Futility Closet - 133-Notes and Queries

Episode Date: December 12, 2016

In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll explore some more curiosities and unanswered questions from Greg's research, including a pilot who saved Buckingham Palace, a ghost who confronted Arthur Conan Doyle, what Mark Twain learned from a palm reader, and a bedeviling superfluity of Norwegians. We'll also discover a language used only by women and puzzle over a gift that's best given sparingly. Intro: Horatio Nelson's coffin was fashioned from the mast of a French flagship that he had defeated. In 1994 the city council of Green River, Wyoming, designated an airstrip south of town as an "intergalactic spaceport." Sources for our feature on notes and queries: The story of the Singapore tiger shooting appears in this history of the Raffles hotel. Neil Kagan's 2013 book The Untold Civil War alleges that the 15th Wisconsin Volunteer Regiment was so thick with Norwegians that it contained dozens of men named Ole Olson. The Norwegian American Genealogical Center says that the Roster of Wisconsin Volunteers shows that the 15th had 128 men whose first name was Ole, 75 men whose last name was Olson, Olsen, or Oleson, but just 15 whose names were Ole Olson, Ole Olsen, or Ole Oleson. The anecdote about the Gettysburg ordinance is mentioned in Michael Sanders' 2006 More Strange Tales of the Civil War, which cites Gregory A. Coco's A Strange and Blighted Land, Gettysburg: The Aftermath of a Battle, 1995. I found it in Allen C. Guelzo's Gettysburg: The Last Invasion, 2013. Frances Wilson describes Titanic survivor Lawrence Beesley's visit to the set of A Night to Remember in her 2011 book How to Survive the Titanic, Or The Sinking of J. Bruce Ismay. The observation about John Ford's eye for camerawork appears in Robert L. Carringer's 1996 book The Making of Citizen Kane. Dan Murphy's Puritan name is spelled out in Willard R. Espy's An Almanac of Words at Play, 1975. (I first wrote about unusual Puritan names in 2009.) The two long names cited by H.L. Mencken appear in his 1921 study The American Language. Douglas Hofstadter describes Stanford art professor Matt Kahn's confetti illusion in his foreword to Al Seckel's 2004 book Masters of Deception. Mark Twain wrote about Cheiro's prophecy in his notebook in 1903. His affidavit regarding the palmist's insight into his character is described in Sarah E. Chinn's 2000 book Technology and the Logic of American Racism. Three sources regarding Georges Simenon's prolificity: Stanley G. Eskin, Simenon, A Critical Biography, 1987. Henry Anatole Grunwald, "World's Most Prolific Novelist," Life 45:18 (Nov. 3, 1958). Aubrey Dillon-Malone, Stranger Than Fiction: A Book of Literary Lists, 1999. Also in Stranger Than Fiction, Dillon-Malone says that Anthony Trollope's quota of seven pages a day would sometimes carry him out of one book and into the next. Dillon-Malone says he's quoting Malcolm Cowley, who indeed says as much in this Paris Review interview, but I'd like to confirm the anecdote. British fighter pilot Ray Holmes' severing of a Dornier bomber's tail is depicted in this painting. In his 2010 book Royal Prayer: A Surprising History, David Baldwin says "the whole engagement was captured on film," but I've never been able to find it. The best I've found is the opening moments of this National Geographic documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lACDhxSLbYQ The anecdote about Arthur Conan Doyle in Africa is from Russell Miller's 2008 book The Adventures of Arthur Conan Doyle: A Biography. Among other places, the story about Kant's soul appears in Arthur Stone Dewing's 1903 Introduction to the History of Modern Philosophy. And Cornelia Parker's comment about her conversation with Noam Chomsky appears in "Apocalypse Later," Guardian, Feb. 11, 2008. Listener mail: Noah Shachtman, "They Cracked This 250-Year-Old Code, and Found a Secret Society Inside," Wired, Nov. 16, 2012. Wikipedia, "Copiale cipher" (accessed Dec. 8, 2016). "Scientists Crack Mysterious 'Copiale Cipher,'" Guardian, Oct. 26, 2011. Jon Watts, "The Forbidden Tongue," Guardian, Sept. 23, 2005. Wikipedia, "Nüshu script" (accessed Dec. 8, 2016). David Kahn, The Codebreakers, 1967. This week's lateral thinking puzzle is from Paul Sloane and Des MacHale's 2014 book Remarkable Lateral Thinking Puzzles. 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 http://feedpress.me/futilitycloset. Please consider becoming a patron of Futility Closet -- on our Patreon page you can pledge any amount per episode, and we've set up some rewards to help thank you for your support. You can also make a one-time donation on the Support Us page 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 the Futility Closet podcast, forgotten stories from the pages of history. Visit us online to sample more than 9,000 quirky curiosities from Horatio Nelson's coffin to a Wyoming spaceport. This is episode 133. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. In today's show, we'll explore some more curiosities and unanswered questions from Greg's research, including a pilot who saved Buckingham Palace, a ghost who confronted Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,

