Futility Closet - 224-Lady Death

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 Brillo puzzles to a flooded Africa. This is episode 224. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. Lyudmila Pavlichenko was training for a career as a history teacher when Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941.

Starting point is 00:00:32 She suspended her studies to enlist as a sniper in the Red Army, where she discovered a remarkable talent for shooting enemy soldiers. In today's show, we'll trace the career of Lady Death, the deadliest female sniper in history. We'll also learn where in the world Futility Closet podcast is and puzzle over Air Force One. Yudmila Pavlichenko was born in 1916 in Bielitserkho in the Russian Empire, what's now Ukraine. Her father was a factory worker and her mother was a teacher. She described herself as a tomboy who was unruly in the classroom and competitive athletically.

Starting point is 00:01:10 She said she wouldn't allow herself to be outdone by boys in anything. When she was 14 years old, the family moved to Kiev and she worked as a metal grinder in a munitions factory. While she was there, a co-worker convinced her to come to a shooting range and that changed her life. She found she had natural aptitude, hand-eye coordination, muscle steadiness, good eyesight, and patience. After four shots at a target, her instructor said, for a beginner, that is simply amazing. It's clear you have ability. She joined a shooting club that held sessions once a week and learned ballistics and the history of firearms. She wrote later, in their own way, firearms are beautiful. They are pleasant to pick up and convenient to use. They earned the love of the people who took them into wars of unbelievable ferocity.

Starting point is 00:01:48 In 1937, she enrolled in Kiev University to study history, and there she competed as a sprinter and a pole vaulter. At the same time, she took a two-year course at a sniper school that had opened in the city, but she still thought of it as recreation. When World War II began, she felt confident in her country's prospects and took a job at a library in Odessa. But when Hitler sent German troops and Romanian allies into the Soviet Union in June 1941, she presented her sniper certificate at the recruiting office in Odessa and was assigned to the Red Army's 25th Rifle Division. About 350,000 women fought in

Starting point is 00:02:19 the Soviet military during World War II, and Russia was the only country to use female snipers in frontline combat roles, where they performed exceptionally well. Over the course of the war, the 2,000 female snipers in the Red Army would amass 12,000 German kills. Up to this point, Pavlyuchenko had fired only at targets. She knew she had ability, but she never killed anyone. She wrote, I knew that my task was to shoot human beings. In theory, that was fine, but I knew that the real thing would be completely different. Her war started slowly. On June 24th, she boarded a military train for the front, where she got her first uniform. The battalion commander recognized her sniper certificate but said they had no appropriate rifle for her, so she was set digging trenches

Starting point is 00:02:57 for the moment. They gave her a single grenade to use if the Nazis broke through. She finally got a rifle in the second half of July, but they still didn't have a telescopic sight for her. It wasn't until August 8th that she made her debut as a wartime sniper in the divided village of Belaevka near Odessa. Romanian troops occupied the west part of the town, Soviets the east. Her captain called her to his command post and pointed to a porch 400 yards away where two Romanian officers were standing. He said, looks like that's the staff headquarters. Can you reach it? She said, I'll try, comrade captain. And with her third and fourth bullets, she killed both men. She wrote later, that was my baptism of fire. From that time, I regarded myself, and so did my comrades, as a fully fled sniper. Hitler's forces besieged Odessa on August 8th, and the Russians

Starting point is 00:03:39 there would fight off three successive assaults on the city. On her first day on the battlefield, she found herself frozen with fear until the young Russian soldier beside her was shot dead. She wrote, he was such a nice, happy boy, and he was killed just next to me. After that, nothing could stop me. In her first 75 days at war around Odessa and Moldova, she would kill 187 Nazis, including 100 officers. The fighting could be exhausting and chaotic, and she had to learn quickly. On the morning of August 19th, her company was smothered by a wave of fire and a shell hit the trench parapet just two meters to her left. The blast destroyed her rifle and she woke up in hospital, shell-shocked but alive. She was released after 10 days, and when she presented herself again for

