Futility Closet - 222-The Year Without a Summer

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to the Futility Closet podcast, forgotten stories from the pages of history. Visit us online to sample more than 10,000 quirky curiosities from teddy bear medicine to a tower for goats. This is episode 222. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. goats. This is episode 222. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. The eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815 was a disaster for the Dutch East Indies, but its astonishing consequences were felt around the world, blocking the sun and bringing cold, famine, and disease to millions of people from

Starting point is 00:00:38 China to the United States. In today's show, we'll review the volcano's devastating effects and surprising legacy. We'll also appreciate an inverted aircraft and puzzle over a resourceful barber. The most destructive explosion on Earth in the past 10,000 years took place in April 1815, when Mount Tambora erupted in the eastern part of Indonesia, what was then the Dutch East Indies. The environmental historian Bernice de Jong Boers called it flatly a catastrophe without equal in recorded history. Geologists call it ultraplinian, which means greater than the eruption of Mount Vesuvius that killed Pliny the Elder in 79 AD. There's a word for that. That's great that there's a word for that.

Starting point is 00:01:21 The mountain lost a quarter of its height, sending 50 cubic kilometers of dense rock into the sky, 10 times more than Mount Pinatubo in 1991 and 100 times more than Mount St. Helens in 1980. An eyewitness, Lieutenant Owen Phillips, wrote, About 7 p.m. on the 10th April, three distinct columns of flame burst forth near the top of the Tamboro Mountain, and after ascending separately to a very great height, their tops united in the air in a troubled and confused manner. The sound was heard a thousand miles away. Darkness descended for two days over a radius of 600 kilometers, and the ash cloud expanded to cover a region equal to the continental United States.

Starting point is 00:01:55 Debris blacketed all of Southeast Asia for a week. The British officials who ruled the region at the time had to conduct their business by candlelight. It was April 13th before weak sunlight began to return. On the island, the eruption killed as many as 90,000 people, to conduct their business by candlelight. It was April 13th before weak sunlight began to return. On the island, the eruption killed as many as 90,000 people, largely through the flows of incandescent ash that descended the mountain. As their food sources were destroyed, people were reduced to eating horse flesh and leaves. The parents killed their children rather than watch them suffer. Eventually, the island lost half its population to famine and disease, and most of the rest of the population fled to other islands. For such an enormous disaster, it's surprising how little known it is. I found one writer who

Starting point is 00:02:28 said he'd been practicing geology for 40 years and had never heard of it. The reason lies in technology. Most people have heard of Krakatoa, a volcano in the same region that erupted in 1883. That news spread more quickly because we'd invented telegraphs by then. A major eruption that occurred today would be worldwide news instantly because we have satellites and the internet. The eruption of Tambora was 10 times more powerful and three times as deadly as Krakatoa, but in 1815 news traveled only as fast as a sailing ship, which is not very fast. Even if the news had spread more widely, climate science was too young to appreciate the importance of what had happened. What had happened was an invisible catastrophe. The eruption blew vast quantities of water vapor and sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere,

Starting point is 00:03:07 where they combined to form sulfuric acid. Veils of these droplets spread around the world, reflecting sunlight, cooling the Earth's surface, and causing what the author Gill and Darcy Wood calls the most devastating, sustained period of extreme weather seen on our planet in perhaps thousands of years. Temperatures dropped in every country in the world. On the Chinese island of Hainan, it snowed during the summer of 1815, and half the forests perished the following winter. Eastern China saw record low temperatures and crop failures. In Shanxi, summer frosts killed crops and started a mass emigration. In India, the eruption upset the pattern of the summer

Starting point is 00:03:39 monsoon winds, bringing drought instead of rain to several areas in 1816, with a shortage of grain and a subsequent famine. But hardest it were Western Europe and the northeastern United States, where 1816 was known as the year without a summer, the poverty year, and 1800 and froze to death. That June, snow fell in Albany, New York, and Denny'sville, Maine, and people were slaying in Virginia. Chauncey Jerome of Plymouth, Connecticut, wrote in his diary, I well remember the 7th of June, dressed throughout with thick woolen clothes and an overcoat on. My hands got so cold that I was obliged to lay down my tools and put on a pair of mittens. On the 10th of June, my wife brought

Starting point is 00:04:14 in some clothes that had been spread on the ground the night before, which were frozen stiff as in winter. A month later, a Norfolk newspaper reported, it is now the middle of July and we have not yet had what could properly be called summer. Easterly winds have prevailed for nearly three months past. The sun during that time has generally been obscured and the sky overcast with clouds. The air has been damp and uncomfortable, and frequently so chilling as to render the fireside a desirable retreat. In Europe, 1816 was abnormally cold in the Netherlands, Germany, France, Switzerland, England, and Ireland.

