The Puzzler with A.J. JacobsThe A-Maizing History Of Corn Mazes w/ A.J. and Greg
Today, A.J. and Greg play a rhyming game featuring vegetables and games. Then, they get lost in the twists and turns of the history of the corn maze. They discuss mazes, labyrinths, obstacle courses and more.
Join host A.J. Jacobs and his guests as they puzzle–and laugh–their way through new spins on old favorites, like anagrams and palindromes, as well as quirky originals such as “Ask Chat GPT” and audio rebuses.
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"The Puzzler with A.J. Jacobs" is distributed by iHeartPodcasts and is a co-production with Neuhaus Ideas.
Our executive producers are Neely Lohmann and Adam Neuhaus of Neuhaus Ideas, and Lindsay Hoffman of iHeart Podcasts.
The show is produced by Jody Avirgan and Brittani Brown of Roulette Productions.
Our Chief Puzzle Officer is Greg Pliska. Our associate producer is Andrea Schoenberg.
Hello, Buddler is Welcome to the Puzzler Podcast, the two step verification in your online puzzle account. I am your host, AJ Jacobs, and I am here in the Sleek iHeart Studios with Chief Puzzle Officer at Greg Plisco.
Welcome Greg, Thank you Aj. I love when we get to come here to iHeart. It's great, really, it's the air conditioning is good. Free coffee, yep, he takes good care of us. We're happy here.
A crazy haul which plays music while you walk down.
It exactly well, I have that in my own house. All my favorites, all the things I've written. As I walk down the hall, they play for me every morning. It drives the kids crazy, but it makes me feel proud. Well good. I'm glad to be up from the Puzzle Lab because it's beautiful. It's that time of year, summer is well, it's not quite turning to fall, but we can anticipate the fall coming. Don't rush me when we hit that time. Everyone is anticipating. You know what it is, corn maze? Corn mazes. You were going to say school, but no, not school, corn mazes.
Yes, it's back to back to corn maze time.
Everyone is kind of kids can't wait. Well, and you have some experience with corn mazes, which we'll talk about, But do you want to just explain what a corn maze is to just six people who have never heard of them?
Yes, well, it is a it's a chapter in the book that we worked on together, the Puzzler, and it is when they turn a cornfield into a maze, so they chop little passageways and uh. And you go with a family and you get lost for an hour or so and it's a lot of fun and weirdly, very recent invention nineteen ninety three.
I I can't believe it's weird.
I thought it would go back to ancient Greeks.
You know, I thought at least the colonial time.
Wait last last before we start. The first corn maze was named by none other than Stephen Sondheim, who was a friend of the designer, and he said, you have to name it the Amazing maze maize.
Like, oh, I see Stephen sometimes said, you know you should call this a corn maize. That's brilliant, The Amazing Maize maize. That's very good. I wish that was the puzzle I had come up with. That's not the puzzle, No, I've been thinking, if we can have mazes made of corn, surely we can have other things made from other vegetables, right, love the premise, right, like asparagus word searches or egg plant boggle or something like that, right, right, I mean why not? Why why not name that Stephen Sondheim eggplant boggle. I put together some descriptions of these new vegetable creations with an added wrinkle. The creations themselves will be two rhyming words.
Oh all right.
So for example, I could say, for example, Swiss greens used as the lawn in back of your house.
Okay, I think I got it, charred yard, charred.
Yard, right, Swiss charred in the yard and back of your house. So they're all going to rhyme, and they're all going to be a vegetable followed by the thing that it's, you know, that is made from the vegetable.
All right. So I'm already trying to rhyme eggplant with make plant, take plant.
Right. This is but this is how the puzzler brain works. Immediately the list of all the vegetables, you can see what rhymes. And I know some people are gonna write, They're gonna say, well, corn is technically it's not a vegetable, or maybe is it not? Well, I think you would think of it more as a starchy in your diet. If you're trying to eat a lot of vegetables, corn would not be the go to because it's mostly just sugar.
And we all know tomatoes are a fruit, so you don't.
Have right, it's so complicated to write it's about I'm sure i'd some of these things are not vegetables. And it's okay, all right, your first one is an avenue made entirely of red vegetables.
Okay, it took me a second, but I said red vegetables.
Beets Street, Beat Street right, beatstream right there, crossing right down Times Square and beat Street, Cold Place. This is a fictional city of gold built with guacamole ingredients.
Oh that's great. That is a great one. And I believe because I only know one fictional city of gold, which is El Dorado's avocado, El Dorado Avocado.