Starting point is 00:04:18 duty, they told her she'd been promoted to corporal, though she'd been in the army for only a month and a half. The general orders to snipers from high command were to give the enemy no peace, to harass and demoralize him. On the flat, almost treeless step that required extraordinary courage, the snipers would sneak forward by night from their front line, 400 to 600 meters into no man's land, and set up hideouts there. As the sun rose, they'd study the enemy's movements and then in mid-morning open fire, sometimes with startling accuracy. In one of these attacks, she and a fellow sniper fired 17 times each. She killed 16 Germans and her companion killed 12. On the following day, they went back to the same spot and killed 10 and 8, and wiped out a machine gun squad as well. Apart from her natural talent, she found she had the ineffable hunting instinct that separates the sniper from an

Starting point is 00:05:04 ordinary rifleman. Others define it as strength of purpose or willpower. She once said, the only feeling I have is the great satisfaction a hunter feels who has killed a beast of prey. Another example of her skill, in late September, south of town, she climbed a tree to fire on a Romanian machine gun emplacement. With four shots, she disabled the gun and killed three men, including one who turned out to be Gheorghiu Caraga, the adjutant of the Romanian dictator Ion Antonescu. Her tally was now over 100 kills. She was presented with a sniper rifle inscribed with her own name, and three days later she was promoted to sergeant. Despite these successes, the city was beginning to weaken. At the Battle of Tatarca, she led a detachment of 10 men and was wounded by another mortar round.

Starting point is 00:05:43 After she recuperated, she and 50,000 troops were finally ordered to withdraw from the city, which would fall to the fourth Axis assault. As she was waiting to leave the city, she later wrote, I contemplated the ruins of the enlistment office. Without doubt, the war had had a sort of magical impact on my life. I had been intending to be a school history teacher or a research assistant in a library or archive. Instead, I had become a frontline sniper, a skillful hunter of people dressed in Romanian and German uniforms. Why had those people come here onto my land? Why had they forced me to give up my peacetime profession? On October 17th, she boarded a ship for the first time in her life and crossed the Black Sea to Sevastopol on the Crimean Peninsula. The fighting here was just as desperate, and by the end of the

Starting point is 00:06:22 month, the city was besieged just as Odessa had been. The commander of the coastal army told her she was now a senior sergeant and put her in charge of a sniper platoon. The first Axis assault on Sevastopol lasted 25 days, but was repelled almost entirely. In the lull between assaults, the role of the snipers became even more important. They had to observe no man's land, reconnoiter, and hunt for soldiers and officers on the front line. Occasionally, she'd venture alone into the enemy rear, hoping to raise her tally to a thousand Nazis. She wrote to her sister, but before you can wipe out the thousandth cutthroat, you have to survive 999 times after taking an accurate shot at an enemy who wishes to kill you, whatever the cost. This was even more dire than she makes it sound. In her memoir, she mentions that snipers who were captured were

Starting point is 00:07:02 typically not taken prisoner, but shot directly on the spot. And if they were female, they were sometimes gang raped first. So she always carried a grenade and a pistol. She wrote, To give just one example of her skill in battle, during the second German attack on Sevastopol, at one point she had to fire on a six-ton armored transport that was advancing on a Soviet trench. She had a minute to solve the ballistics problem. The heads of the machine gunners in the transport were two meters above

Starting point is 00:07:32 ground level, and the parapet of her trench where her rifle rested was about 20 centimeters high, so she calculated that the target angle was 35 degrees. The transport was moving, so she had to aim at a point traveling ahead of it and consider that at a distance of 200 meters, her bullet would take a quarter of a second to reach the transport, during which time the vehicle would advance four meters. She fired so accurately that she hit the Germans through the eye slots in their helmets. The Germans responded with mortar fire, which gave her her third wound of the war. As Sevastopol became a fortress, the Germans called up their own sharpshooters to help in the siege, and increasingly she found herself engaged in duels with enemy snipers. This was grueling. She described it in a 1961 address, you see the sniper through your sights, his eyes, the color