Starting point is 00:04:44 In London, the chemist Luke Howard found that the average daily temperature had fallen 12 degrees Fahrenheit. There were snows in July on the summit of Helvellyn in northern England, and snow drifts five feet deep in the north of Scotland. Though the cause was unclear, the effects were great enough to affect world history. The disastrous weather drove tens of thousands of people out of New England to try their luck on the western frontier, twice as many as normal. Partly as a result, Indiana became a state in 1816 and Illinois in 1818. Similarly, people fled the misery in Europe for Russia and the United States. In fact, historian John D. Post has said the failure of corn and wheat crops in Europe and Great Britain caused the last great subsistence crisis in the western world. Most

Starting point is 00:05:24 people in the early 19th century depended on subsistence agriculture, living from harvest to harvest, and Wood says that for three years after the eruption, quote, to be alive almost anywhere in the world meant to be hungry. When crops failed in 1816 and 1817, rural people entered market towns begging for alms and selling their children. In Ireland and Switzerland, people were reduced to eating sorrel, moss, and cat flesh. The government taught people how to avoid poisonous plants. In Germany, 1816 was called the Year of the Beggar. In Switzerland, it was L'année de la misère and Das Hungerjahr. Families in Wales became refugees, begging for food. In Ireland, the wheat, oat, and potato harvests failed, leading to famine in the north and southwest.

Starting point is 00:06:03 In France, crops rotted in fields soaked with rain, and vintners in 1816 gathered the smallest grape harvest in centuries. In Switzerland, where even in normal times a family devoted at least half its income to buying bread, the price of grain tripled so that even a subsistence diet was out of reach for hundreds of thousands of people, and desperate mobs set upon bakers and destroyed their shops. A priest in Glarus wrote, it is terrifying to see these walking skeletons devour the most repulsive foods with such avidity, the corpses of livestock, stinking nettles, and to watch them fight with animals over scraps. Karl von Clausewitz, the military tactician, traveled on horseback through the Rhine country in 1817.

Starting point is 00:06:39 He wrote, I saw decimated people, barely human, prowling the fields for half-rotten potatoes. People ate horse and dog flesh, and when rumors arose that crops might be exported to Switzerland, riots erupted. Things were no better in the American Northeast where the entire corn crop was lost. As the price of feed skyrocketed, animals died of hunger or had to be sold for giveaway prices. In a cemetery in Ashland, New Hampshire, a gravestone reads, Ruben Witten, In a cemetery in Ashland, New Hampshire, a gravestone reads, In New Haven, Connecticut, the growing season of 1816 was the shortest in its history, fewer than 70 days, where the average had been 126. Villagers in Vermont ate hedgehogs and boiled nettles, and Thomas Jefferson had such a poor corn crop that

Starting point is 00:07:29 he applied for a loan of $1,000. In China and Tibet, the cold weather killed trees, rice, and even water buffalo, and the crops that survived were ruined by floods. The southwestern Chinese province of Yunnan had record low temperatures for three successive growing seasons. Corpses lay on the road, mothers sold or killed their children, and people wandered the fields eating white clay. On the heels of famine came pestilence. A typhus epidemic raged throughout southeast Europe and the eastern Mediterranean between 1816 and 1819, arising from cold, damp, poor hygiene, and lice. In the Belfast Fever Hospital, a doctor wrote, about in search of subsistence, and also by the establishments for the distribution of soup and other provisions among the poor where multitudes were crowded together, many of whom must have come from infected houses, or were perhaps even laboring under the early stages of the disease.