what Mark Twain learned from a palm reader, and a bedeviling superfluity of Norwegians. We'll also discover a language used only by women, and puzzle over a gift that's best given sparingly. of Norwegians. We'll also discover a language used only by women, and puzzle over a gift that's best given sparingly. Okay, notes and queries. You've heard me do this before. These are just miscellaneous notes and questions from my research. I'll put all the reference for this stuff in the show notes, and if you can shed any light on any of this, please write to me at podcast at futilitycloset.com. Here we go. The last tiger in Singapore was shot under a billiard table, or so many people say. I've seen this in several sources, but none that I would call wholly reliable. Apparently it happened at the Raffles Hotel. Here's the hotel's account. In 1902, a wild

tiger managed to find its way into the billiard room of the hotel, where it hid underneath one of the billiard tables. According to local legend, this wild animal was the last tiger to be shot in Singapore after a local man from the nearby Raffles Institution was called upon to remove the tiger. After firing five shots into the darkened room, he managed to hit the tiger square between the eyes. It's certainly vivid. If you have any better source or know more about it, please let me know. Two items about the Civil War. Please let me know. Two items about the Civil War.

Neil Kagan's 2013 book, The Untold Civil War, says that the 15th Wisconsin Volunteer Regiment contained so many Norwegians that it had dozens of men named Ulle Olsen. Kagan writes, the perplexed colonel finally brought order out of chaos by officially numbering each man. I looked in trying to confirm this. The Norwegian American Genealogical Center looked this up in the roster of Wisconsin volunteers and found that the regiment had 128 men whose first name was Ulle, 75 men whose last name was Olsen, Olsen, or Olsen, but just 15 whose names were Ulle Olsen, Ulle Olsen, or Ulle Olsen. That's still a lot, I think. That's still a lot.

That's 15 men in the same regiment, which is enough to cause a lot of confusion, I should think. I don't know if they were numbered. Also, I don't know if—it makes me wonder now how many Ula Olesons are in Norway today. It just seems like an awful lot of people in one regiment in Wisconsin. Maybe one of our Norwegian listeners can look into that. Yeah. The other Civil War item I have concerns the Battle of Gettysburg. According to several sources, in the thick of the fighting when there was mayhem on every side, one colonel drew the attention of Union General Otis Howard to a sign posted nearby. It said, driving, riding, and shooting on these grounds strictly prohibited. Any person violating this ordinance will be punished by fine and imprisonment.

The colonel said that Howard would get into trouble after the battle for violating this order, but then a Confederate shell knocked it into a thousand pieces, and Howard said it seemed to him that the ordinance had been pretty effectively rescinded. That's such a great story that it makes me wonder whether it's true. I'll put the sources I found it in in the show notes, but if anyone knows more about it, please let me know. Here's just a random note. During the filming of the 1958 film A Night to Remember, which is about the sinking of the Titanic, the set was visited by Lawrence Beasley, who was one of the actual survivors of the real Titanic. Beasley wanted to appear in the film and go down with the ship this time. The director, Roy Ward Baker, spotted him and kicked him out as his presence would have violated union rules. One author writes, and so for the second time in his life, Lawrence Beasley found himself leaving the Titanic just before it went down. Another one related to filmmaking. In his 1996 book, The Making of Citizen Kane, Robert L. Carringer writes, It is said that when John Ford was making documentaries for the government in World War II, he could usually tell from the images themselves which cameraman had shot what footage.

