Futility Closet - 126-The Great Australian Poetry Hoax

Episode Date: October 17, 2016

In 1943, fed up with modernist poetry, two Australian servicemen invented a fake poet and submitted a collection of deliberately senseless verses to a Melbourne arts magazine. To their delight, they were accepted and their author hailed as "one of the most remarkable and important poetic figures of this country." In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll tell the story of the Ern Malley hoax, its perpetrators, and its surprising legacy in Australian literature. We'll also hear a mechanized Radiohead and puzzle over a railroad standstill. Intro: In 1896 an English statistician decided that "brass instruments have a fatal influence on the growth of the hair." The Lincoln Electric Company presented a check made of steel to each winner of a 1932 essay contest. Sources for our feature on Ern Malley: Michael Heyward, The Ern Malley Affair, 1993. Brian Lloyd, "Ern Malley and His Rivals," Australian Literary Studies 20:1 (May 2001) 20. Philip Mead, "1944, Melbourne and Adelaide: The Ern Malley Hoax," in Brian McHale and Randall Stevenson, eds., The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century Literatures in English, 2006. The Ern Malley website contains the complete story and poems. In June 2002 Jacket Magazine ran a special "hoax" issue, with much background and commentary on the Malley story. Listener mail: Radiohead's "Nude" played by a Sinclair ZX Spectrum, an Epson LX-81 dot matrix printer, an HP Scanjet 3c, and an array of hard drives. Queen's "Don't Stop Me Now" via Super Mario World. "Logická Hádanka" by Horkýže Slíže -- a Slovak punk band sings a lateral thinking puzzle (translation and solution in video description). Guy Clifton and Emerson Marcus, "A Tale of the '70s: When D.B. Cooper's Plane Landed in Reno," Reno Gazette-Journal, July 13, 2016. Ralph P. Himmelsbach and Thomas K. Worcester, Norjak: The Investigation of D.B. Cooper, 1986. This week's lateral thinking puzzle was devised by Greg, who collected these corroborating links (warning -- these spoil the puzzle). You can listen using the player above, download this episode directly, or subscribe on iTunes or Google Play Music or via the RSS feed at

Welcome to the Futility Closet podcast, forgotten stories from the pages of history. Visit us online to sample more than 9,000 quirky curiosities, from baldness in trumpeters to a check made of steel. This is episode 126. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. In 1943, fed up with modernist poetry, two Australian army officers invented a fake poet and submitted a collection of deliberately senseless verses to a Melbourne arts magazine. To their delight, they were accepted,

and their author was hailed as one of the most remarkable and important poetic figures in the country. In today's show, we'll tell the story of the Urn Malley hoax, its perpetrators, and its surprising legacy in Australian literature. We'll also hear Radiohead mechanized and puzzle over a railroad standstill. Thanks to listener Ralph Ilcheff for suggesting this one. At the end of October 1943, Max Harris received a letter in the mail. Harris was the 22-year-old editor of Angry Penguins, a magazine of contemporary writing and art in Melbourne, Australia, and a champion of modernist poetry. The letter was from a woman named Ethel Malley. She wrote,

Dear Sir, When I was going through my brother's things after his death, I found some poetry he had written. I am no judge of it myself, but a friend who I showed it to thinks it is very good and told me it should be published. On his advice, I am sending you some of the poems for an opinion. And she enclosed some poems. Harris read them with increasing excitement and wrote later, At this stage I knew nothing about the author at all, but I was immediately impressed that here was a poet of tremendous power, working through a disciplined and restrained kind of statement into the deepest wells of human experience. A poet, moreover, with cool, strong, sinuous feeling for language. Here's one stanza from a poem called Culture as Exhibit.