The other way around, the avocado, El Dorado Avocado. It's all o the formed corn, maize vegetable thing. But you get credit, which I'm going to give myself credit. Absolutely exactly, absolutely wasn't El Dorado. Where was it? Theoretically somewhere central I mean, it's not real.
If I knew where it was.
El Dorado's not real, right, If we knew where it was, we wouldn't be sitting here anyway. I think it was in Central America purportedly, and therefore it might have been made of avocados.
I don't know that it all works, very realistic.
Moving to a different part of the world. A traffic circle paved with cabbage like vegetables from Belgium.
Oh, fantastic. Okay, I got one part of it, I got roundabout or did I not get rid of those?
Well? I'm maybe you did, all right, Yeah, of course you did.
Oh it took me a second.
From Belgium. I figured that's where you would have gone first.
And no. Okay. So Brussels sprout or is it Brussels sprouts roundabouts?
Yes, very good, Brussels sprouts roundabouts? Excellent, exactly right, exactly.
I love that these are good because they're not just you know that you are making me work.
Okay, good, you're a thinker. You're a thinker. Sometimes famous French landmark erected with courgettes.
Wow, Okay, I've got a couple of options. I mean Eiffel Tower, so it could be Eiffles.
I will also tell you there's a little note in the margin of this document from one of our producers. Is there an easier way to clue the vegetable sassen?
Yeah, thank you, Neel exactly Corsette. I'm not a chef. I don't have a Michelin star.
There wasn't easier one.
Wait, corget is how do you spell corsette?
Give me c o U are g e t t e s corgetts corsettgetable French word for this vegetable, which is why it's the perfect clue, neely for this particular one famous French landmark erected with corgetts.
Hilarious and impossible for me.
What vegetable rhymes with Eiffel Tower?
Eiffel Tower, there's sour kraut. How about that? No, Eiffel tower.
It's in the same family as brussels sprouts.
And cruciferous and cauliflower tower flower again, imagine that's built up all right. Corn mazes would be jealous of the califlower.
Eiffel Tower.
It is a lovely image and white broccoli. That's what I think of.
Well, it's the same. It's the same plant as broccoli. It's just cultivated to look totally different. Gotcha as is as is Brussels sprouts. And one of the others I think is in the puzzle I think is also the same plant.
Our good head.
It's not the next one though. Next one is Norwegian waterway, carved from Thanksgiving squash.
Well, I gotta love Norwegian waterways because I only know one, and I feel good about fjord yep, fjords gords gordj fjord yep. I keep mixing up the order, but.
That's all right, sorry, thanks squashes. Also, well, you know the clue is in the opposite order. The clue is waterway, squashaquash. So it's natural to put fjord gord. But the answer is gordfjord excellent, delicious, technical pedanticism. Here a little frozen gord delicious. Uh where prisoners are kept within bars of healthy greens.
Oh okay, all right, I like it. Uh. Kale jail, kale jail exactly. And that was top of mind because I had in the puzzle I just did with you, there was a kale reference so I was like, oh, which I cut a.
Gale's kale or something?
It was wait, what was it? Kate's kale?
Kate's kale?
Oh, Hudson scale like healthy vegetables, healthy, which I mean you can see she probably she seems like someone who eats a lot of kale.
So it's completely, completely So in the advanced version of these two episodes mashed together, it would be Hudson's Healthy Vegetables turned into a place to keep prisoners, and it would be Kate's kale jail.
Fantastic acrossover episode.
Amazing. All right, last one for you. A street car named Sweet Potato.
Okay, okay, it took me a second, but yes, yams trams.
Right tram. It's just a ya. You always want to make them possessive and plural.
I did get on the Yam tram people.
I think that's the play. Tennessee Williams should have written a street car named Sweet Potato. It's a Yam tram coming down the street. So what we should talk more about corn mazes? Should I do the extra credit now or should we do it after we I don't say.
Let's let's do it after Okay, give people dessert, and.
Yes, only because they're in the book. The book had corn mazes in them, right.
Which is why I feel we can just do a little detour, if you will, into the history of corn mazes, because I love, first of all mazes. I love the chapter the history. Uh one not safe for work part of mazes which we won't get into in detail, was the.
Weird Nude Benjamin Franklin. Surely that was you fair game, but yes.
This was one of the first famous mazes, was the Minotaur and the Labyrinth. But I never thought how did the minotaur come about? And it was because the Poseidon, I believe, put a curse on the queen and she fell in love with a bull. And there is in the mythology a very vivid scene of how the Minatauri.
