Futility Closet - 137-The Mystery of Fiona Macleod

Episode Date: January 16, 2017

When the Scottish writer William Sharp died in 1905, his wife revealed a surprising secret: For 10 years he had kept up a second career as a reclusive novelist named Fiona Macleod, carrying on correspondences and writing works in two distinctly different styles. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll explore Sharp's curious relationship with his feminine alter ego, whose sporadic appearances perplexed even him. We'll also hunt tigers in Singapore and puzzle over a surprisingly unsuccessful bank robber. Intro: In 1904 Mrs. Membury, of Hyde Corner, Bridport, Dorset, set out to make a snake of stamps. In 1996, mathematician Michael J. Bradley noticed that his son's Little League rulebook specified a geometrically impossible home plate. Sources for our feature on Fiona Macleod: Flavia Alaya, William Sharp -- “Fiona Macleod,” 1855-1905, 1970. Terry L. Meyers, The Sexual Tensions of William Sharp, 1996. John Sutherland, Curiosities of Literature, 2013. "Sharp's Death Solves a Literary Mystery," New York Times, Dec. 15, 1905. Emmeline Pethick Lawrence, "A Man With Two Souls," Votes for Women, Jan. 6, 1911. "The Past Year's Literary Output," Sydney Morning Herald, Feb. 16, 1901. "Fiona Macleod," Athenaeum 3733 (May 13, 1899), 596. "Fiona Macleod," The Academy, May 15, 1897, 525-526. Georgiana Goddard King, "Fiona Macleod," Modern Language Notes 33:6 (June 1918), 352-356. Alfred Noyes, "Fiona Macleod," Fortnightly Review 79:469 (January 1906), 163. "Fiona Macleod," The Academy, Dec. 16, 1905, 1312-1313. Ethel Rolt-Wheeler, "Fiona Macleod -- The Woman," Fortnightly Review 106:635 (November 1919), 780-790. Frank Rinder, "William Sharp -- 'Fiona Macleod,'" Art Journal, February 1906, 44-45. "Miss Fiona Macleod," The Sketch 23:296 (Sept. 28, 1898), 430. "Fiona Macleod," Vogue 13:13 (March 30, 1899), 206. Catharine A. Janvier, "Fiona Macleod and Her Creator William Sharp," North American Review 184:612 (April 5, 1907), 718-732. William Sharp "Fiona Macleod" Archive, Institute of English Studies, University of London. James Norman Hall, Oh Millersville!, 1940. Edward Brunner, "'Writing Another Kind of Poetry': James Norman Hall as 'Fern Gravel' in Oh Millersville!", Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies 8/9 (Spring 2006), 44-59. Listener mail: Cara Giaimo, "How Millions of Secret Silk Maps Helped POWs Escape Their Captors in WWII," Atlas Obscura, Dec. 20, 2016. "A Tiger in Town," Straits Times, Aug. 13, 1902. "Notes of the Day," Straits Times, Oct. 27, 1930. Tom Standage, A History of the World in Six Glasses, 2010. Mark Pendergrast, Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World, 2010. This week's lateral thinking puzzle was contributed by listener Davide Tassinari, who sent this corroborating link (warning -- this spoils 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 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 a snake made of postage stamps to an impossible home plate. This is episode 137. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. When the Scottish writer William Sharpe died in 1905, his wife revealed a surprising secret. For 10 years, he had kept up a second career as a reclusive novelist named Fiona MacLeod, carrying on correspondences and

writing works in two distinctly different styles. In today's show, we'll explore Sharpe's curious relationship with his feminine alter ego, whose sporadic appearances perplexed even him. We'll also hunt tigers in Singapore and puzzle over a surprisingly unsuccessful bank robber. Just a reminder, Futility Closet takes us many hours a week to research, write, and produce, and this wouldn't be possible without the support of our wonderful listeners. If you would like to help support the show, please check out the Support Us section of the website, or our Patreon page at patreon.com slash futilitycloset.