Swamps, marshes, borrow pits, and other areas of stagnant water serve as breeding grounds. Now have I found you, my Anopheles. There is a meaning for the circumspect. Come, we will dance sedate quadrilles, a pallid polka, or a yelping shimmy over these sunken sodden breeding grounds. We will be wraiths and wreaths of tissue paper to clog the town council in their plans. Culture forsooth. Albert, get my gun. Albert, get my gun. That's what it says. I'll forget my gun.

That's what it says. Harris was very impressed with these and wrote back to Ethel saying he was very much impressed with the poems and would be pleased to publish the poems in the January issue of Angry Penguins. He sent a letter to John Reed, who was his co-editor, saying, Here's a pretty terrific discovery, and Reed agreed. What they didn't know is that the whole thing was a hoax, which had been concocted one Saturday afternoon earlier that month by Harold Stewart and James McCauley, two young on Australian servicemen and former school friends. Uh,

they were serving in the army at the time during the war, but both were trained poets. Both of them disliked modern poetry. Both hated the surrealist poetry championed by Harris, which they thought was pretentious nonsense. So sitting at their desks in the offices of the Victoria barracks in Melbourne, they decided to create what they called a literary experiment to see if this was all just become the emperor's new clothes and that even its adherents couldn't tell good from bad anymore. So they just started writing poems for a poet they invented just named Ernest Malley, just writing them out on army issue ruled pad.

And they used whatever books were in front of them that happened to be on their desks, including the concise Oxford Dictionary, a collection of Shakespeare's plays, a dictionary of quotations, and a rhyming dictionary. And they used these quite freely. In the poem I just read, the phrase, swamps, marches, borrow pits, and other areas of stagnant water serve as breeding grounds, was copied verbatim out of a U.S. Army report on mosquito control. So they wrote these poems, there are 17 of of them all together and added a pretentious preface and statement giving Malley this tragic biography. They said he died of Graves' disease at 25 years and four months of age, which is exactly the age that John Keats died, just trying to set him up as someone who Max Harris would

fall in love with, and also tried to set up this whole story so that a sleuth couldn't really trace it back to them. After the poems were written, Stuart typed them up and they aged them by rolling them in dust, standing wet cups of tea on them, and leaving them in the sun. They also put them in order. There were 17 of them, but they started with the most plausible one, and they got sillier and sillier as you went through the stack. Stewart said, by the time you got to things like, in the 25th year of my age, I find myself to be a dromedary, you have reached the comic. But Harris loved them and duly published them in the January issue of his magazine.

And when he did so, a literature professor at Adelaide University and journalist at Sydney's Sunday Sun newspaper began to investigate and found that Mallalley didn't seem to have existed. According to his biography, he'd lived this sort of quiet life either as an auto mechanic or an insurance salesman living in certain areas, and they tried to confirm any of this and couldn't find anyone who knew him or who could confirm he'd worked at these places. He just didn't seem to have any real existence. But Harris and Reed, the two editors of the magazine, insisted nonetheless that the poems were good. They said in a joint statement, whoever wrote the Earnmalley

poems was a fine poet. When we received them, we felt there were modes of expression and words reminiscent of other poets, for example of T.S. Eliot, but it is not surprising when the idioms of contemporary poets overlap. We were satisfied with the intrinsic merits of the verse. Eventually, they were traced to Macaulay and Stewart, and they just came clean and explained what they had done. This was all published in a story in the newspaper on June 25th. They wrote, For some years now we have observed with distaste the gradual decay of meaning and craftsmanship in poetry.

The distinctive feature of the fashion, it seemed to us, was that it rendered its devotees insensible of absurdity and incapable of ordinary discrimination. What we wished to find out was, can those who write and those who praise so lavishly this kind of writing tell the real product from consciously and deliberately concocted nonsense? They explained their whole composition process, saying they produced all of Earnmalley's tragic life work in one afternoon, basically an afternoon and evening when they had nothing else to do.

