The Mustached Man Was …

We posted a pop quiz yesterday asking you to guess the identity of a mustached man on a long flight who read and snoozed before departing in his cashmere coat.

My hat is off to the wisdom of the crowds. Even with these very thin clues, and even though it took quite a while — it was the 315th guess, by Dave Damore — the truth came shining through:

The Reverend Al Sharpton.

One clue I didn’t give, since it would have made guessing too easy, was the book Sharpton was reading: Why Blacks Fear ‘America’s Mayor’: Reporting Police Brutality and Black Activist Politics Under Rudy Giuliani, by Peter Noel. The flight was from New York to San Francisco; interestingly, Sharpton received a police escort from the gate at San Francisco.

As for Damore, he’ll get his pick of Freakonomics schwag for his correct guess — even though he probably should have been disqualified since Sharpton was just one of 11 people he guessed. In the future, we will try to remember to specify one guess per post.

Finally: I had no idea there were so many mustached people still running around!