The Annotated Conundrums

Q: What turns a word into a sword and laughter into slaughter?

A: The letter S (p. 71)

* Known at the time as the “Trial of the Century Since We Don’t Expect There To Be Any Other Especially Noteworthy Trials This Century”, the 1905 case of United States v. The Letter “S” was the result of years of agitating by such luminaries as William Jennings Bryan, William Cullen Bryant, and plus-sized clothing magnate Lane Mullens Bryant.  Accused of over “seven billion gajillion” crimes, it was the first time the visual representation of a phoneme had ever been arraigned by the American court system.

Fig. 766 – These gallows built for S’s execution now stand in the Phoenix University Museum of Lexicological Justice.

Unfortunately, despite a parade of witnesses who testified to S’s violent tendencies, ability to turn the necesary “not” into the patently offensive “snot”, and close association with snakes, he was eventually acquitted by a jury of his peers.  The nation soon lost interest in the excitement over the new “not dying of consumption” fad, crippling the once-bright political prospects of the case’s prosecutor, Q (who sank into relative obscurity).

After his controversial memoir S Happens: Why I’d Do It All Again made S a hero in certain social circles, he retired to a palatial estate in Florida, appearing infrequently to speak out for the cause of various anti-lisping charities.  The United States wouldn’t see such a public alphabetical trial again until Rudolph Giuliani’s successful 1998 crusade against X.

Q: What time should an innkeeper visit an iron foundry?

A: When he wants a bar-maid. (p. 28)

* Most history texts will tell you that the first robot was invented in the 1920s, to serve as a decoy for President Calvin Coolidge.  (Cool-Bot also allowed the President to slip out of the White House for romantic peccadilloes without his wife suspecting anything. It was programmed to sound and act exactly like Coolidge, and perform all of his duties, both presidential and husbandly.)  But evidence has begun to appear suggesting that robots were actually walking among us as early as 1854, when they were employed in the hospitality industry in Wild West towns that were too dangerous for the women and effete snobs who normally worked at hotels and restaurants.

Fig. 134 – Some of these robots even became lawmen and cowboys

In the early years of manifest destiny, most “women” in border towns were robots, including prostitutes, laundresses, and, most commonly, bar maids. So if an innkeeper needed a new woman to serve drinks in his saloon, he would take a few donkeys for trade and go down to the iron foundry to place an order for a new one.

The practice was generally phased out as the American West became more hospitable to the fairer sex, with human bordellos first appearing along the Mexican border in the 1870s. Among the menfolk, these were infinitely preferable to robot bordellos, with their enormous, iron sexbots — the first human-staffed establishment was so popular, it was called “the best little whorehouse in Texas.”

Q: Why does Cupid carry an arrow?

A: Because it is a weapon for the bow (beau). (P. 129)

* Though now almost universally viewed as a positive force, in 1902 love was considered a controversial and destructive passion.  Many thousands of American men thought it closer to a disease than an emotion, blaming the French and Spanish for bringing it to previously untouched shores (overlooking the first known outbreak of love in the western hemisphere, Pocahontas’s catching of the contagion from englishman John Smith).  Understanding that Cupid was the source of love, several states passed laws declaring the rosy cherub an outlaw and thus an acceptable target for the violence of dedicated bachelors.  Cupid soon found himself in a dangerous game of cat-and-mouse.

Fig. 223 – A floorboard creaks!  Cupid realizes the innkeeper has betrayed him!  But can he reach his bow in time?

On the run and knowing that unarmed he would soon be a dead man, Cupid relied on the Shoshone training he received during his days with the cavalry fighting the Great Sioux War.  Always talented with bow and arrow, he forced himself to become a crack shot.  It was said he could aim, release, and re-nock at the rate of 20 dead bachelors per minute.   Wandering from town to town, righting wrongs and creating instant love connections, Cupid’s legend grew, increasing the ranks of single young men determined to “be the one what bagged the Cupe.”

The title eventually went to Eustace Marble, a drunk vagabond who stabbed Cupid in an opium den while fighting over a tin of dogfood.  Only then did Marble notice the wings on the addict’s back, and realize he’d murdered the only being capable of curing the unbearable loneliness which had driven Marble to drink.  Marble was so struck by the irony of the situation that he changed his name to O.Henry and wrote “Gift of the Magi”.

Q: What did the Egyptians do when they found themselves in the dark?

A: They turned on the Israe-lites, (P. 117)

* During Thomas Edison’s long descent from “America’s beloved genius” to “mad supervillain imprisoned in the earth’s core”, some tried to remove his evil taint from the inventions he created by theorizing that he had actually stolen their technology from the Egyptian tombs he had explored in pursuit of the evil Ka Stone of Manahotep.  The rumor that the electric lightbulb originated in Hatshepsut’s pyramid was never proven, though Edison’s 1978 death was caused by a bite from Aedes aegypti, the Yellow Fever Mosquito, the brand of mosquito pharaohs preferred for their cursing needs.

Fig. 324 – Edison, bored with improving the world, soon sought to destroy it

In addition, the joke’s contention that enslaved Israelites would somehow power the Egyptian lights is easily dismissed by Edison’s own experiments using American Jews as filaments.   Even if the human body could be used for the purpose, the resulting bulbs would be impractically large and whiny.

Q: Why does a miller wear a white hat?

A: To cover his head (P. 34)

* As a result of the uniquely hallowed place held by Fred Drake’s Conundrums as the go-to reference volume of American religion, this particularly joke is credited with introducing the false stereotype that all millers were Jewish (known as the “dough libel”) — because who else would need to keep their head covered all the time?

