How Does Aspirin Find a Headache?
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FRUSTABLE 7: Why and where did the notion develop that fat people are jolly?
In Do Penguins Have Knees?, we mentioned Shakespeare’s Falstaff, the archetypical fat-jolly person. But reader Judith Goldish of Lakewood, California, reminded us of another of the Bard’s pronouncements, from Julius Caesar:
Let me have men about me that are fat;
Sleek-headed men and such as sleep o’ nights.
Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look;
He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.
FRUSTABLE 8: Why do pigs have curly tails?
Buhnne Tramutola of Annandale, New Jersey, an ex-pig raiser, confirmed what we have written before—that a curly tail
is an indicator of healthiness and happiness, just like a dog’s wagging tail. If the pig’s tail was not curly, we would check into its health or living conditions.
Old news. But Tramutola has something new to contribute. Pigs’ tails were once used to grease pancake griddles. According to an unidentified book he sent, a pig’s tail “would last for weeks if kept cold. But mostly the extra fat was used in soap making.” That would be enough to curl our tails.
FRUSTABLE 9: Why does the heart depicted in illustrations look totally different from a real heart?
We thought we exhausted the possibilities in this question. But we were wrong. In Do Penguins Have Knees?, we mentioned Desmond Morris’s theory that our Valentine’s heart is an idealized version of the female buttocks; reader Kierstyn Piotrowski of Parsippany, New Jersey, with the help of Kassie Schwan, presents a similar, ingenious theory:
If you put the profile of a man and woman in a “kissing position” (excluding the inevitable turning of heads to avoid nose bumping), it looks roughly like this.
Jerry Tucker of Burton, Michigan, claims that the secret to this Frustable has been unlocked for centuries by fellow Native Americans:
Take a walk in the woods. Any bush or shrub that has a leaf shaped like the Valentine heart has medicinal qualities especially beneficial to the human heart.
We have for centuries identified medically beneficial shrubs and bushes by the shapes of their leaves. This particular shape was adopted by white people to represent their concepts of love, romance, etc.
We’re not sure, though, how this theory accounts for the spread of the “leaf-shaped” heart to non-Native Americans. Tucker presented us with some leads to confirm his theory, and we’ll report back if we find out more.
FRUSTABLE 10: Where do all the missing pens go?
Two readers have taken us to task for our secular-humanist explanations for the disappearance of pens. The answer, they insist, lies in felonious felines. To wit: Here is the sworn testimony of Rainham D.M.H. Rowe of Jacksonville, Florida:
One morning I was faced with the task of finding my wedding rings, after I had left them on the kitchen counter the night before. I happen to have three cats, two of which are notorious for climbing on the counter, where they know they aren’t supposed to be, to find things to play with.
One cat in particular loves the little rings that come off milk jugs. I figured this cat must have seen my rings and thought they were milk jug rings and knocked them off the counter to play with.
I began my search by shining a flashlight into every crevice in the kitchen, to no avail. I then pulled out the appliances. Under the range I found a handful of magnetic ABCs, about ten milk jug rings, and lo and behold, five pens. There was a similar sight under my refrigerator.
I eventually found my rings under the computer desk, and found another handful of pens, piles of paper that had fallen out of the back drawer, and a toy car. So if Imponderables fans have cats, perhaps their pens are being used as nocturnal entertainment.
Rainham, you won’t convince Janet Sappington of Hope Mills, North Carolina, otherwise. In her cats’ “hidey holes,” she has found numerous pens, as well as pen caps, coins, lighters, socks (oh, that’s where the missing socks are!), and once, a whole shirt.
Frustables First Posed in Do Penguins Have Knees? and First Discussed in When Did Wild Poodles Roam the Earth?
FRUSTABLE 1: Why do doctors have bad penmanship?
We thought we exhausted this topic in Poodles, but two readers raised points that we never considered. David A. Crowder of Miami, Florida, stresses that penmanship is not stressed or valued highly in schools, particularly for boys:
As a child, I got excellent grades in all subjects but penmanship. My parents, who would have hit the ceiling had I gotten less than a B in any other subject, would shrug at a D in penmanship—after all, their son was going to be a doctor!
With no pressure to perform in this subject, and no apparent benefit otherwise, I would never put much effort into it.