And thanks so much to everyone who helps keep Futility Closet going. In the late 19th century, a literary movement evolved called the Celtic Revival. It revolved around Celtic legends, folklore, and mythology. One of the foremost Scottish writers in this movement was a woman named Fiona MacLeod, a poet and novelist who developed a large following in Britain and America. All the leading writers admired her. Yeats thought she had in her hands the keys of those gates of the primeval world which shut behind more successful races when they plunged into material progress.

But for such a great literary celebrity, MacLeod was strangely reclusive. Interviewers who called at her residence in Edinburgh were told that Miss MacLeod was out. She claimed to have drawn great inspiration from the Scottish island of Iona, but no one there remembered her visits. Indeed, almost nothing was known about her. Supposedly, she had been born in the southern Hebrides, and apart from brief sojourns to Italy and France, she had never been away from Scotland. Her cousin, the novelist and critic William Sharp, said she was the wife of a secretive, older, rich Scottish laird. Sharp helped her to publish her writings, but said that he respected

her privacy and rarely knew where she was. She was said to spend much of her time sailing with her family among the Hebrides. As her fame grew, readers began to speculate as to whether Fiona MacLeod was a pseudonym. The Sydney Morning Herald wrote that, By common consent, the writer is a woman. It's said she has displayed a wonderful imaginative faculty, as well as a sympathy for Celtic myth and legend, imaginative faculty, as well as a sympathy for Celtic myth and legend, and her delicate work has won her a host of admirers, but her identity still continues to puzzle the literary critics. By 1905, the New York Times was calling MacLeod's identity the most interesting literary mystery in

the United Kingdom for the past 10 years. As the speculation intensified, MacLeod seemed to try to avoid discovery. At one point, she published a note in a literary journal, Dear Sirs, I am much annoyed at this continued identification of myself with this or that man or woman of letters, in one or two instances with people whom I have never seen and do not even know by correspondence. For what seemed to myself not only good but imperative private reasons, I wish to preserve absolutely my privacy. It is not only that temperamentally I shrink from and dislike the publicity of reputation, but that my very writing depends upon my privacy. It is not only that temperamentally I shrink from and dislike the publicity of reputation, but that my very writing depends upon this privacy. The climax came later that year when William Sharp died and his wife revealed the truth. Fiona MacLeod had never

existed at all. All of her works had been written by William Sharp, the cousin who had supposedly been helping her. Starting in 1894, ten years earlier, he had maintained two writing careers, one as himself, the other as a woman, whose true identity he worked to keep secret from all but a few close friends. This was much more than a pen name. He had negotiated publishing contracts, corresponded with readers, worked with editors, and published novels, poetry, and criticism in two different styles under two different names. When he had to write a letter as Fiona, he would send the text to his sister in Edinburgh who would copy it out in feminine handwriting

and send it out for him. When someone wanted to meet Fiona, he would invent an excuse to avoid the encounter. Sometimes this descended into comedy. A Yale undergraduate once fell in love with Fiona through her books and asked to meet her. Sharp wrote back as Fiona, saying that she was traveling and could not meet with him,

but suggesting that he meet with William Sharp, whom she called her most intimate friend. The undergraduate did this and then wrote to Fiona afterward to say how much he had liked him. Fiona responded, if you would not, you would not like me, truly, for we are not only close kindred, but at one in all things. Elsewhere, she called Sharp my most intimate friend, as well as my kinsman. If you like him, you would like me. If you do not like him, you would not like me. It appears that all this started with a woman named Edith Wingate Rinder, whom Sharp fell in love with in Italy in January 1892. Sharp saw Edith as the ideal of feminine beauty, and as he

began writing a new novel in her presence, he had the sense it was being composed by a distinct personality that was decidedly feminine, and he found himself writing with the Celtic enthusiasm that would become Fiona's hallmark. Somehow Edith helped him to exercise his creative imagination in a way that he could not do alone. He could invoke this feminine side of himself and write most easily through it when he and Edith were alone together. He would project himself onto Edith, become her, and absorb her mind into his own. He described this as no literary adventure but a deep spiritual impulse and compelling circumstance of a nature upon which I must be silent. When he finished the novel in 1894, he feared it would be mocked if he published it under his own name, so he invented