They wrote, our rules of composition were not difficult. One, there must be no coherent theme, at most only confused and inconsistent hints at a meaning held out as a bait to the reader. Two, no care was taken with verse technique, except occasionally to accentuate its general sloppiness by deliberate crudities. And three, in style, the poems were to imitate, not Mr. Harris in particular, but the whole literary fashion as we knew it from the works of Dylan Thomas, Henry Treese, and others. And of the fact that this whole thing had succeeded, they wrote,

It proves that a literary fashion can become so hypnotically powerful that it can suspend the operation of critical intelligence in quite a large number of people. This made a huge splash not just in Australia, but around the world. not just in Australia, but around the world. When it was exposed in the press in June 1944, it was front page news in the country and reported everywhere else, crowding out headline space, even during the invasion of Normandy and the liberation of France. It was a huge story at the time. New York Times headline said, Australian plaudits go to fictitious poet, drainage report gems culled in hoax called Tremendous. Time magazine called the hoax as fantastic as a duck-billed platypus. Newsweek called Earnmalley the epitome of Australia's striving for culture, and the New Yorker said that if it was taken seriously, it, quote,

spoils anyone for modern poetry for the rest of his life. And some contemporary critics agreed. H.M. Green, a historian of Australian literature, said the hoax was, quote, justified and timely as an attack upon a perversion of poetry that has spread to three continents and misled a number of talented young men, of whom Mr. Harris is an outstanding Australian example. the substantial correctness of their judgment, and some people began to agree with them. The critic Herbert Reid in London read that issue of Angry Penguins and showed it to T.S. Eliot, and word came back that Eliot was, quote, extremely interested, but that this was not for publication in any way. And Reid cabled to Harris later, I too would have been deceived by Earn Malley, but hoax or hoisted by own petard has touched off unconscious sources inspiration, work too sophisticated, but has elements genuine poetry. The idea here seems to be that because both Macaulay and Stewart were

trained poets, they couldn't help but produce somewhat finer work than they were intended. Like if you are trained with good technique in playing a musical instrument, you sort of lose the ability to play it badly even if you want to. You sort of forget how to do that. I've been reading a lot of G.K. Chesterton lately, and there's a quote of his in another context. He says, Leonardo da Vinci cannot draw as if he couldn't draw. Even if he tried, it will always be a strong parody of a weak thing. I think that's what the supporters of the poems are trying to say. The Australian poet A.D. Hope told the writer Michael Hayward, it shows the signs of somebody who'd been right in and out the other side and could use the language in that way. It's rather cleverly done. It's not simply

parodying. It's a parody of that kind of thing, but quite original in itself. That, of course, helped the thing to catch on. So Max Harris, the editor who they'd set out to catch, was pretty roundly humiliated by the whole affair, but I kind of like him in hindsight. He never fought back. He never tried to deny what was happening or to spin it didn't matter who had written it. Exactly. Yeah. And I mean, we should acknowledge he certainly would have saved face by saying that if he didn't truly believe it, but I do have the sense he really did think they were good poems. If all this weren't comical enough, the South Australian police impounded that issue on the grounds that the poems were obscene, which put Harris in the impossible position of trying to explain poetry that had been written

as deliberate nonsense and to try to insist that it hadn't been obscene. And insist that it's not obscene, right? If it was nonsense, then it's almost like an inkblot, right? Like you can just see into it whatever you think you see into it. Yeah, it almost tells you more about the South Australian police. This became a farce when the police detective didn't know the meanings of the words he claimed were obscene. At the trial, the detective, a man named Vogel, sang, he referred to a poem called Night Peace, which goes like this. Remember, this is intended to be completely nonsense. The swung torch scatters seeds in the umbraliferous dark, and a frog makes guttural comment on the naked and trespassing nymph of the lake. dark, and a frog makes guttural comment on the naked and trespassing nymph of the lake.