Just a mark of his skill as a filmmaker that he didn't have to ask which cameraman had shot. He could just go by their styles and just the quality of their work. He knew them well enough to be able to distinguish that just by looking at their work, which I thought was impressive if it's true. That is. Long names. Some Puritans in the 16th century thought common names were too worldly and instead named their children with religious slogans. I've written about this a bit in the past. In the late 17th century, a member of the British Parliament was named Praise God Barebone. With brothers and sisters named Fear God Barebone,

Jesus Christ came into the world to save Barebone, and if Christ had not died for thee, thou hadst been damned, Barebone. Those are all hyphenated. I wonder what you were called among your family and friends. Yeah. Where nowadays you have to fill out forms. There's no way you're going to fit that name. Willard R. Espy's Almanac of Words at Play says that this practice continued actually into the 19th century.

He says a Texas farmer born in 1883 was christened Daniel's Wisdom May I Know, Stephen's Faith and Spirit Choose, John's Divine Communion Seal, Moses' Meekness, Joshua's Zeal, Win the Day, and Conquer All Murphy. That's his whole name. Yes. It's all hyphenated. I wonder what his birth certificate looked like. He was known as Dan for short. Dan Murphy. Speaking of long names, in his 1921 study of the American language, H.L. Mencken notes two long names. The first is a 1901 baptism record in Ponca City, Oklahoma, for a man whose name was Loyal Lodge No. 296, Knights of Pythias, Ponca City, Oklahoma Territory, Smith. And a

second one, he found a 1949 interview with a man in upstate New York whose name was John Hodge, Opera House, Centennial, Gargling Oil, Samuel J. Tilden, 10 Brink. He doesn't say anything more about them, but those are supposedly real names of actual people. Here's just a query, I guess. Al Seckles' 2004 book, Masters of Deception, is about Escher, Dali, and optical illusion in art. The foreword for that book was written by Douglas Hofstadter, and he wrote this intriguing paragraph. One of my favorite illusions ever was a photograph taken by Matt Kahn, a professor in the Stanford Art Department. One day, walking in Florence right after a rainstorm,

he saw a manhole cover filled with colorful confetti. Ever ready with his camera, Matt pointed it down, snapped the image, and a year or two later, in a slideshow for a group of Stanford students one evening, he asked us, what is this image of? We all were convinced, and many of us said, it's a stained glass window in some French cathedral, isn't it? And then he told us what it was, and we couldn't believe our brains. Our eyes told us, though, that he was certainly right. This is aesthetics. This is magic. This is what art is all about. Unfortunately, in that book,

Masters of Deception, Hofstadter gives that verbal description but doesn't include an image of the art, and I've always wondered what it looks like. Unfortunately, Matt Kahn, the professor, died in 2013, so we can't ask him. I'm just helplessly offering this question out there. It's an interesting curiosity, and I wonder if anyone knows any more about it, because I'd love to see that image.

Mark Twain, in 1895, visited the Irish astrologer William John Warner, who was popularly known as Chiro. He predicted that in Mark Twain's 68th year, which would have been 1903, he would become suddenly rich. Twain must have been glad to hear that as he was $94,000 in debt at the time. Two years later, Chiro repeated the prediction and said that the riches would come from a quite unexpected source. And in fact, the prophecy came true on October 22, 1903, with just a month and nine days to spare, when Twain signed a contract with Harper guaranteeing him $25,000 a year for five years.

And in fact, the books under that contract actually always yielded more than that. That's interesting in itself, but that's actually not why I bring this up. Mark Twain was actually rather hard-headed about these things, and had visited Chiro originally as a skeptic, but he left this message in the Visitor's Book. Chiro has exposed my character to me with humiliating accuracy. I ought not to confess this accuracy. Still, I am moved to do so. Mark Twain.