Starting point is 00:08:12 of his hair, but he sees you as well. At this point, everything can be decided in a fraction of a second. A duel like this puts a sniper out of commission for several hours. He is so weary that it is difficult to wring anything out of him. She might lie in position for 15 or 20 hours before her opponent finally gave her a clear shot and she could fire. One duel lasted three days before her opponent finally made what she called one move too many, and she finished him. She said afterward, that was one of the tensest experiences of my life. But she was exceptionally good at it. Altogether, she killed 36 enemy snipers. In January 1942, the Germans and the Soviets faced each other across a gully, the Germans on the north and the Soviets on the south.

Starting point is 00:08:50 The gully had been crossed by a railway bridge, but its central span had been bombed away. She was told that a top-class German rifleman had appeared recently and killed five Soviets in the last two days, including two officers. She wasn't surprised to learn he was using the north side of the railway bridge as his hideout. She'd been considering the southern side herself. Instead, she and a partner hid in a trench and she studied the bridge for two days through binoculars. At first there was no sign of her opponent, but at last he showed up, just as she'd expected, taking up a position on the ruined bridge. Her partner carried a decoy out into no man's land to attract a shot, and when the German sniper showed himself, she fired. He fell into the gully. It took her a quarter of an hour to reach the body, which she found she

Starting point is 00:09:28 had shot between the eyes. She took his regalia, his notebook, and his rifle. It turned out he'd fought in Poland, Belgium, and France, and served in Berlin as a sniper instructor. He'd had 215 kills. She had 227. This duel brought on huge publicity, as the Soviet leader seemed to realize her value as a propaganda tool. She was featured in newspapers around the city and directed to take part in a conference of women activists in the defense of Sevastopol, but she had little patience for any of this. At the beginning of March, she was presented with a sniper-destroyer diploma from the Military Council of the Coastal Army, certifying that she'd killed 257 fascists. Her platoon had not lost a single soldier.

Starting point is 00:10:09 On June 7th, the Germans began their third assault on the city. By this time, she'd been fighting there for eight months, and her exploits had made her famous. The Soviets called her Lady Death, and the Germans called her the Russian Bitch from Hell. They played radio messages saying, Lyudmila Pavlichenko, come over to us. We will give you plenty of chocolate and make you a German officer. They also vowed to tear her into 309 pieces. This pleased her because she said, they knew my score. Her kill count, 309, had made her the highest scoring female sniper of all time. And those were kills that had been observed by a second party, which was not always possible. The British military historian Martin Pegler says a total count of 500 would not be improbable. She received her fourth wound when her position was bombed and she took shrapnel to the face. She was evacuated by submarine to Novorossiysk, promoted to junior

Starting point is 00:10:50 lieutenant, and given the order of Lenin, among the highest awards in the USSR. When she spoke at a meeting in Moscow about the events in Sevastopol, her superiors noted that she spoke well and knew her subject thoroughly, so they asked her to address some young workers about her experiences in the siege. She was reluctant to do this, but her commander said, you'll get used to it. You have the makings of an orator. People need to be told about this awful war. He introduced her to the writer Boris Lavrinov, hoping he might write a propaganda pamphlet about her. She resisted that, too. She didn't like writers, didn't want to be well-known, and thought that the story they planned to tell was inaccurate. In the end, they forced her to do it, and she felt the result was

Starting point is 00:11:24 largely untruthful. But 50,000 copies were printed, and that became the basis of further articles in newspapers and magazines. The Red Army also printed a leaflet with her picture and the slogan, Shoot the Enemy and Don't Miss. Between 1942 and 1945, more than 100,000 of these were distributed on the Eastern Front. This opened the way to a reluctant new career representing her country. On August 3rd, Franklin Roosevelt telegraphed Stalin to say he was planning an international student assembly that September in Washington, where delegations from the Allied powers would meet. He hoped the Soviets could send two or three Soviet students, preferably some who had