The symbols were evident, though on park gates the iron birds looked at disapproval with rusty invidious beaks. Among the water lilies a splash, white foam in the dark, and you lay sobbing then upon my trembling intuitive arm. The detective said, apparently someone is shining a torch in the dark visiting through park gates. To my mind they were going there for some disapproved motive. I have found that people who go into parks at night go there for immoral purposes. And Harris was reduced to fumblingly trying to explain that there was some meaning here and that it wasn't intended to be prurient in any way, which apparently satisfied them eventually. The detective said he also found the word incestuous indecent in a poem called Perspective Love Song, but later admitted, I don't know what incestuous means. I just think it sounds naughty. Yeah, so the whole

prosecution was kind of incompetent. In the end, Harris was told that he had far too great a fondness for sexual references and was fined five pounds in lieu of six weeks in prison. The outcome of all this gets increasingly interesting. Angry Penguins, the actual magazine, continued for two years after all this happened and produced only nine issues. But the tide began generally to turn, and more and more people began to praise these poems as legitimate poetry. Not as travesties, not as hilarious examples of bad writing, but as poems in themselves. Harris maintained his insistence that Malley's poems were works of genius, saying the myth is sometimes greater than its creator. And, as I say, more and more readers began to agree, to the extent that some people thought it was impossible for the two of them, Macaulay and Stewart, even to have produced 17

poems of such quality in a single afternoon. That's how quickly or completely things turned around. Altogether, in the 17 poems, there are 424 lines. If it took the writers 8 to 10 hours, as they claim, that's a line a minute. Fans of Mallet denied that this is even possible. In 1974, the artist Sidney Nolan said it would have taken Shakespeare a weekend. Stuart, one of the hoaxers, always said that it was not only possible, but could be repeated. He wrote, two army officers working in the same unit, both distinguished anthropologists, questioned the possibility of doing this in one afternoon, and so we set them the task of doing the same thing. And they had no difficulty whatever in producing an equal number of poems and lines of a very much higher Indeed, later the poet Elizabeth Lambert wrote, opening lines of that American drainage report.

It might easily be accidental, but on the other hand, the poor fellow might be a suppressed poet. Which sounds sarcastic, but in context, I think she was serious about that. It just says a lot about poetry. Maybe you can read poetry into all sorts of things. Apparently you can. Including drainage reports. Particularly since the 1970s,

the Malley poems have been celebrated as a successful example of surrealist poetry. All of Malley's poems have been included in the Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry, and not as an object of mockery, but as legitimate poems. In fact, eventually they eclipsed the other writings of Macaulay and Stuart. They both, as I said, were trained poets, and after they wore, they went on to quite long careers in poetry. Macaulay published several volumes of verse, founded the Literary and Cultural Journal Quadrant, and became professor of English at the University of Tasmania. Stewart settled in Japan where he translated traditional Japanese poetry, but neither of them ever produced poetry

that was as widely recognized as the Ern Malley poems, which they just dreamed up one Saturday afternoon just to sort of have a dig at someone. I suppose the most telling example is from the American poet John Ashbery, an immensely decorated and widely admired poet. He had noticed the Malley issue of Angry Penguins in the Grolier Bookshop in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1944. He said, I like the poems very much. They reminded me a little of my own early tortured experiments in surrealism, but they were much better. In fact, he used to teach creative writing, and in an exam for that course, he would print without attribution one of Jeffrey Hill's Mercy and Hymns, which are very dense, complex, very serious late modernist poems, and beside them a poem by Ern Malley, and just told his students, one of the two poems below is

by a highly respected contemporary poet, the other is a hoax originally published to spoof the obscurity of much modern poetry. Which do you think is which? Give your reasons. And Ashbery said his students rather enjoyed the exam. I think they are right about 50% of the time. That means they're wrong about 50% of the time, which is about what you'd expect from the toss of a coin. This episode is brought to you by our patrons and by Harry's. I've mentioned Harry's before. For years, I used an electric shaver until Harry's had me try their blades, and I'd forgotten how close a shave you can get with a good blade. And you can't beat the convenience.