That doesn't seem to be a joke and it doesn't seem to refer to the prophecy because the prophecy was just that he'd come into a lot of money and that's no reflection on his character. So I don't know quite what he's referring to there. I don't know if anyone else does. Possibly it was just some private matter between the two of them, but I just wondered if anyone knows anything more about that. I was going to write

up a post for Futility Closet on the fantastically prolific Belgian novelist Georges Simonon, but every resource I can find gives different accounts of his abilities, so it's hard to fact-check anything. He was ludicrously prolific, but I wanted to find some concrete set of facts that I could confirm

and couldn't wind up doing that, so I just gave up on the project. Anyway, for what it's worth, here are my accumulated notes. Altogether, he wrote 500 novels as well as 1,000 stories and 15 volumes of autobiography. He generally wrote a 200-page novel in 11 days, writing a chapter a day every day. His normal pace was to begin typing at six in the morning. He was able to pick up where he had left off automatically, effortlessly, without notes, and without rereading the last paragraphs of the preceding day. He said, I stopped around noon, took a short nap, then worked again for several hours until exhaustion. I could manage thus up to 80 typewritten pages in a day. If he was interrupted for 48 hours, he just discarded the whole project because he conducted it mostly in his memory.

At the peak of his productivity, he turned out a novel a month. His first book was completed in 10 days, and he once wrote a full novel in just 25 hours. Related to this, Anthony Trollope became one of the world's most prolific novelists while holding down a full-time career working in the post office. He did that by getting up at 5.30 every morning and just forcing himself to work three hours. He said he didn't believe in the muse or in inspiration. He just forced himself to do the work, and apparently for him that worked. In his 2000 book Stranger Than Fiction, Aubrey Dylan Malone quotes Malcolm Cowley saying that Trollope was so strict about his routine of turning out exactly seven pages per day that if he finished a novel, he'd just keep going, writing the title of a brand new book

and continuing until he completed his seven pages. Malcolm Cowley did indeed say this. I found it in an interview he did with the Paris Review, but I haven't been able to confirm it elsewhere, and I wondered whether anyone else knows about it. On the one hand, it seems crazy. On the other hand, Trollope was just really admirably self-disciplined, and it's not impossible, I think. I just haven't been able to find that anywhere else. Here's a dramatic one. During the Battle of Britain, a British fighter pilot named Ray Holmes was credited with saving Buckingham Palace. In September 1940, he was flying over London when he spotted a German bomber approaching the center of the city. His machine guns weren't working, so he did something fantastically brave. He flew laterally at it and cut off its tail with his wing. The bomber is much bigger than his own fighter, but he just cut, basically drove his wing right through the tail, which worked. They cut it off. The bomber crashed near a Victoria tube station, and Holmes bailed out and survived, and in fact lived to be

90 years old. He died just in 2005. I raise this here because in his 2010 book, Royal Prayer, A Surprising History, David Baldwin says the whole engagement was captured on film. I found a painting of it, but I've never been able to find any footage of the event. The best I've been able to find is I think

there's some footage just of the plane just reaching the ground, but I don't know if there's anything more than that, not that I've been able to find.

What camera would have caught it? I mean, who would have been filming it? I don't know. There was some filming from the ground

of these fights over London. Wow. I guess it would have been just pure happenstance because it just happened in a few seconds and there was no planning it. That would be really dramatic to see. But as I say, Baldwin says that the whole thing was caught in it. If it exists, I'd love to be able to see that.