We doubt if penmanship is highly prized in medical school, either. But Crowder feels that there may be neurological reasons why doctors might tend to have poor penmanship:
As Betty Edwards points out in her seminal book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, “you can regard your handwriting as a form of expressive drawing.” That is, there is an artistic form to handwriting, an indication of, among other things, artistic ability and perception. Since good artwork is predominately right-brain activity, it is not surprising that any sort of scientist or technician, whose life, work, experience, and study involve mainly left-brain activity, would be deficient in a right-brain function (after all, who can be good at everything?).
Crowder indicates that he never became a doctor but that his “lousy handwriting” led directly to his career in computers. We can testify though, after seeing David’s signature, that he would have made a fine physician.
In When Did Wild Poodles Roam the Earth?, we mentioned that on occasion physicians might deliberately attempt to obscure their handwriting for relatively benign reasons. But Rose Marie Centofanti of Chicago, Illinois, offers a far darker scenario:
I am a member of a profession called “health information manager.” Part of our professional responsibilities entails the legalities of medical records.
The documentation in a medical search is primarily the responsibility of physicians. If a case is brought before a jury in a court of law, the medical record may be subpoenaed as evidence. The physicians will also be subpoenaed and have to read aloud their documentation as testimony in court.
Because their penmanship is illegible in most cases, they can state they’ve written just about anything.
FRUSTABLE 3: Why don’t people wear hats as much as they used to?
Several readers wanted to add another motivator for uncovered pates, at least for females: the Catholic church. Typical were the remarks of Vega Soghomomian of Maple Grove, Minnesota, who wrote:
In the Catholic church, females were required to wear a head cover. (We would not want to offend God!) If a woman forgot her hat, she wore a hanky or even a piece of tissue paper on her head. With the women’s movement, the Catholic church removed the rule and women went out and bared their heads to the world.
FRUSTABLE 4: How and why were the letters B-I-N-G-O selected for the game of the same name?
Not too much to report here, other than a fascinating theory by Rick Biddle, president and general manager of WOWL-TV, and NBC affiliate in Florence, At The Shoals, Alabama. Biddle was once responsible for producing, directing, and starring in a television bingo show, and heard from a bingo supplier that the expression in question is an acronym:
Think of what it would be like if you filled all the numbers on your bingo card. At the same time, three or four other people filled in the numbers on their cards and you all jumped up simultaneously yelling, “I’ve placed all the little balls in the holes with corresponding numbers and have won the game!”
Rather than going through this rather lengthy dissertation, the word bingo is derived from, “Balls In Numbers Game Over.”
We know for a fact that the original bingo markers were not balls, but beans and seeds, which makes this theory less than likely to be true.
FRUS
TABLE 8: How did they measure hail before golf balls were invented?
We received, pardon the expression, a flood of letters about this Frustable in the past year. Most were variations on the analogies to edibles (e.g., peas, eggs, walnuts) we discussed in Poodles. But four different readers directed us to what might be the first written reference to the size of hail in the Western canon, Revelation 16 verse 21: “And great hail from heaven fell upon men, each stone about the weight of a talent.”
According to reader L. Ray Black of Arcadia, Florida, the talent was the largest of the Hebrew units of weight. Two Davids from Keizer, Oregon, Messrs. Engle and Volkov, indicated that the talent fluctuated over time from fifty to one hundred pounds. Reader Dale Gilbert of Chillicothe, Ohio, adds that the Bible indicates that hailstones provoked men to blaspheme God, “for the plague thereof was exceeding great.”
Now that Imponderables books are being published overseas, we are starting to hear reports from far-flung ponderers. Emmanuelle Pingault reports that in France, hailstones in weather reports are invariably, if unsurprisingly, compared to foodstuffs.
A small hailstone may be compared to a nut (in French, noisette), while a larger one will be “as large as a walnut” (gros comme une noix). But the more frequent set of comparisons, regularly heard in weather reports, is as follows: as large as a pigeon’s egg; as large as a hen’s egg; and larger than a hen’s egg.
Emmanuelle wonders how many of us have actually ever seen a pigeon egg. We now know why Imponderables are universal—the seeming nonexistence of baby pigeons was one of the original inspirations for our first book, Imponderables.
But all the other efforts of readers pale before the research undertaken by reader Chip Howe of Washington, D.C., who conducted a Nexis database search of newspaper weather reports and proved conclusively that we sorely overestimated the ubiquity of “golf ball” analogies to the size of hail. We’re proud to announce that literary imagination is not dead. Here are the categories and some of the quotes that Chip found in newspapers over the last six years:
• Sports: softball-sized; tennis ball-sized; baseball-sized; golf ball-sized, of course; marble-sized; and ping pong ball-sized.