Starting point is 00:11:57 taken part in combat against the German fascists. This all happened very quickly, but she was asked to go. Her superiors told her the Americans knew nothing of the war. She would have to convey that it was a life-and-death struggle for the future of humanity. They hoped that she might be able to convince the Allies to open a front in Europe to fight back against the Axis powers and to relieve some of the pressure on the Soviet Union. In America, she became the first Soviet soldier to be received by a U.S. president when she met FDR at the White House, and Eleanor Roosevelt invited her on a tour to tell about her experiences as a woman in combat. She wasn't cut out to be a diplomat. She was shy, and she said she just wanted to kill fascists. She once said a sniper should not draw attention to him or

Starting point is 00:12:33 herself. The main prerequisite for operating successfully was remaining hidden. That made her wary in public, where she was now expected to face press and radio reporters and show the Soviet army in the best light. She was disgusted by the sexism she found in America, where people seemed interested only in her appearance. She said, Don't they know there is a war? Asked whether she wore makeup at the front, she said, Here are some excerpts from a news conference she held in Washington. She said,

Starting point is 00:13:04 him. Are women able to use lipstick when at war? She said, yes, but they don't always have time. You need to be able to reach for a machine gun or a rifle or a pistol or a grenade. A woman journalist asked, is that your parade uniform or your everyday uniform? She said, we have no time for parades at the moment. Another woman journalist asked, but the uniform makes you look fat or don't you mind? She said, I imagine through gritted teeth, I am proud to wear the uniform of the legendary Red Army. It has been sanctified by the blood of my comrades who have fallen in combat with the fascists. It bears the Order of Lenin and an award for military distinction. I wish you could experience a bombing raid. Honestly, you would immediately forget about the cut of your outfit. A man asked, what color underwear do you prefer, Lyudmila? She said, in Russia, you would get a slap in the face

Starting point is 00:13:40 for asking a question like that. That kind of question is usually only asked of a wife or a mistress. You and I do not have that relationship, so I will be happy to give you a slap. Come a bit Good for her. What unbelievable questions. I know, and she was young. She didn't speak English. This is through an interpreter, too. I mean, it's like the most pressure you could possibly have on you. Asked how she felt about killing, she said,

Starting point is 00:14:03 about killing, she said, every German who remains alive will kill women, children, and old folks. Dead Germans are harmless. Therefore, if I kill a German, I am saving lives. In Chicago, she told a crowd, gentlemen, I am 25 years old and I have killed 309 fascist occupants by now. Don't you think, gentlemen, that you have been hiding behind my back for too long? She did her best to promote the war effort, but came away feeling she had been viewed only as a curiosity. She said, in the Soviet Union, I am looked upon as a citizen, as a fighter, as a soldier. She met Stalin again when she returned to the Soviet Union. He told her she would not be returning to the front. He said, if you go back to the front, you will kill a hundred fascists. However, they may also shoot you down. But if you train a hundred snipers, pass onto them your priceless knowledge, and each of them shoots

Starting point is 00:14:40 even ten Nazis, how many will that be? A thousand. There's your answer. You are more needed here, Comrade Lieutenant. She was promoted to major, awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union, her country's highest distinction, and commemorated on a Soviet postage stamp. She trained snipers until the war ended and then went back to her history studies at Kiev University. After she finished her dissertation, she returned to Moscow and became a research assistant in the fleet history section of the Soviet Navy. But she carried the scars from her battles, both physical and mental. She fought a lifelong battle with alcohol and suffered from the effects of her head wounds, including deafness. In June 1953, when she was a major in the Naval Coast Guard,

Starting point is 00:15:15 her illness finally forced her to retire, retaining the right to wear the uniform. She died in 1974 at age 58 and was buried in Moscow with full military honors, content that she'd paved the way for women in the Red Army. She said, whatever we do, we are honored, not just as women, but as individual personalities, as human beings. I have some updates on the location encoding systems that we discussed in Episode 218. Ryan Stark wrote, I just wanted to mention another grid system that I'm familiar with and know gets lots of use, the Maidenhead Locator System. Amateur radio operators, ham radio, such as myself, use this system for logging remote contacts.