the name Fiona and used the surname MacLeod after an old man of the inner Hebrides named Seamus MacLeod, who had regaled him with Celtic myths and Gaelic lore when he was a boy. Fiona's writings had a directness and an unselfconsciousness that Williams lacked, and she became popular with both the public and the critics. The novelist George Meredith called her a woman of genius, and Yeats said he preferred her writing to Sharpe's. In fact, the public came to agree, and ironically, Fiona became more successful than Sharp himself. In Volume 3 of the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, Fiona MacLeod has an index entry and William Sharp does not.

The English Who's Who, which was strongly opposed to pen names and was supposed to print biographical outlines of real people only, had articles on both Sharp and MacLeod. It lists her birthplace as the Hebrides, her first language as Gaelic, and her recreations as sailing, hill walks, and listening. As time went on, Sharp had to continue publishing as two people, both to maintain the pretense and because he needed the income generated by both personalities. Writing essays, reviews, and stories as two different people became a great burden,

but one that he felt was necessary. He feared he would be derided if he revealed he was Fiona McLeod, and he feared that he would not be able to invoke her at all if the truth became known. But she was evolving into a separate personality. His wife wrote, the production of the Fiona McLeod work was accompanied at a heavy cost to the author as that side of his nature deepened and became dominant. The strain upon his energies was excessive, not only from the necessity of giving expression to the two sides of his nature, but because of his desire that, while under the cloak of secrecy, Fiona MacLeod should develop and grow, the reputation of William Sharpe should at the same time be maintained. Moreover, each of the two natures had its own needs and desires, interests, and friends. Why he was doing all this seems to have been unclear

even to himself. The scholar Flavia Alaya writes, There is something about William Sharp that nearly defies biography. There is nothing concrete to explain completely his eccentricity in choosing to write under the name of a woman, nothing positive with which to penetrate the mystery of his cryptic utterances about himself, and everything he produced is Fiona MacLeod. Sharp's wife saw Fiona as a secondary personality. She wrote, There was a continual play of two forces in him,

of the intellectually observant reasoning mind, the actor, that is William Sharp, and of the intuitively observant spiritual mind, the dreamer, that is Fiona MacLeod, which differentiated more and more one from the other and required different conditions, different environment, different stimuli, until he seemed to be two personalities in one. It was a development which, as it proceeded, produced a tremendous strain on his physical and mental resources, and at one time, between 1897 and 98, threatened him with a complete nervous collapse. Modern readers might ask whether Sharp

was transgender or whether this was a crisis in his sexual identity. He did acknowledge having a feminine side or a sympathetic understanding of women. In an 1880 letter to a friend, he had written, don't despise me when I say that in some things I am more a woman than a man. His wife wrote, I remember he told me that rarely a day passed in which he did not try to imagine himself living the life of a woman, to see through her eyes and feel a new life from her standpoint, and so vividly that, quote, sometimes I forget I am not the woman I am trying to imagine. But all of this was taking place in Victorian Britain, which didn't have the insider or the vocabulary to really make sense of it. Sharp himself tended to refer to Fiona in the third person. He experienced himself as William Sharp, a man, and was sometimes visited

or inspired by a second feminine personality, which we referred to as a messenger, an interpreter, or a twin. He once called Fiona a puzzling literary entity. So he didn't really see himself as being Fiona. No. What fascinates me about this whole thing is who knows how he would conceive this if he'd been born today. Right.

But back then, what I think is remarkable is that she came out through his pen alone. Outwardly, he was just a completely conventional Victorian man of letters. And when she showed up, it was to help him write. It was literary only.