I've never been able to find it. Arthur Conan Doyle had a lifelong interest in the supernatural and in spiritualism. In the 1920s, he was touring Africa and met with an embarrassing incident. This is from Russell Miller's 2008 biography of Doyle. A tour of mixed success concluded with an embarrassing incident during Conan Doyle's last lecture in Nairobi when he showed a photograph taken of a ghost at a country house in Somerset, and the ghost turned out to be sitting in the audience. Arthur Spencer Palmer, a British dental surgeon working in Nairobi,

was astonished to see a picture of himself covered in a gauze sheet flashed up on the screen as one of the spirit photographs. He immediately stood up and called out, I am that ghost. Lady Conan Doyle, sitting on the stage with her husband, could hardly conceal her fury at this undignified interruption, but Conan Doyle invited Spencer Palmer onto the platform. He, meaning the surgeon, explained precisely how, where, and when it had been taken by his brother years earlier as a student prank. explained precisely how, where, and when it had been taken by his brother years earlier as a student prank. And since in the picture the dentist's features were discernible under the sheet, Conan Doyle had little choice but to accept it was fake and promised to withdraw it. He would later complain bitterly about psychic research being hampered by what he called irresponsible buffoonery,

perhaps because of the extensive and inconvenient publicity such an incident generated. I want to see the photo. It wouldn't be surprising if that had disappeared as well, but it's just one more thing I've always been hunting for and never been able to find. And then two just last little items to finish here. In 1804, when news of Immanuel Kant's death spread over Königsberg, a soldier pointed to a small cloud in the sky and said, behold, that is Kant's soul flying heavenward. I've always liked that. And in 2007, the English artist Cornelia Parker recorded an hour long conversation with Noam Chomsky, the MIT linguist, for a film that she called Chomsky

in Abstract. She was going to conduct this conversation and just offer that itself as a piece of art. She later wrote, what was the most important thing I learned from Chomsky? That capitalism compels us to work ourselves and our planet to death in order to stuff our houses with things we don't need, which is both bleak and true, I think. Anyway, I'll put the notes and sources for all of this stuff in the show notes, and if anyone has anything to add or contribute, please write to me at podcast at futilitycloset.com. for anyone who is still trying to figure out their holiday gift shopping for this year or who is looking for a little december pick-me-up for themselves we'd like to remind you that there are two futility closet books both books have hundreds of short bites of mental candy entertaining oddities quirky inventions intriguing quotes and quotes, and brain-teasing puzzles.

Perfect for anyone who would like to learn about ironic names for law firms or a baby carriage modeled after a tank. Look for them on Amazon and see why other readers have called them a wonderful collection of fascinating nonsense and full of wonderful discoveries for the curious mind. In episode 129, Greg told us about the Voynich Manuscript, a very old text that scholars had been unsuccessfully trying to decode for more than 100 years. Katerina Moberg wrote, This week you talked about the Voynich manuscript, and that got me thinking about something I heard some years ago.

In 2011, a couple of scientists from Uppsala Universitet in Sweden, together with a scientist from the University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute, were able to decode the Copiala cipher. The Copiala cipher is a 260-year-old manuscript of 105 handwritten pages. They discovered that the manuscript was written in German and created by a secret society called the High Enlightened Oculist Order of Wolfenbudel. And as Katerina indicated, this was a very large text consisting of about 75,000 handwritten characters in a perplexing mix of

upper and lowercase Roman letters, along with a large assortment of unknown symbols. It turned out that the text dates from the 1730s and describes rituals from a secret society of oculus who were fascinated with eyes and viewed sight as a metaphor for knowledge. Part of their initiation ceremony involved asking initiates to read a blank sheet of paper, wiping their eyes with a cloth, and plucking out hair from their eyebrows. These types of secret societies were actually quite common in the 18th and 19th centuries when authoritarian laws of church and state made it illegal to discuss certain types of ideas such as maybe democracy or even to discuss different scientific theories. So for example, the Copiala text contains a call for revolt against

the tyrannical three-headed monster who deprives man of his natural freedom. But because these types of societies needed to meet and discuss in secret, little tends to actually be known about them and many of their encrypted documents still remain encrypted. It was actually a certain amount of serendipity that allowed the decoding of the Copiala cipher. Photographed copies of 100 pages of the Copiala text were given to Christiana Schaefer as a bit of a joke gift when she left Germany to start a job in the linguistics department at Uppsala University. Schaefer found herself unable to even catalog the many different symbols in the manuscript, and she gave up on it until 13 years later in 2011. She attended a conference at Uppsala on