Starting point is 00:16:06 This is common in amateur radio contests where points are assigned by kilometer distance between stations. I live in the square CM87XO, which covers most of my hometown, Union City, California. CM denotes a 10 by 20 degree box and 87 denotes a smaller 5 by 10 degree box inside that. An XO narrows it down to an area of 2.5 minutes latitude, 5 minutes longitude. It can be further refined down to the needed precision. 10 digits in Maidenhead is about a house-size box, and in PLUS code, open location code, it's about 3 square meters, as you mentioned on the podcast. Interestingly, they're both based on the same coordinate system, WGS84, although originally Maidenhead was not, and some people's locators changed when the system switched in 1999. What I like about Maidenhead over Pluscode is that they

Starting point is 00:16:55 chose the precision of each division to make the manual conversion to degrees, minutes, seconds easier. Take a look at the Wikipedia page for a good description of that. The Maidenhead Locator System is named for a town in England that was the site of the 1980 meeting of a working group of the International Amateur Radio Union, where they chose to adopt this global locator system out of 20 different proposed systems. Amateur radio operators hold contests based on the number and distance of the stations contacted, so the operators needed a global system for exchanging location information that would be simple, concise, and not easily misunderstood in case of interference. So a Maidenhead locator conveys information about latitude and longitude using a short string of characters composed of alternating pairs of letters and digits,

Starting point is 00:17:42 where the first two letters indicate a zone of 20 degrees longitude and 10 degrees of latitude, and the following pairs indicate successively smaller zones. The Wikipedia article does explain the math behind how the codes were chosen to simplify manual calculations, and the link will be in the show notes for those who want to pursue that. There are actually several different systems that provide location codes. When Google devised their PLUS codes systems that provide location codes. When Google devised their PLUS codes or open location codes,

Starting point is 00:18:13 they wrote up a list of attributes that they thought would define ideal location codes, such as that the codes should be short enough to be memorized, a code shouldn't require additional information like a country name, you should be able to tell if two codes are close to each other, codes should be able to be created and decoded offline if need be. Codes should be able to be truncated to specify a larger area. And the algorithm should be public and free to use. The Maidenhead locator system actually fulfills most of Google's proposed criteria, with two exceptions.

Starting point is 00:18:45 The Maidenhead system uses vowels, so it's possible for the codes to form words, which Google doesn't think is ideal. And the codes are only officially defined to a length of eight characters, which doesn't identify a small enough area to be precise enough for, say, a specific house. Unofficially, the Maidenhead codes are sometimes extended further than the codified eight characters to provide more specific locations, but the systems for doing this might not be universally observed. I find this whole project fascinating somehow. It seems so simple and so elemental just to divvy up the Earth's surface into some addressable scheme.

Starting point is 00:19:17 Yeah. And there's so many different ways you could tackle that. Sure. I guess if you had a really good system, you could apply it to other planets even, you know? Oh, wow. I don't know if anybody's tried that yet, but maybe they have. And I would imagine that there were various arguments to be made about whether Google's proposed criteria are all necessary or preferable. And in episode 218, I briefly covered some of the

Starting point is 00:19:36 arguments made for and against the criteria of locations near each other having similar codes. Chris Spellman wrote in on that topic, addressing whether that's even always possible. Dear Podcast Cast, When coming up with a coding system for pinpointing places on the Earth, one has to decide an important question. Should places near each other have identifiers that are similar? What three words tries explicitly to avoid this for reasons given in the podcast? The addresses we use in the U.S. are mostly similar