Yeah. So he didn't do anything else that indicated that he wanted to be living as a woman. Not that anyone knows about, not that I was able to discover. It's very much as if people talk about the muse, if you're trying to do something creative, you can't get anywhere until this other creature shows up and inspires you, and then you can do it. It very much feels like that. He once asked whether two souls can inhabit the same body.

See, I wonder if it's not like some repressed part of his personality, like, you know, with the really strong sexual stereotypes that people had to live up to, or gender stereotypes that people had to live up to in the Victorian era, and that, you know, he might have felt that having these sorts of dreamy, spiritual, romantic, Celtish feelings would not be appropriate for a proper Victorian man. One thing I found myself wondering a lot is he kept saying he could write as Fiona mostly when he was alone with Edith Rinder in the countryside, in the quiet. And we don't know anything about how they interacted, those two, when they were alone together. There's no way to know that. Right.

But he may have felt more free to be whoever he really was when he was with her. Yeah. Well, he's also said that his writing was more self-conscious and Fiona's writing was more unselfconscious, which implies that when he was writing as himself, he felt like he was censoring himself. Yes. Well, also, he was kind of too stiff, I think, from what I understand. She would write, Fiona would write characters who actually stayed in character and you could invest yourself in and sort of actually care what happened to them in the story. And he was a bit too. So more emotional and he was more rational.

But very distinct styles, which is interesting. Fiona became a distinctly real person to him. In a letter to Yates, Sharp once wrote, I will leave your letter where Fiona will find it when she wakes. Yates added, by this, he meant that the secondary personality when it awoke inith Rinder, his lover, the beautiful woman in whose presence he could write as Fiona. He would show someone a picture of Edith and say it was Fiona. When going to meet Edith, he would say he was meeting Fiona. When asked for Fiona's whereabouts, he often gave Edith. This helped him to remember where Fiona ostensibly was, but it also reflected his tendency to conflate the two women. On one occasion in 1897, he convinced Edith to go with him to see George Meredith, saying she was herself Fiona McLeod.

That only happened once, and it was only for a couple hours. It must have been, I think, very difficult for her to pretend she was this other person. But she agreed to do it that one time. He asked her again to do it later in Paris and apparently she refused to do it. See, I almost wonder if Edith didn't represent to him this repressed side of himself. Like she seemed to match it quite a lot.

Yeah, and this seemed to come out for him only after he met her somehow. That seems significant. I don't know enough psychology to know how. Sharp and Edith were both married, but their spouses were remarkably understanding about this arrangement. Sharp's wife agreed with Edith that one or the other must always be with him so that he could continue to work, especially later in his life as his health and his finances started to fall apart. That's very tolerant of his wife.

And Edith's husband wrote a glowing tribute to Sharp when he died. So if there was any scandal or ill feeling among the four of them, it was kept perfectly quiet. I think possibly there simply was none. I think they just understood what was needed and they all just did it. He kept her identity a secret to the end of his life. In 1902, when his health was failing and his finances dwindling, he could have appealed to the Home Secretary to be placed on the civil pension list to get some money from the government. He refused to do this because it would have meant revealing his authorship of Fiona's writings.

He said he valued, quote, the aloofness and spiritual isolation of Fiona McLeod, but also feel that a great responsibility to others has come to me through the winning of so already large and deepening a circle of those of like ideals, or at least like sympathies in our own country and in America. At the end, Sharp left a message to his friends that said in part, It is a mystery. I cannot explain. Perhaps you will intuitively understand or may come to understand. He once wrote, It is with me as if Fiona were asleep in another room. I catch myself listening for her steps sometimes, for the sudden opening of a door.

