Scatter Brained

C H A P T E R   5

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120
S C A T T E R B R A I N E D
his only friends), Pablo Picasso (who named a daughter 
 Paloma, Spanish for pigeon), and Charles Darwin (who was 
an  active  member  of  a  London  pigeon  club).  Speaking  of 
whom . . .
BARNACLES
Th
  e same obsessive powers of observation that led to Charles 
Darwin’s great discoveries were for many years focused on, 
um, barnacles. After his historic voyage on the 
Beagle
 but be-
fore he wrote the evolution-introducing 
On the Origin of Spe-
cies,
 Darwin became fi xated on barnacles and other marine 
invertebrates. Over the course of eight years, he obsessively 
studied, drew, and dissected barnacles, eventually publishing 
four (
four!
) books on the creatures. He fi nally abandoned bar-
nacles in the mid-1850s and gathered his thoughts on evolu-
tion, publishing in 1859 
On the Origin of Species,
 which fi nally 
won him the fame his barnacle books had not. Which just 
goes to show that where there’s a neurotic, intractable will, 
there’s a way. And . . .
05
  Where There’s a Way, There’s 
a Will:
Unusual Wills
When Irish playwright and Nobel laureate George Bernard 
Shaw died in 1950, he left a substantial share of his estate to 
creating a new English alphabet. Shaw felt the Latin alphabet 
was “hopelessly inadequate,” and wanted to replace it with 
one that contained between 40 and 50 characters.

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121
✖  ✖  ✖
William Shakespeare fa-
mously bequeathed his wife 
his “second-best bed,” which 
seems pretty cruel. But in all 
likelihood, the second-best 
bed was the one they shared—
and therefore a fi nal romantic 
gesture.
✖  ✖  ✖
Th
  e comedian Jack Benny did 
even better by his wife. Th
 e 
day after Benny’s death, his 
wife, Mary, received one long-
stemmed rose from a fl orist. 
Th
  e next day, another came. When Mary called to ask about 
the deliveries, she learned that Benny had stipulated in his 
will “one perfect red rose daily for the rest of Mary’s life.”
✖  ✖  ✖
Th
  e only heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune, Daisy 
Singer Alexander was an eccentric woman who enjoyed drop-
ping bottles with messages inside into the River Th
 ames. In 
June of 1937, Alexander wrote a note reading, “To avoid all 
confusion, I leave my entire estate to the lucky person who 
fi nds this bottle,” sealed it in a bottle, and threw it into the 
river. Singer died in 1940. In 1949, a San Francisco dish-
washer named Jack Wrum was walking along the beach and 
happened across a sealed bottle. As a result of the note inside, 
he inherited $8 million.
✖  ✖  ✖
John  Keats  died  when  he  was  just  25—had  he  survived,  he 
might have become the greatest writer of his era. As it was, he 
You’re Like 
Sunshine on a 
Cloudy Day
German poet Heinrich Heine 
was not so kind to his wife. 
His last will and testament be-
queathed his entire estate to 
his wife, Eugenie—as long as 
she remarried. Why force her 
to remarry? So that “there will 
be at least one man to regret 
my death.”