. See, there are certain plants that, like, they need to cross-pollinate or pollinate with, like, neighboring plants. Is this something, like, am I in the right ballpark? You're very much in the right area.

It's not as complicated as you hear. Okay, I'm trying to, like, make this some kind of complicated plant biology question here. Okay, does this have to do with um diseases or predators of wheat no no does this have and it has something to sort of do with pollination it has to do with weeds you you actually have the pieces you need i think i have the pieces that i need and i'm just not putting it together um i got the library one really fast I just used up my whole brain power on the library one, apparently. He wants his neighbors to plant these really good, these are good wheat seeds that'll make really good plants. And that's going to improve his crop somehow.

No. No, it's not going to improve his crop. Rephrase that. Okay. If his neighbors did not plant these seeds, would his crop be less good? Yes. Okay. So somehow it's going to be to his benefit to have his neighbors plant these special wheat seeds.

Yes. Yes. And that's, is he doing anything illegal or unethical? No. No. And it's something vaguely to do unethical? No. No. And it's something vaguely to do with pollination? Yes.

Put the pieces together. I'm just... What am I not seeing? He has good wheat seeds. He has good wheat seeds. He has neighbors who are also growing wheat. Right. And he wants... He thinks it's going to pollinate his wheat to have the neighbors plant the same wheat?

It's going to improve the pollination of his own wheat? Yes. But it doesn't have to do with attracting bees or anything. I've ruled that out. No, because... Because of the wind patterns? Yes. What would happen if he didn't do this?

If he didn't give them the good wheat? His plants would cross-pollinate with inferior stock? Yeah, basically that's it. Oh. Wheat pollinates by wind, so the farmer's protecting his own future crops from contamination by inferior pollen from his neighbor's it. Oh. Wheat pollinates by wind, so the farmer's protecting his own future crops from contamination by inferior pollen from his neighbor's crops. Okay, I didn't know that wheat pollinated by wind, but I guess that's what I had to sort of figure out.

Well, you had all the pieces you said put together. Yeah. So presumably he's, meanwhile, at work creating an even better breed of wheat. Yeah. Oh, I see. But at least he's safe now from these inferior— From the inferior crops contaminating his... And nobody died.

That's right. Presumably nobody died. We should note that because it's so seldom we get one of those. Well, if anybody else has any puzzles they'd like to send in for us to use, you can send them to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. That wraps up another episode for us. If you're looking for more Futility Closet, you can check out our books on Amazon

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