Starting point is 00:08:33 The Irish writer William Carlton wrote, the very skies of heaven were hung with the black drapery of the grave, for never since, nor within the memory of man before it, did the clouds present shapes of such gloomy and funereal import. Hurses, coffins, long funeral processions, and all the dark emblems of mortality were reflected, as it were, on the sky from the terrible works of pestilence and famine which were going forward on the earth beneath it. 1816 also saw a terrible outbreak of cholera. That doesn't seem to be a direct result of the eruption, but it may have spread more readily because famine had weakened the population. As I said, no one at the time thought to blame a Southeast Asian volcano for any of this.

Starting point is 00:09:08 Ben Franklin had suggested as early as 1783 that there might be a link between volcanic eruptions and a cooling of the earth, but no one would connect the eruption of Tambora to bad weather until 1914, and scientists wouldn't have the tools to study the phenomenon closely until the Cold War. As a result, many people blame these upheavals on a decline in morality and a decrease in church attendance. Some blamed the weather on sunspots and icebergs in the North Atlantic. In Bologna, Italy, one astronomer predicted that the world would end when the sun broke up on July 18, 1816. This started a millennialist panic across the continent in view of the deteriorating weather and the after-effects of war. The prophet was thrown into jail and penitents filled churches in Belgium for two weeks.

Starting point is 00:09:48 It's amazing to me how much world history, like we may never even know how much world history may have been affected by this one volcanic eruption. What astounds me is, I mean, this is like Dante, this sounds wretchedly terrible, and it was only 200 years ago, and most people don't even know about it. Yeah, I didn't know about it until, you know, someone suggested the story and I looked into it. It's just amazing what a cataclysm this was and how it's been, you know, forgotten in a couple centuries. And how it affected almost the entire world,

Starting point is 00:10:16 it seems, or a great majority of the world. Yeah. And really profoundly. Remarkably, the eruption even left its mark on art around the world. In the spring and summer of 1816, people in Europe and the United States reported what they called a dry fog in the sky, that the wind and rain wouldn't wash out. That means it was above the weather. They were seeing the stratospheric veil of sulfate aerosols that was causing all this. In New York, sunspots could be seen with the naked eye, and in London it produced long, brilliantly colored sunsets, orange or red near the horizon, purple and pink above, streaked with diverging dark bands. The artist J.M.W. Turner painted lurid orange and red skies in this period.

Starting point is 00:10:52 John Constable switched from English landscapes to experimental cloudscapes. And in Germany, Kaspar David Friedrich painted skies marked by a high, pervasive fog. Those examples are anecdotal, but there does seem to be a measurable effect. In 2014, a team of Greek scientists led by Christos Zarephos digitally measured the ratio of red to green in 124 sunsets painted between 1500 and 2000. There were 54 highly explosive volcanic eruptions in that period, and the scientists found significantly more red in sunsets painted after these eruptions. Tambora's effects are seen in literature as well.

Starting point is 00:11:25 In China, an ancient form of verse known as the Poem of the Seven Sorrows saw a renaissance as people suffered through starvation, infanticide, and even child slavery. The poet Li Yu-Yang wrote, The cold wind blows in their faces. The parents wipe their tears away. But back home they cannot sleep while the birds moan like old men in the night. In 1816, Mary Godwin rented a villa with her lover Percy Shelley near Lake Geneva in Switzerland, where the weather was extraordinarily terrible. Mary wrote, it proved a wet, uncongenial summer, and incessant rain often confined us for days to the house. That was an understatement. 1816 had the coldest, wettest summer in Geneva since records began in 1753, with 130 days of rain between April and

Starting point is 00:12:05 September. Wood says, in the dozen millennia since the retreat of the glaciers opened the door to human civilization, people have rarely, if ever, seen weather like it. Lord Byron was renting a villa nearby where he composed the poem Darkness. He was brooding on the Napoleonic Wars, but the metaphor he chose was a storm. I had a dream which was not all a dream. The bright sun was extinguished and the stars did wander darkling in the eternal space, rayless and pathless, and the icy earth swung blind and blackening in the moonless air. Morn came and went and came and brought no day. And men forgot their passions in the dread of this their desolation, and all hearts were chilled

Starting point is 00:12:39 into a selfish prayer for light. That June the three of them and some friends sat out a storm reading a collection of German ghost stories, and Byron challenged his friends to write their own macabre tales. That launched two seminal horror stories. John Polidori wrote The Vampire, the progenitor of the romantic vampire tale, and Mary wrote Frankenstein, which she published two years later. By the summer of 1818, the stratosphere had largely cleared. There were bumper harvests that year, and the world gradually recovered, though it would be a century before we began to understand what had happened to us. Today, Mount Tambora is dormant, but it is not dead.