computational linguistics. The featured speaker was Kevin Knight from the University of Southern California on his use of algorithms to automatically translate one language into another. For example, trying to treat Russian as if it were coded English. Knight mentioned that the algorithm could also be used to help break codes and generally the longer the cipher, the better. Knight told the audience, if you've got a long coded text to share, let me know. And afterwards, Schaefer went up to him and basically said, hmm, funny you should mention that. Knight took on the challenge, which proved to be considerable. It took him two weeks just to transcribe the symbols in the text into something that he could enter into a computer. And then it took hundreds of hours for the algorithm to

compare the text to 80 different languages. And it ended up showing a slight preference that the manuscript's original language might have been German. Even with the algorithm, cracking the code required a fair amount of human creativity, guesswork, and research. And for anyone who is interested, there is a rather detailed article about just how Schaeffer and Knight worked to finally manage to do it in Wired, and we'll have a link to that in the show notes. That's really impressive that you said it was 260 years old, and now it's just at the limit of our ability to crack that code. Right, and I mean, people had been trying off and on, you know, right, and it was,

right, exactly the way you say it, just at the ability, because they really did need a certain amount of just intuition and guesswork and let's try this and, you know, consider that kind of thing. Katerina said, I find it fascinating that there are still so many mysteries left that we still haven't been able to solve with all our technology. And after I read about how very much work went into cracking the Copialli cipher, I can better understand why that would be. Also on the topic of the Voynich manuscript, David Weitsch wrote, I wanted to mention my favorite theory I've heard about the Voynich manuscript since I started reading about it

after your episode on it. There was a script slash language used exclusively among Chinese women from the mid 1600s to the early 1900s called Nushu. It bears a resemblance to the traditional Chinese script Hanzi. Interestingly, it has nearly died out of use, but a recent documentary about it has inspired some women to begin learning it again. As the Voynich manuscript script is also claimed to have structures similar to other language styles, and many if not most of the pages of the sections claimed to be concerned with biology feature pools of green liquid filled with naked women, I like the idea that it is a book written exclusively for women in a language men would not be able to understand. No proof to support it, but there's very little to support any of the other theories, so I'm going with the most entertaining, in my opinion. So yeah, sure, if there are competing theories on something and not much evidence to judge between them, why not go with the most entertaining one, right? Sure. But actually, I found the whole subject of Nushu to be really interesting.

Nushu means women's writings, and as far as it is known, it is the only language that seems to have been used solely by women. Though, for all we know, if we do finally crack the Voynich manuscript, maybe that'll be the second one. Yeah. Nushu seems to have been used exclusively in one area of the Hunan province in southern China So historically females did not have access to formal education in China And Nushu seems to be something that was passed down from mother to daughter at home

It's not known how or exactly when it was developed But the Guardian says that theories range from its being developed by an emperor's concubine To its being a remnant of a very old language that died out elsewhere when the first emperor of China decreed the use of one standardized script as a means of unifying the country in the third century BCE. Men who used an alternative script risked being put to death, but women would not have been considered important enough to have worried about what they were doing. So they maybe adopted it for themselves. Yeah, yeah, right. So they just kept using perhaps an old form of the language that if men were to use it,

they would have been put to death, but the women just kept using it. Women often used Nushu to express their frustration or resignation with their being required to marry, often in arranged marriages in which they had little or no say. Women exchanged writings and poems on these themes with their so-called sworn sisters, and the Telegraph says, The saddest and most famous form of new shoe literature is the Third Day Book, a lament for the loss of a sister to marriage. These books, presented to brides three days after their wedding, also contain space at the back to be used as a diary. Wives considered these so

precious that they had them buried or burned with them when they died so they could take the new shoe from their sworn sisters to the next world. There's been a growing interest in new shoe among both academics and tourists, which has created a financial incentive for more women to learn it and to create new works written in it. So in an interesting twist, new shoe is now creating a way for some women to earn money and gain more financial independence as the language is still only taught to and used by women. That's fascinating. Yeah, it actually sheds a lot of light into like traditional Chinese culture, just even in learning about this language. In episode 130, I talked about Operation Unthinkable, a secret plan of Winston Churchill's to combine British, American, Polish, and German troops to launch a surprise attack on the Soviets during World War II.