Starting point is 00:20:05 for nearby places. For many of us, our neighbor's addresses are just a street number different from our own, or even have the same state, county, city, street, and building number, but with a different apartment number. However, this similarity of neighboring addresses doesn't always hold. For example, our family lives on a corner and we have a neighbor who lives on a different street. As an extreme case, one could imagine that right on a state border, two adjoining properties could have different states, counties, towns, streets, etc. Odder still, these two properties could have the same street and street number, but that's opening a different can of worms. From the podcast, I got the impression that plus codes try to give places that are right next

Starting point is 00:20:44 to each other similar identifiers. As with the human system, this generally happens, but not always. On the border of the larger sections, two tiny sections can have very different plus codes. For example, these four plus codes are right next to each other and touch at a point in Edwards County, Texas. Texas. 85 2x 2x 2x plus 2x 5. 86 2 2 2 2 2 2 plus 2 2 2. 75 x x x x x x plus x x x. 76 x 2 x 2 x 2 plus x 2 r. With some searching, I'd bet one could find a house whose front door and back door have two very different plus codes. This kind of discontinuity is unavoidable when we try to map the two-dimensional world into one-dimensional names. Anyway, thanks for turning your pod listeners on to plus codes and what three words. It's going to be fun to confuse my nerdy friends by telling them where I live. I wonder if then that's an argument for just not even trying to make them...

Starting point is 00:21:42 Continuous or to tell if some places are near each other? Yeah, to make them sort of visibly contiguous. Like if you just adopt a scheme where they just have every place have just a completely different code, then you won't be at least misleading anyone into thinking that two places are adjacent when they're not. That's true. I hadn't even realized that the plus code system

Starting point is 00:22:01 wasn't able to achieve that ideal that they had set out to. And I also thought that you could add to Chris's example of neighbors having very different addresses in the conventional system, where you can find, you know, parts of the same house or building that can be in different counties or states in the US or in different countries in Europe. We actually did a lateral thinking puzzle one time where that was the solution that the parts of a hotel crossed into two different countries. So, yeah. So the plus codes are probably an improvement over that. But Matt Sides wrote, Evening, Greg, Sharon, and obviously Sasha.

Starting point is 00:22:38 I enjoyed your discussion about what three words on the podcast this week. I've been using their site and app for a couple of years. I always thought it was quite a fun and clever way of directing people to places. However, I mostly use it to have fun in meetings. Whenever people start using buzzwordy type terms or ridiculous phrases in meetings or grant applications, I like to see if they map to a place on the What3Words globe, like international collaborationation Framework or Retrospective Gaps Analysis. It keeps me amused. I've listed some of my favorites below in case you want to take a peek.

Starting point is 00:23:10 In the meantime, did you already find that Futility Closet Podcast has a three-meter square way down in the Indian Ocean? Happy W3Wing. And I hadn't even thought to check if Futility Closet Podcast was an address in what three words. I'm kind of impressed they're using the word podcast as not everyone knows what one is yet. We should go visit it. We have to go way down in the Indian Ocean.

Starting point is 00:23:32 When I typed in Futility Closet Podcast to check the location at What3Words.com, the site gave me some alternatives just in case I'd gotten one of the words wrong. So I was able to see that Futile Closet Podcast is see that Feudal Closet Podcast is in Montana, and Utility Closet Podcast is in Saskatchewan, Canada. But they both exist. They both exist. All three of them exist. And I also checked out the phrases that Matt mentioned in his email, as well as some of the others he included. So international collaboration framework turns out to be in Western Australia, and retrospect gaps analysis is in

Starting point is 00:24:05 Northwest Russia. Some of Matt's other phrases that I thought were amusing were deeply frustrating meeting, which is in Oregon, and extremely positive meeting, which is in the Ashley National Forest in Utah. Says nothing loud is in Bayonne, France. Boring, boring people is in Los Angeles. And meaningless phrases abound is in Morocco. So when you check an address in What3Words, it shows you a really zoomed-in map of the indicated square. So if the address is in a city like Los Angeles, you'll see buildings and streets around the square. But if it's not near anything map-worthy, like if it's in the Indian Ocean or parts of Montana or Morocco, you might have to zoom way out to see any landmarks at all and get any idea of where you are.

