Games, puzzles and bad artificial intelligence

The committee wanted a simple answer to a simple question: who owned American music? The witnesses immediately made the question less simple.

Mark Twain objected to the premise, Chuck D objected to the committee, Bruce Springsteen tried to answer in four verses, and LL Cool J asked why everyone else had been given smaller nameplates. By lunch, the official record showed that no hearing had taken place.

The session had stalled. Paul had a melody, George Martin had an arrangement, and nobody had a final line. Then Abraham Lincoln entered Studio Two carrying a stovepipe hat and the confidence of a man who had already edited the Gettysburg Address.

“A song divided against itself cannot stand,” Lincoln said. McCartney explained that it already had a bridge. Lincoln suggested a second bridge, a shorter speech, and fewer French horns. The record was finished before tea.

Reconstructed from Guy’s description while the original illustration is being recovered.

The officers expected Wagner. Instead, the door opened and Kid Rock began a performance nobody had requested and nobody could stop.

After several minutes, Hitler announced that the military situation was hopeless, the bunker acoustics were worse, and he could not endure an encore. Historians continue to argue over which development ended the war.

Reconstructed from Guy’s description while the original illustration is being recovered.

The full story is printed directly in the image above. It is restored here without replacing it with a newly invented version.

In the spring of 1961, the White House arranged a ceremonial meeting between President John F. Kennedy and former President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Someone decided the occasion required top hats, although nobody could later explain why. A military officer was supposed to stand behind them for the official photograph, looking solemn and prepared in case either hat attempted anything unconstitutional. A young clerk was told to send the invitation, but he found the wrong name in an old diplomatic file: Grigori Rasputin, Special Adviser to the Imperial Household, extremely difficult to dismiss.

Ordinarily, mailing an invitation to a Russian mystic who had been dead for forty-five years would have produced no response. Unfortunately, the envelope passed through an experimental postal machine designed to “improve chronological delivery.” It arrived in Petrograd in December 1916, several hours before Rasputin was due at a dinner that history suggests he had good reason to avoid. The invitation promised transportation, formal clothing and the opportunity to advise two American presidents. Rasputin signed immediately. The next morning, a blue flash filled a White House supply closet, and he stepped out carrying a fur coat, three onions and the expression of a man who felt the future had kept him waiting.

The ceremony was twenty minutes away, so there was no time for questions. An aide found Rasputin a military uniform, another placed a top hat on his head, and the Secret Service decided not to argue after he stared at them for several uncomfortable seconds. He was introduced as the newly appointed Deputy Secretary of Presidential Hat Security. Kennedy entered first. Rasputin studied his hat, measured the brim with two fingers and announced, “Seven and one-eighth. A narrow victory, followed by a difficult landing.” Kennedy asked what kind of landing. Rasputin replied, “The hat does not provide details.”

Eisenhower arrived wearing a slightly larger hat. Rasputin examined it and nodded. “Seven and three-eighths. Strong structure. Large command. Beware the factories that make too many hats.” Eisenhower asked whether he meant the military-industrial complex. Rasputin shrugged and said, “In Russia, we call them the people who own the felt.” The photographer placed Kennedy and Eisenhower in front and Rasputin directly behind them, where he could observe both hats without interfering with either president. This arrangement seemed sensible to everyone who had already accepted the existence of a federal hat-security department.

As the photographer prepared the camera, Rasputin began reading the future through presidential headwear. Kennedy’s hat showed him a bay full of pigs, a silver machine landing on the moon and a man with heavy jowls recording his own crimes on little reels. Eisenhower’s hat revealed trousers of unnatural width, jackets made from fabric that feared fire and music escaping into colored lights. Kennedy quietly asked whether Rasputin was predicting war. Eisenhower said he thought the Russian was warning them about leisure suits. The camera flashed before anyone could settle the question.

The developed photograph was magnificent. Kennedy looked confident, Eisenhower looked experienced, and Rasputin stood behind them as though he had personally arranged the twentieth century and was disappointed by the workmanship. The White House kept him for three days. He rejected a tax proposal as “too tight around the crown,” described the space program as “eight inches of vertical confidence,” and advised Congress to reduce the national debt by placing unnecessary senators inside one extremely large hat. Congress objected, mainly because no one could agree which senators were unnecessary.

At last, the postal machine was reversed. Before returning to 1916, Rasputin handed Kennedy a sealed note and told him not to open it until 1974. Kennedy asked what it contained. “The correct hat size for a man named Nixon,” Rasputin said. Then the blue light swallowed him, leaving behind only the uniform, the smell of onions and a handwritten warning inside Kennedy’s hat: Seven and one-eighth. Watch the bay.

The government has never explained the photograph, and the Smithsonian refuses to display the hat because it still predicts election results by changing size. The predictions are usually wrong, but the hat always insists it won.