Moritz Stocker wrote, hey there, Mr. and Mrs. Closet. I just listened to episode 130 today, heard you mentioning Operation Unthinkable and wondering who came up with that name. I heard you mentioning Operation Unthinkable and wondering who came up with that name. Now, I'm just reading the legendary book The Code Breakers by David Kahn, the reference on the history of cryptology. And in Chapter 15, he pretty much answers that exact question. And Moritz, who let me know that his name is actually pronounced Bolivian Axolotl, but I'm going with Moritz, very helpfully sent a file with the relevant section of Kahn's book. words. Very helpfully sent a file with the relevant section of Kahn's book. Kahn says that one of the characteristic features of World War II was the extensive use of code names for important

operations. And Kahn notes that Winston Churchill himself wrote a memorandum on the choosing of appropriate words for code names on August 8th, 1943. And it reads in part, I have crossed out on the attached paper many unsuitable names, operations in which large numbers of men may And it reads in part, such as Wobitide, Massacre, Jumble, Trouble, Fidget, Flimsy, Pathetic, and Jaundice. They ought not to be names of a frivolous character, such as Bunny Hug, Billingsgate, Aperteef, and Ballyhoo. They should not be ordinary words often used in other connections, such as Flood, Smooth, Sudden, Supreme, Full Force, and Full Speed. Names of living people, ministers, or commanders should be avoided. After all, the world is wide, and intelligent thought will readily supply an unlimited number of well-sounding names

which do not suggest the character of the operation or disparage it in any way, and do not enable some widow or mother to say that her son was killed in an operation called Bunny Hug or Ballyhoo. And Churchill ended with, Care should be taken in all this process and efficient and a successful administration manifests itself equally in small as in great matters. That's a good advice. We don't,

Americans don't seem to follow that anymore. If we ever did that, it's, we have things like operation American freedom, you know, things where it's pretty transparent what we're intending to do with them. That's true, but we don't use like bunny hug. Yeah.

So all those are real examples? He said he crossed them out. So someone had proposed an Operation Flimsy? That I don't know. He was giving examples of what he thought we shouldn't use. But yes, I don't know for sure that anybody actually proposed an Operation Bunny Hug or Jaundice. Kahn felt that during the war, the Americans had demonstrated a similar sensibility to Churchill's

when they codenamed what he called the crowning operations of the Pacific War, the invasion of Japan, Coronet and Olympic. But he believed that Churchill came up with the greatest codename of the war for the greatest operation of the war, that of Operation Overlord for the Battle of Normandy, which Kahn felt conveyed an appropriate sense of majesty, vengeance, and crushing power. So thanks so much to everyone who writes in to us. We feel bad that we're not always able to reply to everyone individually due to the amount of email that we sometimes get, but we really do appreciate hearing what you have to say.

And so if you have something to say, please send it to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. It's Greg's turn to try to solve a lateral thinking puzzle. I am going to present him with a strange sounding situation and he has to work out what's actually going on, asking only yes or no questions. This puzzle comes from Paul Sloan and Des McHale's Remarkable Lateral Thinking Puzzles. Give a man one and he will thank you for a long time. Give him two and he will hate you,

but maybe not for long. What are we talking about? He will, what was it? He'll thank you for a long time? Yes. Give a man one and he will thank you for a long time. Give him two and he'll hate you. And he will hate you, but maybe not for long. All right. By one and two, are you referring to quantities of some item? Yes. So one beehive or two beehives? Something along those lines.

Something like that. It's not some trick with how that's phrased. Okay. Give a man one and he'll thank you. Correct. Okay. Give a man one heel. Thank you for a long time. Give a man one. Okay. What do you give someone that they hate?

I keep thinking of like some, is it, would you call this, you said he might hate you, but what was the end of that? But not, but maybe not for long. Give him an N2. And he'll hate you for it, but maybe not for long. I don't even know how to approach this. Okay, will he thank you because... Give him an N1.