Starting point is 00:13:12 Its most recent eruption was in 1967, and today more than a million people live within 100 kilometers of it. People sometimes suggest that now that Earth's climate is warming, another volcanic eruption might have the silver lining of reducing global temperatures. But the world population is now much greater than it was in 1815, and the number of people who could be affected by crop failures, famines, and epidemics would also be much larger. Perhaps we should think twice before wishing to go through this again. We often say that Futility Closet would not still be here today if it weren't for the support of our listeners,

Starting point is 00:13:52 because that really is the case. We appreciate all the different ways that many of our listeners help the show, but the backbone of our support is our Patreon campaign, as that gives us an ongoing source of support so that we can commit to the amount of time that the podcast takes to make. Patreon also gives us a good way to share some extras with our show's supporters,

Starting point is 00:14:12 like outtakes, peeks behind the scenes, extra discussions on some of the stories, and updates on Sasha, the Futility Closet podcast. You can learn more about our Patreon campaign at patreon.com slash futilitycloset, or see the support us section of our website for the link. And thanks so much to everyone who helps keep Futility Closet going. Greg told us about how in 1939, an ocean liner carrying Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany sought sanctuary in North America, but was turned away by each nation it appealed to. The ship was forced to return to Europe, and more than 250 of the passengers ended up dying in concentration and internment camps. Mark and Emily from Halifax, Nova Scotia wrote,

Starting point is 00:15:03 or technically Mark did, but he thought it would be a nice surprise for Emily to get a shout out on the show. My wife and I love the podcast and have been working our way through the archives after reading both books. We recently listened to episode 91, Voyage of the Damned. I was reading the news just this morning and found a modern update to this saga. Next month, Prime Minister Trudeau will be publicly apologizing on behalf of the Canadian government for turning away the MS St. Louis. Full details of the story can be seen on the CBC website here. Keep up the great work of boiling our collective noodles every week. And Mark sent an article about how Trudeau is planning to officially apologize on

Starting point is 00:15:42 November 7th for the decision to turn away the refugees. As reported in a couple of articles on the CBC, Trudeau said, this was an absolute moral failure on the part of the government, and, when Canada denied asylum to the 907 German Jews on board the MS St. Louis, we failed not only those passengers, but also their descendants and community. While an apology obviously won't change history, Trudeau said that acknowledging that the government's decision to turn away the ship resulted in the death of 254 people is an important step in learning from the past. He said,

Starting point is 00:16:16 It is our collective responsibility to acknowledge this difficult truth, learn from this story, and continue to fight against anti-Semitism every day as we give meaning to the solemn vow, never again. I look forward to offering this apology on the floor of the House. Now I wonder if other nations have made formal statements like that. I ought to know that and I don't. Oh, that's a good point. I don't know either. Taya Young sent an update on the discussion of the Quaker Oats Tiny Plots of Land giveaway from episode 216,

Starting point is 00:16:45 which was itself a follow-up to Episode 79. I am a new listener to the podcast, and hearing the recent mention of the Quaker Oats Land Giveaway was very interesting. In my city, Portland, Maine, something similar happened that predates it by 50 years or so. We have a city park called Oatnuts Park. Around the turn of the century, actual plots of land were given away with purchase of oat nuts cereal. They were much larger than one square inch and had real deeds, but unfortunately were not large enough to build on. The city slowly acquired these properties, and now most of the land is a park, but there

Starting point is 00:17:18 are still some parcels still in private hands. This newspaper article is a pretty good summary. It's a nice wooded area and provides access to the Przemskit River. Thank you for the great stories. In 1902, the Boston-based Liberty Pure Food Company carried out a promotion designed to sell two of its breakfast foods, one of them a cereal called oat nuts and the other something called nameless food. Maybe that sounded better in 1902 than it does in 2018. People were buying that.