His grave is marked with words chosen by him. Farewell to the known and exhausted. Welcome to the unknown and illimitable. Love is more great than we conceive, and death is the keeper of unknown redemptions. Today's episode is brought to you by our patrons and by Kryzal No Glare Lenses. If you're like me, then you expect your eyeglass lenses to not only help you see better, but also to stay clean and clear all day. But if you've only ever worn ordinary lenses, then you know that in reality, fingerprints, smudges, scratches,

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Listener Reed Savory wrote to Greg to say, Just a heads up, did you see that Atlas Obscura just added a long article on the Silk Maps in Monopoly set story? It's almost as if they were listening to your show or something. Happy holidays to you and Sharon and Sasha the Futilicat. So there's a new title for Sasha. I guess that makes us the only podcast with a Futilicat mascot. And we covered these maps that Reid was talking about, which were

hidden in Monopoly boards and other unexpected places in episode 76. The article that Reid saw is a nice story on Atlas Obscura entitled How Millions of Silk Maps Helped POWs Escape Their Captors in World War II,

and is about Christopher Clayton Hutton and the various obstacles that he had to overcome to realize his plan of getting these maps into the hands of British POWs, such as he had to find a material to use that would be thin, durable, and very importantly, quiet. We'll have a link in the show notes for anyone who wants to learn more about that. But the one thing that I found very interesting in the article was that in all, the British and American military ended up producing about 3.5 million of these maps to help aid their POWs, but they're rarely seen, which suggests that many soldiers that received them kept them. The article says, this would make a certain amount of sense.

Soldiers may eventually get rid of uniforms, but who wouldn't want to keep the bit of silk that came to you in a game box, folded up small, and with nary a rustle, showed you how to make it back home? Still, that's a lot of them out there floating around. Right, but that's what they're saying is, they're floating around, but nobody ever sees them, which means that people must be holding on to them.

A lot of people. Interestingly, though, Hutton himself came across one in a French antique shop in 1949 and bought it. He said that it cost him four pounds, which would have been about a 2,000% markup. In episode 133, Greg noted that several sources maintain that the last tiger in Singapore was shot under a billiards table in the Raffles Hotel in 1902 and asked if anyone had any confirmation or further information about this incident. And Nick Colensi wrote, I am an international school social studies teacher living in Bogota, Colombia, and thanks to a recommendation from a fellow Irish teacher, I have enjoyed listening to the back catalog of your podcast over the past few months. I was writing to shine a bit of insight into your discussion of the Singapore tiger shooting at the Raffles Hotel that you mentioned in episode 133. As an international school teacher in Myanmar, I had heard this story shared and thought I would give you a bit of the background. The local you mentioned was Charles McGowan Phillips, a principal of Raffles Institution,

who apparently shot this tiger in his pajamas after a long night at the government house ball. One of my favorite parts to the story is that apparently there was someone sleeping on the veranda the same night as the tiger was found and felt lucky to be alive afterwards. the tiger was found and felt lucky to be alive afterwards. You were correct in mentioning that this was not a wild tiger living in Singapore, but apparently escaped a traveling show and was named Stripes. Seems he had a run-in before making his way to the hotel. Also misinterpreted in the legend is that it was under the billiard table. If you read the article, you will see it was under the billiard room, not the actual table,

but I guess the legend makes it better to sell drinks in the billiard room and bar. And Nick sent a link to an article in the Straits Times, which is a Singapore-based newspaper, dated August 13, 1902, which starts, A tiger was shot under the billiards room of Raffles Hotel early this morning. Lest anyone be inclined to doubt the veracity of the foregoing statement a representative of this paper who saw the dead body of stripe soon after he was shot is prepared to bet a new hat that a live loose tiger slept under the billiard room of raffles hotel last night that mr c m phillips of raffles institution was informed of this fact early this morning and that the said gentleman dispatched the tiger in the presence of an excited band of hotel residents. And the article explains that the billiard room of the hotel was raised a few feet off the ground on brick pillars and goes

on to relate that the tiger belonged to what it called a native show that had been performing in the area and that said tiger broke out of captivity and apparently made its way to the Raffles Hotel. A Mr. Phillips was summoned from his bed in the early hours to deal with the situation and showed up in his pajamas toting a rifle. Mr. Phillips had to contend with not being able to see much in the gloom underneath the billiard room and his first three shots were at something that turned out not to be a tiger. But the noise did cause a crowd to gather and after some time, Mr. Phillips saw the animal's eyes gleaming at him in the dark,