Is this... Okay, so it's an object. It's noun some item isn't it we're referring to yes is it a tangible thing yes a lot like an insult or a correct a tangible thing that you could touch um give him one is it is it valuable i mean is that why he would thank me it's because i've given him something well it's something he value, but it's not what you would normally call valuable. But I don't want to mislead you either way, depending what you mean by valuable. Do you mean worth a lot of money valuable?

Yeah, as opposed to you removing something that was troubling him, and he's thanking you for that. Oh, no, you're giving him something that he would want. Okay. I would work on the why won't he hate you for very long. He might hate you,

but not for very long. He might hate you. I mean, he will hate you, but maybe not for very long. Give him two. That's why I'm hanging on that. Like if you, he might hate you

because you've caused him momentary pain, but then after the pain wears off. Yeah, it's not that. It's not that. It's not that at all. Okay. He might hate you if you give him two. But maybe not for very long.

Is it specifically two if you give him three of these things? Should we go off down that? No, it's one and two. Oh, really? Yes. Specifically? Specifically. That's even weirder.

Give him two. I'm sure this is, I can already tell it it's gonna be obvious once i figure it out give him two and he'll hate you he'll hate you yeah but not for long okay but maybe not for very long maybe not for very long if so is that because he'll come to thank me as he would with the... No. No, those are two different things. Definitely not.

So a man, if you give him one, he's going to appreciate it. He'll find it valuable. He'll be appreciative and grateful. But if you give him two, he is not going to feel that way ever. Does that have to be a man? No. That's just how they phrased it. Okay, so having two of these things

causes some sort of trouble for the man. Yes. But not physical pain. Correct. Causes more than trouble. Are the things living? No. And they're tangible things

that are valuable. But if you have two of them... This is going to apply to somebody who's in a particular situation, not just people in general. Is the occupation of the person important? No. Particular situation. Yeah, it wouldn't just apply to anybody on the street.

Is he in some extremity? Yes. In danger? Yes. Give him two. Yes. So give him one that's like a he in some extremity? Yes. In danger? Yes. Give him two. Yes. So give him one that's like a life preserver or something? Yes. Is that what it is? Not exactly. Okay.

You give him, he's in trouble. Yes. And you're giving him something. Yes. And he'll thank you if you give him one of these. Yes. Because that would be helpful and valuable to him. If you say he'll hate you but maybe not for very long, is that because he dies? Yes. Because he may die, yes.

So that's why he's not going to hate you for very long. Okay. Lifesaver, is it something like that? Yes. Like some sort of rescue? Yes. Why would you give someone two? Is it medication of some kind?

No. Or connected with medicine? No. You're closer with the life preserver, like a lifesaver. I want to say like a parachute or something, but he wouldn't curse you for giving him two of those. Right, right. But I mean, it's along these kinds of lines. So he's in some sort of extremity, and if you give him one, that's going to save him.

But if you give him two, it's not. It'll doom him. Yeah. Okay, let me try to puzzle out what. Yeah. It's an emergency, like a fire, he's fallen out of a plane or something. An emergency like that. Is it either of those two things?

No. So his location is important? Yes. Is he in water? Yes. He's in water, is he drowning? Yes. Give him one of these things...

Yes. ...and he'll thank you. Yes. So that's why a life preserver is the closest you've been, although two life preservers would still be helpful. Two. Do I need to know more than that just that he's drowning? Yes, he's drowning.

And let's say you're not. You're somewhere else where you can throw him things that might help him or not. Well, a rope wouldn't hurt him. Okay, a rope, but specifically, what is he going to want? Does he want a whole rope? Oh, the ends of a rope. That's right. Throw him one end of a rope and he'll thank you.

Throw him both ends of the rope, not so much. Or maybe not for very long. That's good. If anybody has a puzzle they'd like to send in for us to try, fatal or otherwise, you can send it to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. Futility Closet is supported primarily by our wonderful patrons. While we do sometimes have some advertising on the show, it doesn't cover the big commitment of time that it takes to make the podcast each week. If you would like to join our Patreon campaign to help keep us going and get access to bonus content, please go to patreon.com

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