Futility Closet An idler's miscellany of compendious amusements

In October 2003, a couple hiking in the mountains of northern Sweden came upon 70 pairs of shoes, all filled with butter.

No one knows who put them there, or why.

“Twenty young men chase a cheese off a cliff and tumble 200 yards to the bottom, where they are scraped up by paramedics and packed off to hospital.”

That’s a typical description of the Cooper’s Hill Cheese Rolling and Wake, held each May at Cooper’s Hill near Gloucester, England. The participants run downhill after a Double Gloucester cheese, which the winner gets to keep. Theoretically they’re trying to catch the cheese, but it rapidly gets up to 70 mph (knocking over a spectator in 1997) and this rarely happens.

The racers themselves get sprained ankles, broken bones and concussions, and the first-aid services are getting stretched as the race grows in popularity. Last year they ran out of ambulances.
(Image: Wikimedia Commons)

Winnipeg resident Jim Sulkers lay dead in his apartment for two years before his body was discovered.

Sulkers was estranged from his family, and automated banking processed his disability checks and paid his bills.

When police finally climbed through the window in August 2004, they found his mummified body in the bed, spoiled food in the refrigerator, and a wall calendar that was two years out of date. Everything else was in perfect order.

If you live on the Atlantic coast, keep your eyes peeled for rubber ducks. In 1992, 29,000 bathtub toys were washed from a container ship into the North Pacific. For 14 years they’ve been working their way through the arctic, and they’re beginning to appear in the U.S. and Europe. The First Years, the U.S. company that made the ducks, is offering $100 in savings bonds to anyone who finds one — call 1-800-317-3194.

A masochist’s lunch menu:

• Casu marzu is a Sardinian cheese riddled with live insect larvae that can jump up to 6 inches. Wear goggles.
• Kopi luwak, sometimes described as “cat poop coffee,” is a Sumatran beverage made from berries that have passed through a civet’s digestive tract.
• Lutefisk is a Nordic dish made by soaking whitefish in lye. It is the only food refused by Jeffrey Steingarten, author of The Man Who Ate Everything: “Lutefisk is not food, it is a weapon of mass destruction.”
• “Stinky tofu,” a favorite of Mao Zedong, is marinated for months in a brine of fermented vegetables. Reportedly it tastes like blue cheese, but its smell has been compared to sewage, horse manure, and “a used tampon baking in the desert.”

Mark Twain wrote, “Part of the secret of success in life is to eat what you like and let the food fight it out inside.”