Starting point is 00:24:50 You just see a lot of blank blue for the ocean or a lot of blank gray for land. On the topic of using three words as a specific identifier, Matt Ketz wrote, Good morning, FC crew. I just finished listening to episode 218 and your discussion of new ways of determining addresses, specifically what three words, reminded me of a couple of websites that do something similar. Meh is a deal-a-day site that uses three-word identifiers for orders

Starting point is 00:25:17 instead of order numbers so it's easier to remember them. And JiffyCat uses a more restricted form, adjective-adjective-animal, to name all of its gifts, once again to make it easier to remember and share them. And JiffyCat uses a more restricted form, adjective-adjective-animal, to name all of its gifts, once again to make it easier to remember and share them. I wasn't able to find out much about meh and its order identifiers, but the JiffyCat website notes that most randomly generated URLs are just a long string of letters and numbers, and they say, we thought it would be fun to do it differently. Our URLs follow the nomenclature adjective-adjective-animal. This is enough to give us a namespace of billions while also letting humans write them easier.

Starting point is 00:25:51 You're welcome. And playing around on the site to see some of the URLs, I did see that while many of them are kind of fun, like dearest organic bearded collie, idolized medium koala bear, and gigantic educated fish. That was one of my favorite. Some of them do require a bit more of an extensive knowledge of animals than the average person might have, such as demanding, polite hadrosaurus, bite-sized weird ibizan hound, or spicy, careful idolan helvum, which turns out to be a kind of fruit bat. But those are all, I mean, mostly memorable. I mean, you can...

Starting point is 00:26:27 It's memorable if you can remember how to spell Eidolon, but... More than like a random string URL would be. Yeah, definitely. And it's kind of fun, too. And then you can tell your friends you've learned a new kind of fruit bat. In episode 218, I had suggested that given all the problems that people's names can cause, maybe we should start assigning people some combination of syllables or characters like some of the location code systems do.

Starting point is 00:26:51 At the end of his email, Matt said, On a lighter note, when Sharon suggested we could adopt a similar system for names, I immediately thought of the Monty Python election night sketch, in which the silly party has a candidate named Tarkin, Flynn, Tim, Lynn, Bin, Win, Bim, Lim, Busimlimbustopfatangfatangolebiscuitbarrel, someone whose parents were clearly a fan of this naming convention. Thanks for many, many weeks of wonderful commutes. Thanks so much to everyone who writes in to us,

Starting point is 00:27:20 and I really appreciate how many people have been sending in pronunciation help for their names. Thank you all. If you have any comments or updates you'd like to send, please send them to podcast at futilitycloset.com. It's my turn to try to solve a lateral thinking puzzle. Greg is going to give me an odd-sounding situation, and I have to work out what's going on, asking yes or no questions. Air Force One has taken off more times than it's landed. How is this possible? Air Force One has taken off more times than it has landed. Okay. Is the number of extra times

Starting point is 00:27:58 a specific finite number? Like it's taken off exactly one more time than it's landed? Yes. And is it the number one? Yes, it is. I believe that's right. Air Force One, is it up in the air right now as we're recording? I thought of that as I was writing this. And I actually don't know. It's here to go for sure.

Starting point is 00:28:16 Yeah. But let's pretend it's on the ground. Okay. That same thought. I had that same thought. Has it done... By landed, do you mean like, you know, landed safely on the ground with its landing gear down so that if it's done anything other than that,

Starting point is 00:28:35 that counts as not landed, like it's crashed one time? No. Although that does raise an interesting question. No, that's not what I have in mind. That's not what I have in mind. That's not what you have in mind. When it took off the one extra time, did it take off under its own power? Yes. Okay.