which enabled him to shoot the tiger right between the eyes, as Greg's sources had claimed. As Nick noted in his account, the article reported that one gentleman is said to have slept last night in a long chair on the billiard room veranda. No doubt he feels particularly grateful,

especially as the tiger is said by those who saw him alive to have looked a very hungry specimen. I'm frankly surprised that this story is true because it's so impossibly colorful. Yeah, and there were a few details, a few small details that were a little different from the accounts that you saw, but it's mostly consistent with the stories you found. I actually felt kind of sorry for the tiger because it sounded to me like he was just looking for a good place to hide. I wonder who Mr. Phillips was. He's just some guy. Yeah, they didn't actually explain that in the article. Maybe we were just supposed to have known who he was. In his email, Nick went on, but like all good tales, it doesn't end here.

You mentioned this as the supposed last wild tiger killed in Singapore, but that part of the story doesn't ring true with a bit more searching. I am linking another website that has information on what is reported in the same paper as a hunting party killing the last known wild tiger of Singapore in 1930. Keep up all the good work. We love listening to you each week. And yep, the Straits Times reported on October 27th, 1930, that a tiger had been harassing a village for a few weeks, killing its pigs and dogs, and had finally been shot the previous day. So the 1902 shooting was definitely not the last tiger shooting in Singapore. Nick Moffitt wrote in with a follow up to episode 31 about animals who were put on trial for their misbehavior. Nick notes that he tends to binge listens to his podcasts and said,

I regularly come up with points to mail in only to find out half an hour later that other listeners mentioned my concerns or observations months ago. One that I am fairly sure has not resurfaced regards one of your earliest topics, that of animals brought on trial. When I first heard this story and the subsequent letters years ago, it reminded me of something brought up in A History of the World in Six Glasses by Tom Standage. In the chapter on coffee, he describes the process by which the Muslim world at the time decided if the drink should be permitted or relegated to the same status as alcohol. A trial was held with an actual jar of the beans present in the courtroom to stand in for the substance as a whole. He explains that putting even inanimate objects on trial was common in that era. Before we had scientific methods of inquiry and proof, debate and petition to a wise judge were the best processes many peoples had to decide the questions of fact.

One can imagine this continuing the tradition of Solomon and it begins to seem less absurd. So what Nick is referring to here is a case of coffee on trial that stemmed from a governor in Mecca named Cahir Bey trying to ban coffee in June of 1511. Begg's argument was that coffee was intoxicating and therefore subject to the same religious prohibition as alcohol. Standage suggests that Begg was motivated by his responsibilities for maintaining public morality, but Mark Pendergrast in Uncommon Grounds, The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World,

suggests a different motivation, that Be beg had discovered that satirical verses about him were originating in coffee houses whatever his reasons beg convened convened a council of legal experts placed the accused coffee before them and apparently convinced them that coffee should indeed be banned which it was for a time until a sultan who was a coffee lover himself reversed the decision. Can't go without your coffee. Besides the strangeness of a beverage being put on trial,

I thought it was interesting how apparently Muslim scholars of the time really had quite a debate about whether coffee qualified as an intoxicating beverage or not. According to Standage, one of the difficulties was in coming up with an agreed upon definition of intoxication. He says, an intoxicated person was variously defined as someone who becomes absent-minded and confused, departs from whatever he has in the way of mild virtue and tranquility into foolishness and ignorance, or comprehends absolutely nothing at all and who does not know a man from a woman or the earth from the heavens. And unfortunately for coffee's foes, it did not seem to produce any of these effects, and it could even be argued that it can have the opposite effect on people.