• Food: grapefruit-sized; orange-sized; lime-sized; cherry-sized; egg-sized; walnut-sized; “hail the size of Spanish olives”; bean-sized; pea-sized; butterbean-sized; ice cube-sized; and our personal favorite, dry roasted peanut-sized hail, from Georgia, the peanut state.
• Money: Chip could almost start a coin collection. He found references to every current denomination of American coinage except the silver-dollar.
• Body Parts: “Hail the size of babies’ toes” and this scary report from Canada: “…after a torrential thunderstorm had pelted Edmonton with fist-sized hail stones.”
• Two-for-one: pea- to marble-sized hail and quarter to tennis ball-sized hail.
• Nature’s Own: acorn-sized hail; pellet-sized hail; pebble-sized hail; mothball-sized hail; and a contribution from Bulgaria (snowball-sized hail), a country that must have more uniformity of snowball size than we do in North America.
FRUSTABLE 10: Why does meat loaf taste the same in all institutions?
When we first posed this Frustable in Do Penguins Have Knees?, we mused: “Does the government circulate a special Marquis de Sade Cookbook?” One reader, Carl Bittenbender of Staunton, Virginia, answers “yes”:
Many institutions of all kinds, college, military, hospitals, etc., use the armed forces menu cards, which give recipes for cooking hundreds of meals at a time. The cards give formulas for figuring the amounts of ingredients needed for large recipes. This accounts for the bland, tasteless quality of many of the recipes, as they are designed to be eaten by people who do not have a choice.
Reader George E. Jackson, Jr., of Mantua, Ohio, notes that the federal government supplies many institutions with surplus food and that they are
extremely picky about their suppliers meeting stringent specifications…. As an example of what I mean: the military recipe for fruitcake is eight pages in length. Perhaps if you contacted the Government Printing Office, you might be able to get their recipes for meat loaf and fruitcake.
Sorry. We’d rather write the IRS, asking them to please audit us.
Of course, the government has its civilian culinary counterparts in the large institutional catering companies, such as Marriott and ARA. As Mike Tricarico, Jr., of Dubuque, Iowa, puts it:
The meat loaf you had last month for lunch at a hospital in New York was very possibly made by the same company, following the same recipe, as the meat loaf that you ate yesterday at an IBM cafeteria in southern California. Marriott also serves food on airlines, so it is even possible that you had the very same meat loaf on board flight 123 from New York to southern California. Hopefully, this entree was not followed by fruitcake!
Is it our fate for fruitcake to follow us everywhere? We’re talking meat loaf, now.
Only one reader was willing to plumb the ineffable essence of meat loaf. And that savior is Wayland Kwock of Aiea, Hawaii:
It boggles the mind that nobody would be brave enough to expose the meat loaf conspiracy. Closer inspection would probably show that meat loaf is served on Friday, the end of the week. The day to get rid of all the “extra” food, the dregs, the leftovers. All of this goodness is unceremoniously included in the meatloaf.
So why does it taste the same? Mathematics, specifically probability, provides the answer. If an infinite number of monkeys…No, that’s not quite right. If an infinite number of institutions served an infinite variety of food, the amounts and types of leftovers would tend to form a Gaussian distribution. This means that there may be meat loafs out there that taste better (not better—different), but they are outside one, if not two, standard deviations. All other meat loafs contain an average amount of a generic sampling of foods and thus, on average, taste the same.
We don’t understand a word that Wayland says here, but we smell greatness. Or is that fruitcake we smell?
Imponderables readers have continued to flood our post office box with thousands of letters in the past year. We appreciate all your new Imponderables and solutions to Frustables. And we wouldn’t be human if your words of praise didn’t put a spring in our step. But this section is reserved for those of you who have a bone to pick with us: Some of you want to add to what we’ve discussed; others want to disagree with what we thought were words of wisdom.
Please remember we can publish only a fraction of the terrific letters we receive. Many of you have submitted corrections or suggestions that we will be researching; we will check out your concerns even if we don’t publish your letter. Because of the mechanics of publishing, it can sometimes take years to validate objections and change the text on subsequent printings, but we do so regularly. The letters contained here are chosen for their entertainment value and the merit of their argument. Let the bashing begin!
Is it Clintonomics? The coming millennium? We don’t know why, but Imponderables readers were particularly testy this year. Sometimes for good reason. