Source: Futility Closet
In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll explore some more curiosities and unanswered questions from Greg’s research, including a misplaced elephant, a momentous biscuit failure, a peripatetic ax murderer, and the importance of the 9 of diamonds.
We’ll also revisit Michael Malloy’s resilience and puzzle over an uncommonly casual prison break.
Intro:
In 1846, geologist Adam Sedgwick sent his niece some tips on pronouncing Welsh.
In 1961, psychologist Robert Sommer reflected that a person’s importance is reflected in his keyring.
Sources for our feature on notes and queries:
Justin Kaplan and Anne Bernays mention the naming of Deathball Rock, Oregon, in their 1999 book The Language of Names: What We Call Ourselves and Why It Matters.
The anecdote about the King Kong animator is from Orville Goldner and George E. Turner’s 1975 book The Making of King Kong.
The anecdote about Fred Astaire and the editor is from Brian Seibert’s 2015 history of tap dancing, What the Eye Hears, supplemented by this New Yorker letter.
Oxford mathematician Nick Trefethen’s jotted thoughts are collected in Trefethen’s Index Cards, 2011.
The identity of the “bravest man” at the Battle of the Little Bighorn is discussed in Thom Hatch’s 2000 Custer and the Battle of the Little Bighorn: An Encyclopedia and Frederic C. Wagner III’s 2016 Participants in the Battle of the Little Big Horn. But I don’t know any source that makes a decided claim as to his identity.
“Icy Mike,” the bull elephant skeleton discovered on Mount Kenya, is mentioned in Matthew Power and Keridwen Cornelius’ article “Escape to Mount Kenya” in National Geographic Adventure 9:7 (September 2007), 65-71.
Bernard Suits defines games in The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia, 1978.
The anecdote about Maidenhead, Berkshire, is…
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