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That's harrys.com, code CLOSET. Greg and I have definitely learned that people and place names can sometimes be pronounced rather differently than you would expect, and we now make a particular effort to try to get them right, but it turns out that I wasn't paying enough attention on how to pronounce computer names. In episode 124, I read an email from Chris Lear about making music using disk drives, and he very good-naturedly wrote to say that I'd pronounced his name exactly right, which he actually found a bit disappointing that I

hadn't managed to mess it up in some way, but that I had given an American pronunciation to the ZX spectrum, which sounded a bit strange to his British ears. So maybe that makes up some for getting his name right. You said ZX. Yes, that didn't occur to me to say anything other than ZX. But Chris's email did save me from making the same mistake twice. As John Costello wrote and said, the segment on floppy disk drive music reminded me of another video. This one was part of a contest by the band Radiohead to remix one of their songs. This entry played the song on an orchestra made up of a ZX Spectrum, a dot matrix printer, a scanner, and some hard drives. And we'll have a link to that whole video in the show notes for those who get into music produced by older technology, now that we know that there even is such a thing. Dan McIntyre wrote to say, Being a fan of odd music in pretty much any form, I enjoyed this week's feature on Mr. Solid Snake 745's Disc Drive Music.

feature on Mr. Solid Snake 745's Disc Drive Music. After listening to the podcast, I spent much of Monday revisiting some old favorites on YouTube, including music made with giant Tesla coils and Mario Paint Composer. And Dan says that his top favorite is a video of four custom-programmed Super Mario world levels masterfully choreographed with Queen's Don't Stop Me Now. Dan says that in the video, there are quite a few lyrical references and Easter eggs that were painstakingly included. The only one I'll spoil here is all four Marios collect exactly 100 coins, the last simultaneously. Just imagine how much time went into building this tribute. And we'll also have that link in the show notes for anyone who wants to see what you can accomplish when you apparently have quite a lot of free time and want to combine your love of Queen and Super Mario.

Also in episode 124, I mentioned how surprised we sometimes are to discover that there are songs written about some of the offbeat topics that we cover on the show. But apparently it's not just the stories that we cover on the show that get turned into songs. It's also lateral thinking puzzles. Listener Petr Smili from Czechia wrote to say, I love your podcast and it has helped me pass some of the more tedious days at work. Your last episode mentioning songs on strange topics finally pushed me to write with such a song I heard as a teenager. In the song by a Slovak punk band, one singer presents a strange sounding situation and the other is trying to

figure out what happened, asking only yes or no questions. Petr says they ask classical questions like, were other people involved, as well as unorthodox ones like, was he an idiot? And I have to say, after all the puzzles we've done, I don't think I've ever thought to ask, was he an idiot? That would be a great solution. That the person was just really, really doing something stupid. Petra says it might be easy too easy for you but if you want to try it in fewer questions than in the song here it is a naked guy lies in the middle of the sahara desert there are no footprints but a lot of clothes are scattered around and there is

one short match what happened there and greg and i both knew this puzzle which is a mild variation on a classic uh so we'll have a link to the video of the song in the show notes for anyone who desires to see a Slovak punk band performing a classical lateral thinking puzzle and who wouldn't want to see that, right? The whole song is in Slovak, but there is what Petter describes as an English Google translator-ish translation in the description for those who Slovak isn't up to the task, but who do want to see the answer to the puzzle. And although Petter did send some very helpful tips on how to try to pronounce the name of the band and the song, I in the end decided that my Slovak pronunciation wasn't really up to it. But I was amused that Google Translate gave me

Bright Noodles for the band's name and Logic Puzzle as the name of the song. There's got to be a story behind that song. I mean, why would you write a song about a puzzle like that unless something had happened? I have no idea. In episode 124, we told the story of D.B. Cooper, the hijacker who jumped out of an airliner with $200,000 in 1971 and has never been seen again. And a lot of listeners wrote in with the same theory about how he might have got away with this. Just to go over the details again, he hijacked the plane between Portland, Oregon and

