Do Elephants Jump?

by David Feldman

  Submitted by Michael Finger of Memphis, Tennessee.

  Why Does Orange Juice Taste So Awful After You’ve Brushed Your Teeth?

  Catherine Clay, of the State of Florida Department of Citrus, offers advice that is hard to refute:

  Most dentists suggest it is better to drink orange juice first, rinse the mouth with water, then brush the teeth, since we should brush after eating or drinking rather than before. Based on personal experience, I can tell you that drinking the orange juice prior to brushing seems to reduce the terrible taste problems considerably.

  Flawless advice, Catherine, but where’s your sense of danger?

  For those of you who have never walked on the wild side, you’ve probably experienced a lesser version of the “toothpaste-OJ syndrome.” Perhaps you’ve followed a heaping portion of sweet cake with lemonade and thought that someone forgot to put sugar in the lemonade.

  The toothpaste-OJ syndrome works in reverse, too. We’ve always found that oranges taste particularly sweet after we’ve crunched on a pickle. These kinds of “flavor synergies” can work for bad or good (oenologists would argue that a Bordeaux and a medium-rare steak work together to enhance the taste of each), but aren’t the same phenomenon as an actual chemical reaction. Toothpaste contains a chemical base, such as baking soda, while orange juice and other citrus fruits contain citric acid. The experts we spoke to were not sure of whether there might be a chemical reaction that would affect the taste of orange juice so drastically.

  Clay cited the mint flavorings of most toothpastes as an offender as well:

  Eating a peppermint, spearmint, or other mint candy, then drinking orange juice results in the same problem. Also, most toothpaste products are formulated to prolong the mint flavor to enhance the belief in long-lasting, fresh breath.

  The most likely culprit in the particularly awful toothpaste-OJ synergy, though, is an ingredient in all of the biggest brands of toothpaste: sodium lauryl sulfate, or SLS. You’ll find SLS not only in toothpaste, but in shampoo, shaving cream, soap, and, ahem, concrete cleaners, engine degreasers, and car wash detergents. What do all of these products have in common? The need for foam. SLS, a derivative of coconut oil, is a detergent foaming agent used to break down the surface tension of water and penetrate solids while generating prodigious gobs of foam.

  Taste researcher Linda Bartoshuk, of the Yale University School of Medicine, notes that the active layer in the taste system is a phospholipid layer:

  You know what happens to a layer of lipid when you add a detergent to it? Well, that’s what happens to your taste system when you put detergent in your mouth, brushing teeth. So you brush teeth and the phenomenon is that your ability to taste sweet declines, and everything that should normally taste sweet, tastes as if a bitter taste has been added to it.

  SLS will also affect your perception of salty foods. If you eat salty snacks such as potato chips or pretzels after brushing your teeth, the salt taste will be faint or missing, but any bitter taste will be magnified.

  If toothpaste-OJ syndrome is ruining your life, you can always search for a toothpaste in a health food store that doesn’t contain SLS. Although we don’t know of any country that bans SLS’s use in toothpaste, a search on the Internet indicates that some folks are concerned about its harmful properties. Warnings abound that SLS can harm the skin, the eyes, the hair, and the immune system. We found expensive health-store brands that trumpet their lack of SLS, but even “homeopathic-style” Tom’s of Maine toothpaste contains SLS.

  Although SLS does help clean the teeth, there are many detergents that are as effective. But consumers believe that the more suds they can generate in anything from bar soap to shampoo to toothpaste, the more effective the cleaning will be. If that were true, we would all take daily bubble baths.

  Submitted by Dianne Love of Seaside Park, New Jersey. Thanks also to Lisa Wahl of Hawthorne, California; Monica Sanz of McLean, Virginia; Lisa Granat of Kirkland, Washington; Ernie Capobianco of Dallas, Texas; Angela McCarthy of Martinsville, Indiana; Jon Grainger of Lexington, Massachusetts; and Tim Walsh of Sarasota, Florida.

  Who Was Casper the Friendly Ghost Before He Died?

