Futility Closet

In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll explore some curiosities and unanswered questions from Greg's research, including a novelist's ashes, some bathing fairies, the mists of Dartmoor, and a ballooning leopard. We'll also revisit the Somerton man and puzzle over an armed traveler. Intro: Amanda McKittrick Ros is widely considered the worst novelist of all time. John Cummings swallowed 30 knives. Sources for our notes and queries: The Pony Express ad is quoted in Christopher Corbett's 2004 history Orphans Preferred: The Twisted Truth and Lasting Legend of the Pony Express. It appeared first in Missouri amateur historian Mabel Loving's posthumous 1961 history The Pony Express Rides On!, but she cites no source, and no one's been able to find the ad. The anecdote about John Gawsworth keeping M.P. Shiel's ashes in a biscuit tin appears in John Sutherland's 2011 book Lives of the Novelists. "The comedian and scholar of nineteenth-century decadent literature, Barry Humphries, was (unwillingly