Seattle. And then under his direction, the plane landed in Seattle, he released all the passengers and collected the ransom money and some parachutes and they took off again headed for Reno, Nevada. At that point, they were about 40 minutes in after takeoff. He told the lone remaining stewardess to go up into the cockpit with the flight crew, and so he was alone in the cabin from that point on happened instead is that he never jumped at all. He lowered the air stairs to create the impression that he must have jumped, but then just sat in the cabin and waited until they landed with the stairs down in Reno and then ran down the stairs and disappeared into the night, which I think is immensely clever. But looking into this, I think it appears that that couldn't have happened. It looks like, according to a report in the Reno Gazette-Journal,

there was actually a shortwave radio operator who overheard the conversation between a report in the Reno Gazette Journal, there was actually a shortwave radio operator who overheard the conversation between the plane and the Reno Tower that night. The pilot said, we will be landing with the air stairs down. We have not communicated with our passenger. They landed at exactly 11 p.m. Joe Martin, a retired Washoe County Sheriff's deputy, said, at this point, no one knew whether he was still on the plane. We all took up positions. I was at the north end of the runway. The plane went right over us and landed. That's when we found out he was gone. After landing the pilot radioed that the hijacker, quote, took leave of us somewhere between Reno and Seattle. And then law enforcement used police dogs to search the airport grounds,

and they also searched in a nearby Reno neighborhood and didn't find anything. Oh, so they actually took that into account themselves. Right. That's the thing they had thought of, which doesn't mean that he didn't still cleverly pull it off, but they were at least aware of that possibility. Ralph Himmelsbach, the FBI lead investigator, wrote in his 1986 book, Norjack, The possibility that Cooper had escaped from the aircraft as it rolled to a stop in Reno held little credence with law enforcement officers who had ringed the airport. Not only was the plane being observed by dozens of officers, but many hundreds more citizens who had heard news reports that the plane was going to land in reno even so investigators searched the field and surroundings thoroughly finding no one who could not account for his actions and no mail fitting the description of this worthy hijacker uh but it still does feel a bit like a magic trick he

he had planned everything so meticulously apparently up to the point of jumping that it seems kind of crazy you and i were talking about this before. Just to trust a luck after jumping, it seems like it has more of the feel of an illusion or something. In particular, listener Jim Ellis said one possibility is if he or a Confederate could have checked a crate or other container in the baggage compartment on that flight, then if that communicated with the passenger cabin, then Cooper could have used his time alone to make his way from the cabin into the badge compartment, hide himself in this crate, and then just wait for the search to be over and then just get delivered to his house or to the house of a confederate or something, ostensibly with

the parachute and the money. Now, presumably, if people are thinking of these things in just, you know, a few minutes, and presumably Cooper spent however long planning the whole thing out, then theoretically, he would have thought of these things too, but... He's never been found. Yeah. The only reason we think anything went wrong is that the money was never spent. So it seems like something went wrong somewhere. But...

I like the idea that he put himself in a crate in the baggage compartment. Maybe that's it. Thanks to everyone who writes in to us. We're sorry that we can't read every message on the show, but we do read every email we receive. If you have any questions or comments, you can reach us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. It's my turn to try to solve a lateral thinking puzzle, although I don't intend to do it in the style of a punk band. Ready?

Yeah. On October 27th, 1985, 45 Amtrak trains across the country went into a state of suspended animation for about an hour and then resumed their trips. For listeners who are outside the U.S., Amtrak is just the U.S. Passenger Railroad Service. The trains were in working order and loaded with passengers why were they stopped i'm gathering this actually happened you were so specific about the date yes okay is there something

important about that very specific date yes there is and what was the date again october 27th 1985 october 27th okay is there something important about the day of the month that it was? The specific date of the month? No, I don't think so. That it was October 27th as opposed to November 27th or October 23rd? I mean, I'm trying to understand what was important. Was the day of the week important? Yes, I don't want to mislead you.

Was the year important? I'm trying to figure out what's crucial here. No, the year wasn't important. Okay, but there's something important about the date, possibly about the day of the week, possibly about the date of the month. Was it important that it was October? I'm not sure I can answer that specific question okay all right um were these trains

all in the same geographical area no so they were in various places right across the country across the country um um okay did something else occur simultaneously on that date that is important. Yes. A natural phenomenon? No. A man-made phenomenon? I would say yes. A mishap? No. Something deliberately occurred on that date?

Yes. Okay. I mean, intentionally. And I'm going to assume that there's no malfeasance, that was, not that somebody sabotaged the system. That's right. Or that there was an intent to do illegal activity. Right, no, none of that. Okay, so something deliberately happened.

Were they switching over from one thing to another thing? Yes. In very broad terms, like something was being switched over? Yes, yes. Does it have to do with computers in any way? No. Does it have to do with current, electrical currents in any way?

No, no. Does it have to do with, like, what side of the road you drive on? No, Amtrak drive on one side. Something about the tracks. No. Okay, they were switching over. So they were switching over some kind of, would you say, system? Yes, I would.

Would you say they were switching some kind of equipment? No. System is closer. Yes. Okay. So Amtrak specifically was switching to some kind of new system? Not Amtrak specifically. Specifically.

Trains in general. Or even broader than trains than even broader than that okay so transportation in general even broader than that even broader than transportation in general and you said it has nothing to do with electricity though that's right uh and nothing to do with computers so there was some something to do with time yes the. The way that time is measured. I mean, the way that, like, oh, that's why the date is important. It has to do with places that had been observing daylight savings time

and no longer were, or the opposite. Yes, basically that's it. The Chicago Tribune reported, every October this procedure, followed by Amtrak since it began operations in 1971, creates a startling time warp as trains cross both time change in eastern, central, mountain, and Pacific time zones. In the spring, when time moves forward, the train can't catch up to the clock, said assistant conductor Al Naccarato. But in the fall, when time moves back, the train has to wait for the clock to catch up.

That's it in a nutshell. So they just stop the trains dead for an hour. And you just sit on the train. While the schedule catches back up to you. R. Clifford Black, Amtrak's manager of corporate communications in Washington, conceded that, quote, it's a rather confusing procedure unless you spend a lot of time pondering it, and not many people do. The people on board might think we're a little crazy, but the people on the platforms would be mighty angry if we didn't do it. Because they'd arrive at the station later and miss the train if they didn't do this.

I don't know. I'll put a link to this story in the show notes. Obviously, a lot of people on the trains were irate because they didn't know this was going to happen. And their train journeys took an hour longer than they had planned. It's not clear to me whether this is still happening. I looked this up on the system timetable for Amtrak for this year, 2016. And it says, Amtrak operates according to prevailing local time, either standard time or daylight saving time. At the spring time change, the second Sunday in March,

Amtrak trains traveling overnight will become one hour late and will attempt to make up the time. At the fall time change, the first Sunday in November, Amtrak trains traveling overnight will normally hold at the next station after the time change, then depart on time, which sounds like it's describing what happened back in 85 so i i guess i never traveled by train but if anyone knows more about that please let us know if trains or in your country if you're not in the u.s what happens to your trains at the stroke of the change from daylight saving to standard time great uh and if anybody has a puzzle they'd like to send in for us to use, please send it to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. If you've been enjoying our quirky stories and lateral thinking puzzles, punk style or otherwise,

then please check out the support us section of our website or our Patreon campaign at patreon.com slash futilitycloset to learn how you can help support the show so that we can keep making it if you're looking for more quirky curiosities check out the futility closet books on amazon or visit the website at futility closet dot com where you can sample more than 9 000 regardable scraps at the website you can also see the show notes for the podcast and listen to previous episodes 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 performed by Doug Ross. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.