  You can’t blame someone for wanting to know more about the back-story of Casper. Restless ghosts are a dime a dozen. Poltergeists are scary. But you don’t run into many friendly ghosts, and none so relentlessly affable as Casper.

  We thought the billowy puff of friendliness originated in comic books, but we were wrong. Casper first appeared in a Paramount Pictures short cartoon in 1945, although at that point he didn’t have a name. Casper might have been friendly, but his co-creators, Seymour V. Reit and Joe Oriolo, fought over who thought of the story of the “Friendly Ghost.” Reit insisted he did, since Casper was based on an unpublished short story of his, and Oriolo was “only” the illustrator (Oriolo later went on to illustrate and produce 260 Felix the Cat cartoons for television).

  By all accounts, the first cartoon didn’t set the world on fire, but the second, “There’s Good Boos Tonight,” was released in 1948, and several more were created in subsequent years. Although Casper never gave Mickey Mouse or Bugs Bunny a run for their money, the chummy spook was Paramount’s second favorite cartoon character after Popeye in the 1940s and 1950s. In these early cartoons, nothing whatsoever was said or implied about how Casper became a ghost at such a young age. As Mark Arnold, publisher of the Harveyville Fun Times, puts it: “They introduce Casper as a friendly ghost who doesn’t want to scare people.” Arnold adds that in the children’s book that was a prototype for the cartoon, Casper’s origins are undisclosed.

  In 1949, Paramount sold the comic book rights to all of its cartoon characters, Popeye excepted, to St. John Publishing, which issued five Casper titles with a resounding lack of success. In 1952, Harvey Comics picked up the license. Harvey became Casper’s comic book home for more than three decades. It was at Harvey where Casper was given a cast of sidekicks — his trusty ghost horse, Nightmare, and his antagonist, Spooky, the “Tough Little Ghost.” Casper also became pals with Wendy, the “Good Little Witch,” who spun off her own titles. The success of the Harvey comic books goosed the interest in made-for-television cartoons — more than 100 episodes were syndicated.

  But despite the need for storylines for all these outlets, Casper’s origins remained shrouded in mystery, and as it turns out, this was no accident. Sid Jacobson, who has been associated with Casper for more than fifty years, told Imponderables that when the company bought the rights to the Paramount characters, Harvey was more interested in the then more popular Little Audrey (a not-too-subtle “homage” to Little Lulu). Casper was thrown in as part of the deal, and he and other editors at Harvey went to work “rethinking him.” Why the need to rethink? It turns out that Jacobson was less than thrilled with the original animated cartoon: “It was so ugly, and so stupid, I never forgot it. If we used the original premise for our books, it would have been a failure.”

  Ever mindful that Casper was meant to appeal to a younger segment of the audience, the editors at Harvey wanted to banish elements that would frighten children or give parents an excuse to ban their kids from reading about even a friendly apparition. Jacobson says:

  Since the dawn of the Harvey Casper character, truly the Casper everyone knows and loves, Casper’s origin is definite but flies in the face of conventional definition: he was born a ghost. Like elves and fairies, he was born the way he was. We consciously made the decision as to his creation. It stopped the grotesqueries, and fits in better with the fairyland situation. It allows Casper to take his place with the other characters in the Enchanted Forest. It doesn’t deal in any sense with a kid wanting to die and become a ghost. That was our main concern.

  Considering the treacly nature of the comic book, inevitably a few impure types have speculated about the secret origins of Casper. Mark Arnold reveals a particularly startling one:

  The most notorious origin story appeared in Marvel Comics’ Crazy Magazine #8, in
December 1974, in a story called, “Kasper, the Dead Baby.” In it, they show that small boy Kasper was killed by his alcoholic, abusive father. It’s pretty gruesome, but bizarrely funny in a kind of strange way. Marvel has disowned the story, as they have tried to acquire the Harvey license.

  In 1991, during The Simpsons’ second season, the episode “Three Men and a Comic Book” speculates that Casper was actually Richie Rich (another bland comic book star of Harvey’s stable) before he died. As Arnold puts it, “Richie’s realization of the emptiness that vast wealth brings caused his demise.”