Starting point is 00:17:49 The company ran a week of ads in local newspapers that bore a large headline screaming, house lots, free, free, free, free. They said that they were so sure that people would love their new breakfast foods that they were offering parcels of land for five box tabs and two dollars to cover the land transfer. The lots, which were said to run as high as 2,500 square feet, were in Oatnuts Park, where a new trolley line was going to be built, and Liberty Pure Food was going to pay the first year's property taxes on the lots. The ads promised that there would be a thousand lots offered on a first-come, first-served basis, though a plan filed with the County Registry of Deeds showed only 772 lots. And that wasn't the only thing that didn't quite live up to the advertisement.

Starting point is 00:18:34 The lots turned out to be too small to put houses on, as they were more like 20 by 50 feet. The streets in the area were too narrow to be usable, and the promised streetcar line never did materialize. In the end, the Oatnuts Park land only generated tax bills for the owners, and at some point, the Liberty Pure Food Company vanished. So I guess the promotion wasn't quite a success for them, or people didn't like eating nameless food. The whole thing just sounds like such a—you're just asking for so much trouble if you put something together like that, you know? Yeah, I mean— It just sounds like such a, you're just asking for so much trouble if you put something together like that, you know? Yeah. They just thought of it as a promotion, but it's not just going to be smooth sailing for the rest of the time. Over the years, Portland ended up regaining much of the land, either through donations to the city or through seizure for unpaid taxes.

Starting point is 00:19:18 Though, as Taya said, there are still a few lots that are privately owned. The current owner of some of the lots has proposed selling them to Portland and said, my family has been paying taxes on this for about 100 years. It is quite an oddity that someone would own something in the middle of a park, which I guess it is. The article didn't say what, if anything, the private owners have been doing with their land all these years, other than paying taxes on it.

Starting point is 00:19:40 Yeah, they're not very big. Also in episode 216, I mentioned that an Oni festival had shown an animated movie about Oni the male dog, during which you could sing along to the Oni song. I asked if anyone went to the festival to let us know how the song goes. Hano Zulo wrote, in your latest episode, you mentioned an animated movie about Oni. Apparently it is this one, which includes the song you mentioned. And he included a link to the film on YouTube, which I hadn't even thought to check. I didn't watch the whole movie, as it's more than 40 minutes long and seems pitched to younger children. But I did find at least two songs in it. So I'm not quite sure which is the Oni song.

Starting point is 00:20:20 But for anyone who wants to check it out for themselves, I thought the one towards the end of the film was much more catchy than the one in the middle of it, so I'm going to guess that that's the song. Apparently, the film is narrated and the song sung by country singer Trace Adkins, so the songs were at least quite well sung. Wow. Ryan Smith sent an update to The Puzzle from episode 44 about one of the famous inverted Jenny stamps, saying, allow me to join the hordes of listeners calling your attention to this article. And Ryan, you were the sole member of the horde, so thank you for sending it. The inverted Jenny was a 1918 stamp on which the airplane,

Starting point is 00:20:57 a Curtis JN4 or Jenny, was accidentally printed upside down. Since only a hundred of them exist, they're considered to be quite a collector's item, and the article Ryan sent from September 6th is about how one of the last two unaccounted-for inverted Jennys is apparently now accounted for, leaving only one whose whereabouts are still unknown. Apparently nobody noticed when this sheet of stamps was printed with an upside-down plane among the thousands that were printed in May 1918. this sheet of stamps was printed with an upside-down plane among the thousands that were printed in May 1918. This was just the second time that the Postal Service had attempted to produce a two-color stamp, which made the stamp more striking with its blue plane in the center of

Starting point is 00:21:33 the red and white border. But the process required the sheets of stamps to go through the printing press twice, which is what allowed for the mistake. A very lucky stamp collector named William T. Roby did notice the error when he went to a post office to buy the new stamp and was handed the sheet of inverted jennies. Apparently, the postal clerk had never seen an airplane and had no idea that the ones on the stamps were upside down. Is that true? I didn't know that. That's what I read. That's a good story. Roby paid $24 for the sheet of 100 stamps, left the post office as fast as he could, and later had to rebuff postal inspectors who tried to get back what was seen by them as an embarrassing error.

Starting point is 00:22:11 Not knowing that the other flawed stamps from the printing had been caught and destroyed, Roby assumed that more of them would be turning up and reduce the value of his, so he soon sold his sheet for $15,000 to Eugene Klein. Klein quickly resold them for $20,000 to his friend Edward Green, and also convinced Green to write little numbers on the back of each stamp from 1 to 100 so that ownership records could be kept. Green broke up the sheet of stamps, kept the best of them for himself, and then sold the rest. The whereabouts of Stamp 49 had not been known for these past 100 years until someone recently contacted the Philatelic Foundation in Manhattan to have the stamp authenticated.

Starting point is 00:22:51 Apparently, the anonymous owner's great-uncle had bought it soon after the sheet of stamps had been broken up, and it had eventually come to the current owner's mother and then to him. Number 49 turns out to be an amazing find as it's in pristine condition, which is rather rare for stamps that are this old. It had been stored in safe deposit boxes for most of its life and not mounted in an album as many old stamps are, or stuck together with other stamps as all of Green's inverted Jennys turned out to be, or sucked up into a vacuum cleaner or put into a locket as two others were. into a locket as two others were. Number 66, the remaining missing stamp of the set, was stolen as part of a block of four of the stamps at a stamp show in 1955. The other three eventually turned up, but who stole the stamps and what happened to number 66 is still a mystery. The inverted jennies aren't the most expensive stamps in the world. Apparently, that title currently belongs to the 1856 One Cent Magenta from British Guiana,

Starting point is 00:23:47 of which there is only one known in existence and which sold for $9.5 million in 2014. But another of the inverted jennies sold for $1.35 million in May 2016, so still a pretty nice windfall to discover that you own one. That's impressive. And I have a quick correction to something that I said in episode 220.

Starting point is 00:24:09 Stephen Miller wrote with regard to my referring to the Isle of Man wallabies as being in the UK to let me know that the Isle of Man is not part of the UK. So I very much stand corrected. According to Wikipedia, the island is a self-governing British crown dependency, but never was a part of the United Kingdom as it has its own internal self-government. So my apologies to all of our Manx listeners and their wallabies. Thanks to everyone who writes in to us. We really appreciate your comments, updates, and corrections if need be.

Starting point is 00:24:42 So if you have anything you'd like to say to us, please email us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. And as always, pronunciation tips are gratefully accepted. It's my turn to try to solve a lateral thinking puzzle. Greg is going to give me an interesting situation, and I have to work out what's going on, asking only yes or no questions. This is from listener Frank Kroger, who's taking it from a German short story by Johann Peter Hebel. A suspicious-looking soldier with a long and scruffy beard enters an inn in Seekringen, a small town in southern Germany, and asks the inn owner to send for the barber because he wants to get a good shave before his meal. When the barber arrives, he tells him

Starting point is 00:25:24 that he'll pay him four silver coins for a good shave, but he also warns him that if he cuts him, he'll stab him to death with his long dagger, which he lays on the table in front of him. He also ominously mentions that he wouldn't be the first barber to admit this unfortunate fate. The frightened barber leaves the inn and sends the assistant barber to the inn. When the assistant hears the soldier's offer, he also leaves and sends the apprentice barber to the inn. But the apprentice barber accepts the soldier's offer, shaves him without a cut, and gets the four silver coins. Why did the apprentice accept the offer? Okay, because the apprentice knows he's really good at shaving people. Did he see something about the sword that made him no longer concerned? No. Okay. It's like a trick sword, fake sword, rubber sword.

Starting point is 00:26:10 Okay. Is the apprentice barber like the man's son and he figures dad won't stab me? Oh, that's good. No. No, that's not it. Okay. Is the specific identity of the apprentice barber important? No.

Starting point is 00:26:23 Is the specific identity of the apprentice barber important? No. So the apprentice barber accepts the offer because he believes that he won't be stabbed? Yes. Yes. He believes that he is unlikely, let's say, to be stabbed. Or he believes he won't be stabbed. The answer to that question is yes, but I don't want to... Okay.

Starting point is 00:26:43 He's wearing armor. The apprentice barber's wearing armor. Barber in armor. Yes. No. Apprentice barbership is... Okay. But he believes he won't be stabbed, sort of.