Starting point is 00:28:55 And by Air Force One, you mean the plane that the president of the United States travels on? That's right. Okay. The one that I've got in my head. Yes. The Air Force One that's currently in service or it doesn't matter? It doesn't matter. Would you say that the previous Air Force One had taken off probably one more time than it landed?

Starting point is 00:29:14 I think that's accurate. I don't know. Okay. This one extra time that it took off. Was it like a specific time? Yes, actually it is. Was it the very first time it took off? No. The very last time it took off?

Starting point is 00:29:34 No. So would you say that the specific extra time, was it for a particular event? I don't know if I'd use that word, but yes. Okay. Well, I'm trying to think. You could take off at a particular time, like this is going to hinge on, I don't know, like the last day of the year,

Starting point is 00:30:00 or it's going to hinge on the calendar or timing or something, or it could be for an event. Yeah, it's more the latter. It's more associated with a specific event rather than like a calendar day or something. Okay. So would you say that the strange part of this was the taking off or the not landing?

Starting point is 00:30:22 Like it did something unusual for a takeoff or it did something unusual instead of landing? Neither. Okay. Did it take off twice one time? Like it somehow like took off from one location and then somehow didn't land but took off again. From a higher elevation.

Starting point is 00:30:45 Yeah, from a cloud or I don't know. No, that's not it. Okay. So did this, would, it's sort of associated with an event though. Would it help me to figure out what the event was? Like it's inauguration or like it's some event like that that i work out i mean if yeah that might be a tall-ish order but that would be helpful would the event be more associated with the presidency

Starting point is 00:31:15 as opposed to like an inauguration is associated with the presidency as opposed to the life cycle of the plane like when the plane is being tested or the plane is first put into service. The presidency. The presidency. So was it like inauguration? It was something like that. Something like that.

Starting point is 00:31:34 The last, like Obama's last day in office? No. No. Did this have something, did it occur during the Trump presidency? No. Did it occur during the Obama presidency? No, I'll tell you it was in the 1970s.

Starting point is 00:31:47 Oh, it's the same Air Force One since the 1970s? Well, no. To be clear, there's been a succession of airplanes with that designation, and I'm saying collectively they've taken off one more time than they've landed. So something happened in the 1970s. Would you say it was associated with world events outside of the presidency, like war or something like that? So it was associated with...

Starting point is 00:32:08 Does it matter which president? That would help. Nixon? Yes. Okay. Was Nixon on the plane at the time? Yes. Oh, is it because it's not called Air Force One if the person isn't president anymore?

Starting point is 00:32:24 That's exactly it. Oh my gosh. Air Force One is the person isn't president anymore? That's exactly it. Oh, my gosh. Air Force One is the call sign of the Air Force plane that's carrying the president. If he stops being the president in midair, then the plane stops being Air Force One. When Richard Nixon's resignation letter was released on August 9th, 1974, Nixon was flying to his home in Orange County, California. The pilot changed the call sign from Air Force One to SAM 27000 as they were flying over Missouri, and it landed with that designation. Oh, that's really clever. I like that.

Starting point is 00:32:50 We can always use more lateral thinking puzzles, so if you have a puzzle you'd like to send in for us to try, please send it to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. This podcast is supported entirely by our incredible listeners if you would like to help support our celebration of the quirky and the curious you can find a donate button in the section of the website at futilitycloset.com or you can join our patreon campaign where you'll get outtakes extra discussions on some of the stories, more lateral thinking puzzles, and updates on Sasha, our ever-diligent mascot. You can find our Patreon page at patreon.com slash futilitycloset, or see our website for the link.

Starting point is 00:33:34 At our website, you'll also find over 10,000 bite-sized distractions, the Futility Closet store, information about the Futility Closet books, and the show notes for the podcast. 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 awesome brother-in-law, Doug Ross. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.

Futility Closet - 224-Lady Death

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.