Just Kidding

be a better place. People like Alan Abel, born in Zanesville, Ohio, in August of able, learned how to be successful from his father, who owned a small shop in town. To help boost his numbers, Mr Abel would artificially limit sales of unsold items to give customers a sense that suff fly was low, and it worked every time. Allen carried that know how with him to college and graduated from

Ohio State University with the bachelor's in education. He wanted to shape the minds of America's youth, a dream that eventually expanded into helping corporate big wigs improve their golf swing quite literally. In the nineteen fifties, he took a job teaching executives from Westinghouse about how different ballet positions could help them do better at their game, similar to how American football players took up ballet to be lighter on their feet during the game in nineteen sixty four.

In nineteen sixty eight, Able started a campaign to get a then unknown grandmother from the Bronx elected President of the United States. Her name was yet A Bronstein, a member of a political party called the Best Party, and with Abel's help, she ran on a comprehensive platform that seemed to appeal to almost everyone. Yet Ah promised to place a suggestion box outside the White House and put truth serum in the Senate water fountains. She also advocated

for a national bingo. Her campaign slogan vote for Yetta and things will get better. In May of nineteen fifty nine, however, Able undertook what could become the greatest project of his life and the reason he is still known to this day that even earned him guest spots on television shows like CBS Evening News and The Mike Douglas Show. Able became an activist for a cause near and dear to his heart, one that plagued the entire planet. He called

it Sina. The Society for indecency to naked animals. You see, he believed that animals, from the smallest squirrel to the largest elephant should be just as modest as humans were, which meant fitting them all for pants. Able first published a piece in the Saturday Evening Post outlining his plan before giving interviews and speaking directly to the people. For example, he wanted horses to wear Bermuda shorts, claiming a nude horse is a rude horse. Deers were to be clad

in burlap sacks. He even referred to zoos as burlesque shows. Two years later, Able and his wife Jean started picketing in front of the White House, where they called out President Kennedy for allowing his horses to wander around the grounds completely naked. A friend of Abel's named ge Clifford Prout also believed in the cause, and he willed four hundred thousand dollars to a clothing fund for any creature that stands higher than four inches or is longer than

six inches following his death. If all of this sounds absurd, well and that's because it was Sina. Yet a Bronstein and the ballet golf lessons were just some of the pranks pulled off by master hoaxer Alan Abel Sina had been a satirical commentary on how various books and movies were being censored in America. Abel had convinced comedian Buck Henry to play the part of g Clifford prout his yet a Bronstein campaign pokes fun at the absurdity of

American politics. Whenever a news outlet needed a sound bite for Yetta for their broadcast, it was his wife Jean who spoke to them as Yetta. And the picture on all of Yetta's and paign signs and posters, well, that was a photo of Alan's own mother. There would be more pranks, of course. In nineteen seventy two, Able pulled off a major stunt at the St. Regis Hotel in

New York City. He wrapped himself in bandages like a living mummy and announced to the press that he was, in fact, noted recluse and aviator Howard Hughes, preparing to be cryogenically frozen until the stock markets improved. Two days later, he came clean and let everyone in on the joke. Most of Abel's hoaxes preyed upon the nation's gullibility, specifically

that of the news media. He held a press conference after the Watergate scandal broke and pretended to be the informant Deep Throat able as deep Throat was even offered a book deal worth one thousand dollars for his story. Sadly, in nineteen seventy nine, all of Abel's pranks and hoaxes caught up with him. The fifty five year old jokester had been skiing near Sundance Ski Lodge in Utah when

he suffered a fatal heart attack. His widow phone the New York Times to break the traged news, which they published in his obituary on January two of nine, But the following day, Abel stood before a group of reporters to announce, in the paraphrased words of Mark Twain, the reports of my demise have been grossly exaggerated. The Times printed a retraction shortly thereafter. Alan Abele continued to pull fast ones on politicians and celebrities for the next thirty years.

Upon his actual death in two thousand eighteen, before we had The Daily Show and The Onion, we had Alan Abel, a man who spent his whole life raising kine Let's be honest. Everyone has a bad day at work. They might hit traffic during the morning commute, or misfile and important report. Maybe they even embarrassed the boss in a big meeting. Whatever the case, these fleeting moments of minor

drama are often forgotten about the following day. People move on, They go about their lives and continue doing their jobs, just as before. Nobody has to worry about their silly mistakes being preserved for eternity. Right. Sadly, Kushim wasn't so lucky. Kushim was, according to a five thousand, four hundred year old clay tablet, an administrator in the ancient Sumerian city of Uruk. Despite the idea of a desk jobbing a fairly modern concept, there were actually middle managers thousands of

years ago too. Kushim happened to be in charge of a grain silo and was responsible for tracking the barley that it received. He kept tabs on the shipments using clay tablets on which he engraved the calculations of his own accounting system. The grain was tabulated in bowls, with

one bowl equivalent to just over one point three gallons. Now, if he drew a bowl on its side, and then added a dot that equaled nine thousand bowls of barley or about eleven thousand, four hundred gallons, and then the final totals were noted on the other side of the tablet, and he always signed his work Kushim, represented by the symbols coup and sim etched into the top left corner

of each tablet above the tabulations. Seventy seven such records were discovered in the Temple of Inana in Uric, located today in what is known as southern Iraq. Inana was the goddess of love and war, first worshiped in ancient sumer The Babylonians, the Acadians, and the Assyrians all referred to her as Ishtar. The tablets found in the temple bore this signature and title of Kushim administrator, and depicted

a lot more than just the barley totals. They were also dated with pictographs of a brick building, a stalk of the barley plant, and a small bottle at the end, which represented the final product. In other words, Kushim was tracking beer production. The discovery of these tablets was important for several reasons. For one, much of what had been analyzed already was comprised of artwork and tablets once owned

by the ruling lass. For a long time, scholars weren't interested in mundane transactional records, but Kushim's tablets were business records, the kind of unique proto writing. They were a rare glimpse into administrative life in ancient Uruk by the people working on behalf of the rich. Second, literacy among the average citizens was not widespread. It was a skill reserved mainly for the elites and their scribes. Kushim didn't know

how to write or do basic arithmetic. His system had been designed for himself, simply to help him do his job better. Unfortunately, he wasn't entirely careful in his calculations. On one of the eight teen surviving tablets, he had added up the barley and finally arrived at the total of three thousand, nine hundred and ten bowls. But that

wasn't what he had written on the back. The opposite side of the tablet bore the number three thousand, eight hundred and ninety five, and his supervisor, Nissa had signed off on that total as well. So where did those other fifteen bowls go? Well, It's possible that Kushim had simply done the math wrong and that Nissa didn't know any better, just taking him at his word. But the other theory is more sneaky, that Kushem and Nissa were skimming a little barley off the top to make their

own beer on the side. To be honest, we don't know for sure what caused the discrepancy, but we do know that Kushim made what maybe the earliest known accounting error on record. Not only that, but the name Kushim itself is the oldest example of a person's name ever captured in writing. And that's what I love about this story, because sometimes our mistakes can be frustrating, while other times

they can be more than a little curious. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created by me Aaron Manky in partnership with how

Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can learn all about it over at the World of Lore dot com and until next time, stay curious, yeah,