  Most recently, in the feature film Casper, there are allusions to the ghost’s past (his father dabbled in scientific spiritualism), but no real explanation for what makes Casper so damned friendly and why he was snuffed out before his prime. Maybe the best theory comes from comic book writer and author of Toonpedia (http://www.toonpedia.com), Don Markstein:

  Personally, I always thought it was his friendly, open nature that did him in. His family apparently didn’t do a very good job of teaching him about “stranger danger.”

  Submitted by Steve, a caller on the Glenn Mitchell Show, KERAAM, Dallas, Texas. Thanks also to Fred Beeman of Las Vegas, Nevada.

  Letters

  Thank you for all the wonderful letters and e-mails you’ve sent since the publication of How Do Astronauts Scratch an Itch? praising our efforts. But we won’t be publishing those. This is the space for folks who have a bone to pick with us, sometimes to the point of wanting to take a pickax to our head.

  We don’t have space to publish all the worthy additions and corrections to our labors, but even the most picayune criticisms are welcomed, and will lead to modifications in future reprints. Without further ado, let’s embrace the abuse!

  Some things you can count on. The swallows will return to San Juan Capistrano. Every summer we will be bombarded with crummy sequels to movies we didn’t care about in the first place. And the Red Sox will field a promising team that will wilt in the clutch.

  In this, our tenth volume, we wax nostalgic for some of the Imponderables that elicit the most passionate letters of comment. And of course, if there is an Imponderables book, there will be letters about why ranchers hang boots on fence posts, a mystery first “answered” in Why Do Clocks Run Clockwise?

  For those of you new to the fracas, here are some of the theories that have been advanced to explain this phenomenon: to shield the post from rotting during rain; to discourage coyotes and other predators; to keep foul-smelling boots out of the house; to display pride; to mark where repair work on a fence is required; to amuse themselves; to signal that someone is home; to point toward a rancher’s home (in case of heavy snowfall); to keep horses from impaling themselves on posts; to point toward the nearest graveyard; to shield posts from adverse reactions to the sun; and to do something with single shoes that lie on the road. But Imponderables readers have indomitable spirits. There are always new theories, like this one from Nicki Woodard of Rapid City, South Dakota:

  I was born in Nebraska and raised in South Dakota, and to us this is just common knowledge. In the Old West days, when a cowboy got a new pair of boots he would put his old boots out on the fence posts. That way if another cowboy had a pair of boots that were in bad shape, he could take the ones the first cowboy left if they were in better shape than his own. I guess they were into recycling back then, too.

  Pam Dellinger of Ashdown, Arkansas, wrote to confirm that a passage we quoted from a Tony Hillerman novel was true:

  Perhaps part of the answer to this Imponderable could have been answered by heading southwest. It is a practice by many, where ranches are still of some size, to follow the Navajo tradition of using the boot at ranch accesses to signal whether or not family members are home.

  As the drive from county-maintained roads to a front door can be considerable, the practice saves many miles of riding at a snail’s pace. Why travel all that way if you don’t have to? The boot is always a cheap resource (we are never without at least one pair beyond human wear), and it takes no thought to turn it up or down as you come or go.

  We have no idea why Steven Serdinsky of West Covina, California, would ever think that the National Museum of American History could possibly be a more authoritative source than we are, but Steven wrote them about this Imponderable and received a response from Lonn Taylor, a historian in the social history division:

  Several scholars in the field of folklore and anthropology have written about this phenomenon, and the only thing that they can agree on is that it originated in western Nebraska in the mid-1970s. In fact, an Associated Press story published in the Emporia, Kansas, Gazette of April 23, 1979, quotes Nebraska folklorist Roger Welsch as saying that a Nebraska farmer named Jim Lippincott originated the practice in 1974. It has now spread across the Great Plains from Texas to Alberta. [Our own research led us to the conclusion that Henry Swanson, before 1974, originated the boot ritual in the same general area of Nebraska.]

