In addition, scattered throughout the book are clues to Blaine's $100,000 Challenge, an armchair treasure hunt of visual ciphers and logic deduction devised by game designer Cliff Johnson, creator of The Fool's Errand.
Henry Fool | The Singing Fool | Nobody's Fool (1994 film) | Kissing a Fool | Fool's Gold Records | Fool's Gold | She's a Fool | Love's Made a Fool of You | Flashbacks of a Fool | Everybody Plays the Fool | David Gardner (The Motley Fool) | You Can't Fool Me Dennis | Tom Fool | The Queen's Fool | King for a Day... Fool for a Lifetime | Fool's Gold (band) | Fool Moon | Fool | April Fool's Day | April Fool's | The Motley Fool | The Fool (Tarot card) | The Fool's Progress | The Fool's Errand | The Fool of Quality | The ''epankylotos brokhos'' or the modern Tom fool's knot | Sutra of the Wise and the Fool | Submarine Tracks & Fool's Gold | No Fool No More | Nobody's Fool (Haircut One Hundred song) |
Abbey's first novel, Jonathan Troy (1954), is set entirely in a thinly disguised Indiana, and his novel The Fool's Progress (1988), which he called his "fat masterpiece", is an autobiographical account of his growing up in this area and his imagined attempt to return home after a lifetime spent mostly in the desert Southwest.
The device is usually mentioned as a joke between engineers, in the manner of a fool's errand, since there is no evidence of one ever having been constructed until very recently.
After killing his noisy refrigerator with a .357 Magnum, Lightcap puts on Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony at ear-splitting volume, drinks off a half-quart of Wild Turkey, and miserably dreams of past loves and his lost Appalachian home.