Yeah, I would think so. Yeah, so that made it a little difficult to argue that it was intoxicating. Both Standage and Pendergrass note that Beg was not the only Arab leader in the 16th century to be wary of coffee and coffee houses, and other attempts were made to outlaw the beverage and the houses in which it was sold, as coffee houses were seen as places in which to promote political discontent, as well as being popular places to engage in other morally dubious activities, such as playing chess and backgammon. So coffee drinkers beware, apparently your habit can lead to political strife and the playing of chess. In his email, Nick also said,

in the modern era, the US has mechanisms whereby materials used in certain crimes may be arrested as a means of seizure when the living perpetrators aren't as easy to reach. This leads to absurd case titles such as United States versus approximately 64,695 pounds of shark fins. Thanks again for the amazing blog and podcast. I was pleased that Nick mentioned that because I've made a little hobby of collecting these case titles. They're called in-rem cases. Normally, if you sue me, the title of the case is just you versus me. But there's another kind of case, which is, I understand, it's when a court asserts power over objects rather than over a person, for instance, for example, to decide its legal ownership or status. And that's where you get these crazy

case titles. So I've made a little hobby of collecting them. These are some of these. These are all actual court cases. United States versus 37 photographs. They all have this poetry to them. These are some of these. These are all actual court cases. United States versus 37 photographs. They all have this poetry to them. United States versus 12 200-foot reels of film. One 1958 Plymouth sedan versus Pennsylvania. They're like wrestling matchups. United States versus 11 and a quarter dozen packages of article labeled in part Mrs. Moffat's shoe fly powders for drunkenness. Quantity of books versus Kansas. United States versus 2,507 live canary winged parakeets. United States versus one lucite ball containing lunar material, one moon rock, and one 10 inch by 14 inch wooden plaque.

United States versus 95 barrels alleged apple cider vinegar. United States versus one Ford coupe automobile. Here's an important one, United States versus one book called Ulysses. That's the 1933 case over whether James Joyce's novel was obscene. United States versus article consisting of 50,000 cardboard boxes, more or less, each containing one pair of clacker balls. And my favorite is United States versus article consisting of 50,000 cardboard boxes, more or less, each containing one pair of clacker balls. And my favorite is United States versus one Tyrannosaurus Batar skeleton, which would be the best movie ever. So somebody has to get on making a movie out of that. That was a 2013 case to stop the sale of a dinosaur skeleton that had allegedly been looted from Mongolia.

Originally, the idea of these in-rem jurisdictions arose when property was identified, but the owner was unknown. In early cases, in 1836, a flotilla of brandy casks washed ashore on the south coast of England, and a dispute arose between a local property owner and the king, William IV, as to who owned it. That case, unfortunately for William, was recorded as the king versus 49 casks of Brandy. So thanks so much to everyone who writes in to us. If you have any questions or comments, please send them to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com.

And I still appreciate it when people tell me how to pronounce their names correctly. It's my turn to try to solve a lateral thinking puzzle. Greg is going to present me a strange-sounding situation, and I have to try to work out what's actually going on, asking only yes or no questions. This one's from listener David Tassinari. A bank robber comes up with an idea to prevent being recorded by security cameras. He tests his idea and finds that it works perfectly,

so he goes ahead and robs two banks, one after another, confident in his stratagem. However, the police are able to obtain pictures of the robber that are accurate enough to be transmitted during the evening news and to have him identified within an hour. The robber, much to his chagrin, is arrested on the very same night he committed the robberies. Why did the robber's plan not work? This really happened, I'm going to guess? Yes. Okay. Does it matter where it was? No. Okay. So he came up with a plan to prevent the cameras that are normally in the bank, the

security cameras, from being able to record him? That's right. Okay. But you say that the police had pictures. Did they come from something other than the security cameras? No, they didn't. So they did come from the security cameras. Correct. We need one of these yes or no words. Don't ask negative questions. Okay. Okay. So they did actually, because that was my first thought was, you know, somebody got pictures somehow else. Okay. So the security cameras did actually take pictures of him. Yes. He was under the belief, okay, I guess there's two different things that could have happened. Was he under the belief that the security cameras would have not taken any pictures of all?

