Futility Closet
072-The Strange Misadventures of Famous Corpses
What do René Descartes, Joseph Haydn, and Oliver Cromwell have in common? All three lost their heads after death. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast, we'll run down a list of notable corpses whose parts have gone wandering.
We'll also hear readers chime in on John Lennon, knitting, diaries and Hitchcock, and puzzle over why a pilot would choose to land in a field of grazing livestock.
Sources for our feature on posthumously itinerant body parts:
Bess Lovejoy, Rest in Pieces: The Curious Fates of Famous Corpses, 2013.
Edith Sitwell, English Eccentrics, 1993.
I'd written previously about Descartes, Haydn, Cromwell, Bentham, Einstein, and Juan Perón. Thanks to listener Alejandro Pareja for the tip about Goya.
Listener mail:
Barney Snow's documentary about Gerald and Linda Polley is Where Has Eternity Gone?
Douglas Martin, "Robert Shields, Wordy Diarist, Dies at 89," New York Times, Oct. 29, 2007.
Listener Christine Fisher found Charles Thomas Samuels' interview with Alfred Hitchcock in Sidney Gottlieb's 2003 book Alfred Hitchcock: Interviews. It appeared originally in Samuels' 1972 book Encountering Directors.
This week's lateral thinking puzzle is from Kyle Hendrickson's 1998 book Mental Fitness Puzzles.
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Many thanks to Doug Ross for the music in this episode.
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