Was created conceived.
Yeah, you know, the myths, Greek myths and Roman myths are demented.
Are you sure it was? I would have just assumed it was Zeus, and it was Zeus in the form of a bull, because that Zeus seems to spend all of this, does love that in the form of some animal, right, seducing somebody.
Or golden coins. Remember he turned into golden coins and seduced, by the way, is quite the euphemism.
Yeah, yeah, that is not. Zeus was not you know, whining and dining and convincing people to consent.
I mean he was a horrible, horrible god basically. Yeah, he would be canceled so fast, so fast as he should be, all right, So anyway, moving on. Then there were the famous hedge mazes in the Middle Ages, and perhaps the most famous is the one that I've forgotten the name of the Hampton Court made yes Court, which I actually went to as I did and it was I think I solved it.
I'm here now, so I just realized we're going to get letters if we don't clarify this. A maze and a labyrinth are different things.
Thank you for clarifying, right. I learned this while researching. A maze is technically a puzzle because you get to a place and you have to choose right or left or straight, and a labyrinth is more there's no choices. You just go around and around and you reach the center. And labyrinths actually are very chic nowadays. Yeah, because they're used as sort of a spiritual meditation type retreat. You walk around, it's walking meditation.
Some New York apartments are like labyrinths, but very very small ones.
Right there you go, And by the way, there are some labyrinth fans who it's you know, there is a split. It's like the Sharks and the jets in some ways because the labyrinth. One labyrinth fan told me labyrinths were invented to heal the psychic wounds that mazes inflects on people, which seems a little a bit of an exaggeration.
Well, but you know, partisanship is everywhere. So so the minotaur was actually in a labyrinth, right, it's very good. Like you, you wandered the maze, you could just there was only one way to go, and it was into the arms of the minotaur.
Yeah, exactly. It was rigged. It was not a good deal.
I could not a good deal. Crete was not a fair place.
But anyway, moving to the corn maze.
Wait, I brought this up because the hedge mazes are also labyrinths, right, or are the mazes?
I think most so that I know of are mazes because you do get lost. You are supposed to get lost.
There's that famous one in the Shining.
Exactly, which was yeah, which.
Is what saves spoiler alert saves Danny at the end, right, because.
And they are yeah, they can be creepy, so I think they are good. They are good cinematic devices.
Yes, And anyway you were getting from the Hedge Maze.
So then the modern version is the Corn Maze. In nineteen ninety three, as we said, Stephen Sondheim named it. It was the first one was created by this guy I interviewed for our book, Adrian Fisher, who is hilarious. He's he calls himself the greatest maze designer in the history of mankind. That is on his website. So he's not a modest man, but he you know, it is probably true. He's designed over seven hundred mazes and he designed the first Corn maze. And he's also very proud because he told me one time he was in a corn maze and these two this couple came up to him and said, did you design this maze? And they said, he said yeah. They said, well, last year we conceived of our first child in this maze. So be careful people. It's supposed to be happy family entertainment.
Well, you know, you need to have a happy family in order to enjoy the family entertainment. Great point another not say for work moment here on the puzzler.
Now, I don't know how that happened.
Poseidon and the minotaur and now the family conceiving their children in the corn maze, I don't.
Know how that happened. It's supposed to be a nice family show about maze.
Do we know our corn maze is different every year?
Yes, most of them. Well, it's interesting because I went to one that when I google hardest Corn Mays in America, I found this one called the Great Vermont Corn Maze, which is in of course Vermont, and it was He is considers himself an artist. He says, there are people who buy designs like Mick Mays's he calls them. Oh, of course, he designs his own every year. It's a different theme. So it's uh, could be dinosaurs. So the actual shape of the maze.
If you were like a drone flying above it, see a big dinosaur shape.
Yeah, that's kind of a weird thing to have a theme of because you cannot appreciate it while you're doing it.
Well, you're lost in it. You're like you don't even know where you are, let alone that you've traversed the shape of a stegosaurus exactly.
I went during the As you know, I wrote the book during COVID, which was a good time for us to write it. And so it was a thank you to the first responsors, which was very nice.
Oh the shape of it is a it spells out thank you exactly. Oh that's nice, very nice.
But he is hilarious because he is he's got a sadistic streak, as to many puzzle makers, and he.
I would never.