That the security cameras would not be taking pictures? No, that wasn't his belief. Okay, so he was under the belief that the security camera would be taking images, let's call them pictures, but that he would not be discernible somehow on these images? That's right. Okay. Was he going to do something to himself, to his own person or face or body that was going to mess up the images from the cameras? Yes. Okay.

Was it going to be something that he was going to be wearing no no okay uh was it something he was going to do to his face yes he was going to do something to his face that he believed would make him not be discernible, so that even if pictures of himself were taken, people wouldn't be able to recognize him? That's accurate. That's accurate? Okay. Okay, so he believed that he was going to be in the bank and that pictures were going to be taken of him. So they were actually going to be taken of him.

Did he believe that something he was going to do was going to make the pictures too indistinct too blurry or difficult to see or that they wouldn't be seen at all like he was going to be like a blue screen or you know the green screen or blue screen that you see on tv i can only answer yes or no so is it okay if any of those is the case yes if any of those the case yes well at least one of those is the case? Yes, if any of those is the case. Yes. At least one of those is right. My brain generates too many hypotheses too fast sometimes. Okay. Okay.

Did he believe that his face was going to be like a blue screen or a green screen like you see on TV so that no picture of his face at all would be taken? Yes, that's what he believed. He believed that. So he did something to his face. Did he make it a certain color? No. And you said it wasn't something he wore on his face? Was it something he wore on his face? I'm trying not to ask negative questions. No, I wouldn't use that word, no. You wouldn't use the word wore. Did he apply something to his face? Yes, and I don't have to drag you through this whole thing because it's unlikely you're going to get further than that.

Basically, he put lemon juice on his face. I'll read David's answer. The story is told in the original paper, unskilled and unaware of it, where David Dunning and Justin Kruger first introduced the logical fallacy that bears their name. The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people with low ability suffer from the illusion of superiority, believing their ability to be much higher than it really is. What happened is that in 1995, a very incompetent Pittsburgh robber called MacArthur Wheeler decided that smearing lemon juice over his head would make him invisible to cameras. He even went ahead and tested his theory by covering his face in lemon juice and taking a selfie with a Polaroid. The picture developed to show only the background, so he was convinced that it worked. David writes, I'm guessing it was even worse as

a photographer than as a robber. Oh, so he just took the picture wrong, probably. Yeah, he was aiming over his shoulder or something. So he decided it was invisible. He then placidly went and robbed two banks in an afternoon without even attempting any other disguise. When he was inevitably identified, he was apparently nonplussed that his clever stratagem did not work and took some convincing that there wasn't anything else going on. So he just went into a bank with lemon juice on his face.

Does it say why he thought lemon juice would make him invisible or he just came up with this idea? The only guess I have in this is purely a guess is that you can use lemon juice as a kind of invisible anchor if you write a message in lemon juice

and then hold a match under the paper that'll sort of reveal the message. If that's not it, I have no idea. So he thought lemon juice as a kind of invisible anchor if you write a message in lemon juice and then hold a match under the paper that'll sort of reveal the message. If that's not it, I have no idea. So we thought lemon juice just makes things invisible. Right. And if you put it on your face, you just, I don't know what he thought the teller would see, just like a suit of clothes walking up to the, or I guess, no, just be the camera somehow. I don't know what he thought. Okay.

Anyway, thank you, David, for sending that. Yes. Thank you so much for that puzzle. And if anybody else has a puzzle they'd like to send in for us to use, you can send it to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. And that's our show for this week. If you're looking for more quirky curiosities, check out the Futility Closet books on Amazon or visit the website at futilitycloset.com

where you can sample more than 9,000 Quiddling Crumpets. At the website, you can also see the show notes for the podcast and listen to previous episodes. If you like our podcast and want to help support it, please see the Support Us page of our website. You can also help us out by telling your friends about us or by leaving a review on iTunes or other podcast directories. 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 my talented brother-in-law, Doug Ross. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.