Starting point is 00:26:56 Or he believes... Okay, let's back up. Does the apprentice barber believe that he can shave the man without cutting him? No. Okay. So does he believe that if he does cut the man, the man will not stab him? Yes. Okay.

Starting point is 00:27:16 And it has nothing to do with any aspect of the sword? Right. Does he plan to drug the man first? You'll shave him unconscious. No, that's a good idea. Or get him really drunk. So he believes, okay, even if I cut this guy, he's not going to stab me.

Starting point is 00:27:37 Yes. Okay. Is the apprentice barber a female? No. Okay, because I'm saying he, and I'm wondering if maybe that's why you're not answering my questions. Is there anything? Oh, I'm saying no, it could be. I mean, it would work equally well either No. Okay, because I'm saying he, and I'm wondering if maybe that's why you're not answering my questions. Is there anything?

Starting point is 00:27:46 Oh, I'm saying no, it could be. I mean, it would work equally well either way. Yeah, yeah. But I thought, well, maybe you can't answer my questions. Something about the way I'm asking, you don't want to give me an unqualified answer, so. Well, I'm worried that you might be making an assumption I don't want you to. Okay, so let's back up. Is there anything about the apprentice barber's identity, characteristics, et cetera, that I need to know?

Starting point is 00:28:04 No. Okay. Is there anything about the man's identity or characteristics, etc. that I need to know? No. Okay. He's evidently a mean man. He's evidently a mean man. So why does the apprentice barber think he's not going to be stabbed even if he cuts?

Starting point is 00:28:22 Or that if he is stabbed, it won't matter? He's undead. He's a zombie apprentice barber. In armor, yeah. And it doesn't matter if he gets stabbed. Okay, not it. Okay, so the apprentice barber, is it that he thinks if he's stabbed, it won't matter or hurt him or be a problem? No. Okay. So he doesn't want to be stabbed. Right. But he thinks, this guy isn't going to stab me. Yes. I mean, I have to say yes to that the way it's worded. Does he think that the knight might try to stab him and not

Starting point is 00:28:59 succeed? Yes. Yes. He's just really fast. He's got really good reflexes. He's like, sure, let the guy try. You're on the right track. He's going to somehow shave the person at a distance because he has a razor on a long pole. No, but he does. He's going to get the person into some position or away from his sword so that he won't be able to be easily stabbed and he can get away. No, but this is the right thing. He accepted the job to get the four silver coins because he... Did he set up some kind of condition under which he would do the job or how he would do it?

Starting point is 00:29:36 No. No, okay. He realized something. But he realized something. He realized... Does it have something to do with what hand the knight uses? Like he's handed and you could like sort of pin that arm against his side while you're shaving him or

Starting point is 00:29:49 something? No. No. Something to do with what handed the barber is, whether he's left-handed or right-handed or something. No. Think about the operation of shaving and... Oh, because he would have the blade against the guy's neck. It's like, go ahead, sure, stab me. When you're shaving someone. After the apprentice is done with the shave, the soldier asked him why he wasn't afraid of getting killed. And the apprentice barber said, sir, I was never in any actual danger. Had you suddenly twitched your head and caused me to cut you, I'd have immediately cut your throat and run away. The story goes on.

Starting point is 00:30:20 Upon hearing this, the soldier realized that his threat almost could have gotten himself killed, and he gave the barber an additional silver coin. And from this day onward, he never again threatened to kill barbers who accidentally cut him. What a happy ending, and nobody died. Thanks, Frank. Thank you. And if anybody else has a puzzle they'd like to send in for us to try, please send it to podcast at futilitycloset.com. Futility Closet is supported entirely by our awesome listeners. If you'd like to contribute to our celebration of the quirky and the curious,

Starting point is 00:30:51 please check out our Patreon page at patreon.com slash futilitycloset or see the support us section of the website at futilitycloset.com. While you're at the site, you can also browse through Greg's collection of over 10,000 compendious amusements. Check out the Futility Closet store in case you want a penguin-themed mug or a t-shirt or a pillowcase. Learn about the Futility Closet books and see the show notes for

Starting point is 00:31:15 the podcast, with links and references for the topics we've covered. If you have any questions or comments for us, you can email us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. Our music was written and performed by my phenomenal brother-in-law, Doug Ross. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.

Futility Closet - 222-The Year Without a Summer

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