In actual fact, the miller’s famous white cap was an early attempt at workplace safety.  The crop-killing droughts  God visited upon America in anger over its hedonistic gilded age lifestyle left the heartland without wheat, forcing millers to make flour out of whatever nuts, bolts, or human bones they could obtain from the local junk man.  In addition to being disappointing in the flavor department, this sort of milling was far more dangerous.

Fig. 808 – A miller (r.) inspects a porch, soon to be ground into your morning bread.

Shrapnel wounds were near-constant, but the noisy mill drowned out the blood-curdling screams of the injured.  Thus the need for the headgear: the easily-stained white caps made blood stains more noticeable, alerting floor stewards which workers needed to be taken to the hospital and docked a day’s pay.

Q: Why is money like a whip?

A: Because money makes the mare go. (p. 40)

* At the end of the 19th Century, America’s dependence on the horse for transportation had become a serious problem.  Horse excrement filled the streets, the sound of clopping woke countless light sleepers, and the horses themselves grew extraordinarily powerful.  By 1896, the horse lobby was the single most powerful political force in Congress, and horses made up 5/9ths of the Supreme Court.  (The controversial “separate but equal” ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson actually wasn’t about race; its intent was to compel train operators to add a separate, private car for horses to ride in.)

Fig. 297 – “Dagobert,” the first horse millionaire

Another side-effect of America’s reliance on horse power was that horses became extraordinarily expensive to ride.  A single cross-town canter from a respectable operator could cost upwards of four dollars ($78,000 in 2010 money), creating a thriving new market outside of the tightly regulated horse-conomy.  Many horses would accept bribes under the table in exchange for unregulated, black market rides, circumventing their owners and becoming wealthy in their own rights.

Horses grew powerful to the point of being insufferable, until two unrelated events in the 1920s combined to end their reign: Ford’s effective mass production of the automobile, and the discovery that dogs loved the taste of horse meat.

** Though it was common enough at the time, the fact that the conundrum refers to a “mare” specifically should in no way suggest an implication of horse prostitution or equiphilia of any kind.

Q: What is the debt for which you cannot be sued?

A: The debt of nature. (p. 28)

* A misleading conundrum, and hopefully one that was never taken seriously. Human courts of law obviously have no jurisdiction over the wild places, but that doesn’t mean that nature has no recourse if a debt is not paid in full.  Specifically, a network of tough-talking carnivorous plants who serve as its strongmen.

Fig. 78 – The Ya-Te-Yeo plant collects on an overdue loan

This is the so-called “law of the jungle”: if you cross Mother Nature, she will have you beaten and possibly killed by a plant.

Q: Why should you be justified in picking the pockets of a vender of engravings?

A: Because he has pict-ures (picked yours).  (p. 29)

* Specifically, one of these pictures, engravings from the 1847 edition of The Public and Private Lives of Animals by J.J. Grandville.

Fig. 77 – “J’accuse!”

The illustrations were considered obscene by several prominent Midwestern preachers, because animals were shown wearing pants, which suggested that they had sex organs that needed to be covered up.  (Many Christian sects in the 19th Century held that, according to The Bible, animals did not have genitalia.)  The scandal made Grandville’s engravings extremely fashionable and sought-after in posh New England, which made the venders willing to sell them extremely wealthy.  As such, it was considered acceptable — and even pious — to rob these art dealers of their ill-gotten gains.

Q: Why is the bed the most dangerous place in the world?

A: Most people die in bed. (p. 81)

* What, to our modern eyes, appears to be a logical fallacy — mistaking correlation for causality — is, in fact, a harrowing peek inside the deplorable sleep-chamber conditions of fin-de-siecle America.  These days, we are used to padded mattresses, sturdy frames, and box springs wholly free from ice monsters and giant, harlequin-harvested mushrooms, but such was not the case at the end of the 19th Century, when the possibility of a painful death attended every trip to dreamland.  If not from being murdered by one of the phantasmagorical horrors that dwelt in and around the bed itself, then the sleeper would surely succumb to a fall from deadly heights as the bed took flight, or grew outrageously long legs.

Fig. 68 – A child narrowly avoids death

To steel oneself for the dangers of sleep, many prepared for bed with strong narcotics, which had a tendency to produce intense hallucinations in children.

Q: Why is a professional thief comfortable?

A: Because he takes things easy. (P. 138)

* This obvious joke about the laid-back cool of the professional scofflaw (which led to the phrase “cool as a cucumber-thief”) reveals a little-known fact about turn-of-the-century America: the accepted professional status of career thieves.  While prisons bulged with criminals of other sorts (arsonists, murderers, the Irish), thieves were allowed to roam free as one of the career choices understood to be a “profession”.  To achieve the height of respect in America one went to Harvard to be a doctor or lawyer, to Yale to become a priest, to Miskatonic to be necromancer, or to Crawgrizzle to be a taxidermist, or, alternatively, apprenticed oneself to a pickpocket or bank robber in order to learn this esteemed trade.  This last path is dramatized in such successful rags-to-stolen-riches novels as Horatio Alger’s Robbing Dick, The Enriching Story of Pilfering Pete, and The World Is Made Of Suckers, or a Highly Moral Tale For Boys.

Fig. 236 – One of many Hollywood films celebrating the solid dependability of these pillars of the community

As the only respectable profession open to the children of the underprivileged, thievery was held up as an example of American upward mobility and egalitarianism.  That observant Frenchman, De Tocqueville, often described the glorious sights of train hold-ups and diamond capers as an example to the decaying monarchies of Old Europe.  As we know, however, theft was outlawed in the 1950s.  In an era of anti-communist fervor, no redistribution of wealth — no matter how skillfully accomplished  — was allowed to flourish.  As a result, the traditional folk techniques of the once glorious American criminal have been allowed to languish and disappear.