  Two reasons are consistently advanced for the practice: that it protects the tops of fence posts from water, which would otherwise get into the cracks of the post, freeze, and eventually cause it to split; and that the human scent on the boots deters coyotes and wolves from crossing the fence lines into pastures. However, Tom Isern of North Dakota State University, who mentions the practice in an article entitled “The Folklore of Farming on the North American Plains,” North Dakota History 41 (Fall 1989), tells me: “There aren’t any practical reasons for putting boots on fence posts. They don’t deter coyotes, they don’t preserve the posts, they don’t mark anything. They just offer a message to passersby, a message having to do with identity and hard work. They are folk monuments, just like an old threshing machine on a hilltop.”

  Boots might not scare away a coyote but just about anything seems to frighten baby pigeons — at least we sure don’t see them very often. In our first book, Imponderables, we wrote about why we never see baby pigeons, and readers have sent us sighting reports ever since. Here is one of our favorites, from Nat Segaloff of Los Angeles, California:

  My friend Pam and I drove up the California coast to Monterey last week and stayed at a couple of inns. Under the eaves of one of them, just down from our window, was an illustration to one of your original Imponderables. Seen close-up, a baby pigeon looks not so much like a bird but like a fuzzy, bile-covered turd. Which is consistent.

  No wonder baby pigeons hide from us — they can’t stand the criticism. Actually, Nat sent us a photo, and truth be told, “fuzzy, bile-covered turd” is an apt description.

  Speaking of unpleasant birds, in When Did Wild Poodles Roam the Earth? we discussed why sea gulls congregate in parking lots. The professional bird experts seemed to think that the feeding possibilities were plentiful in parking lots, and that expanses of asphalt resembled the sandbars where gulls often congregate in beach areas. But David Moeser of Cincinnati, Ohio, noticed Kassie Schwan’s cartoon illustrating this Imponderable (it depicted several birds poring over a map, with one apologizing to the others, with one sad gull crying: “Gee, I could swear a wetland habitat was here! Honest!”). Moeser was inspired by a trip to a shopping center on the day before Christmas:

  My [first] reaction was exactly the same as the suggestion your funny artist makes via the bird in the picture. I figured there may have been a wetland there before the shopping center was built. But on second thought, I think not. A better explanation is that the pavement, heated up by the sun (especially if it’s blacktop), is a warmer landing spot for birds (and their feet!) than frozen grassland, with or without snow on it.

  And I’d like to debunk the food theory. Of the thousands of gulls (yes, “sea” gulls, possibly from the Great Lakes or other water holes up Canada way), in several large groups of hundreds each, only a dozen or two nibbled at some birdseed put down in one spot. The rest just watched the nearby humans who were watching them. A small pond of water nearby was completely ignored, although surely they would have seen it from the air.
Meanwhile, a group of several hundred gulls at the other end of the parking lot whirled around in what seemed to be some kind of social ritual, seemingly pointlessly flying in circles for minutes before rising up to cruising altitude and winging their way south. Why did they choose to congregate at the parking lot instead of the oodles of open space on real ground in the surrounding countryside? I think they just considered it a good place to rest.

  Maybe gulls just like cruising the mall? Teenagers have been doing so for decades. But we have to admit that we love the theory proposed by William Stickney of Cresco, Pennsylvania:

  I’ve been fortunate enough to emulate the soaring seagulls by flying sailplanes. Sailplane pilots stay aloft by flying in lifts (rising air currents) just as gulls do. Two common types of lift are ridge lift and thermal lift. Ridge lift occurs when wind is deflected upward by rising terrain. Ridge lift is common along shorelines where the sea breeze blows against a bluff or large sand dune. Thermal lift occurs when the sun heats the ground unevenly.

  Dark areas, such as asphalt parking lots, absorb heat faster than surrounding areas with vegetation or lighter colored soil. The solar heat is transferred into the air above the dark surface, making it hotter than the surrounding area. This relatively hot air is buoyant and will rise in a column referred to by pilots as a “thermal.” Cooler air from the surrounding terrain then flows laterally into the hot area to replace the air that has risen away. Now this air is heated, and the cycle repeats.