Not you, Greg, of course, but he he loves the fact that it was. It is incredibly frustrating and it takes several hours, can take up to seven hours. And when I called him, he said, I said, can I bring my son? He said, how old is your son? I said thirteen. He said, probably not a good idea because they'll just get frustrated and angry. So and he said he was very proud. Like many couples have gotten in fights during the.
Maze, someone's conceived children. I mean, you know you're in there for seven hours. What else are you gonna do? Well?
The other this one, he said, one family, one father got so angry he left. He abandoned his wife and kids in the naze, and like went out the emergency exit.
Yeah, so that was one of my questions. So they do have emergency exits your track, you can find your way out. Some of them have. I think that I've done a couple where there's a platform in the center where you go up higher you can get an overview of the maid.
Right exactly, and he has that and he often stands there like a pause, I like a god, yeah, and gives people hints and laughs at their follies. He loves. I asked him what he learned about life, and he said, well that a lot of people do not learn from their mistakes, especially young men, like eighteen to twenty one year old men. They will get to a wall, they'll go back and they'll just keep hitting that wall, and it's gonna change. If I keep going, it's gonna change. And that is not the truth.
No, And that's not the lesson you want to take from puzzles either, right. The point of the point, I think part of the point of the book is that solving puzzles helps you think more fluidly and flexibly about things. I often say, like, if you're stuck, take a step back, right, you're stuck on the puzzle, stop banging your head against the part you're stuck and go back a step or two because you probably made some assumption that turned out to be unhelpful or wrong. And if you just back up, you'll find your way around the obstacle.
And this is the physical version of Yes, that's exactly right. I love that. Yeah, So anyway, I recommend it if you do. If you are hardcore and want to get frustrated, then it is a lot of fun. If you have a relationship that's maybe a little shaky with your spouse.
Or could go either way. Yeah, but maybe not the best thing for it.
But yes, we are fans of of mazes. I actually prefer I did labyrinths because I went to a Labyrinth Society gathering and I've had it. Okay, some people say that it's like a mind changing experience, like it dropping like dropping acid. I found it more like, you know, half a glass of white wine. It was kind of relaxing.
But you prefer the psychological damage of maje.
It may exactly one of the massacists who prefer that. Okay, Well, with that, I want to hear what have we got for the listeners at home?
We speaking of psychological torture. We do have an extra credit in our corn Maze puzzle and here it is the entry to a building lined with German turnips.
Okay, I don't have it yet, so.
Expecting German turnips to be mentioned today at all.
No, it's not rude begas, is it really?
Well, don't give it away. No, it's not rudebagus rudevegas. I don't think either, neither German nor turnips.
I know ruda begas because my neighbors were very religious, but apparently they didn't like lent, so for lent they would always give up chocolate covered ruda begas, which I guess is not a very popular.
When I was a kid and in my family was Catholic, we I would give up lent for lent. Very meta, very very mad at yes, very smart.
Well, thank you Greg. That was fantas astic. And for you puzzlers at home, please check out our Instagram at Hello Puzzlers, where we post fun puzzles and other random pictures, and of course please come back tomorrow for more puzzling puzzles that will puzzle you puzzlingly.
Hey puzzler friends, this is Greg Pliska up from the puzzle lab with the answer to last episode's extra credit. This is from a game called Epitaphs with Moe Raka. Moe was given lots of clues to famous fictional epitaphs for famous fictional characters, and your extra credit was this, Larutan sazuak, Larutan sazuak. That's a very tricky clue for the epitaph of Danny Torrance, the little boy character in the film The Shining. If you remember, Danny spoke in that raspy voice and said everything backwards, particularly the word red drum, which was murder and very spoiler alert shocking. In this case, he's saying natural causes backwards. Larutad sazuak. Thanks for playing along with us, and we'll see you next time on sakdop reslup.
Thanks for playing along with the team here at the Puzzler with Aj Jacobs. I'm Greg Pliska, your chief puzzle officer. Our executive producers are Neelie Lohman and Adam Neuhaus of New House Ideas and Lindsay Hoffman of iHeart Podcasts. The show is produced by Jody Averragan and Brittany Brown of Roulette Productions, with production support from Claire Bidegar Curtis. Our associate producer is Andrea Show. The Puzzler with Ajjacobs is a co production with New House Ideas and is distributed by iHeart Podcasts. If you want to know more about puzzling puzzles, please check out the book The Puzzler by Ajjacobs, a history of puzzles that The New York Times called fun and funny. It features an original puzzle hunt by Yours Truly and is available wherever you get your books and puzzlers. For all your puzzling needs, go visit the puzzler dot com.
See you there,
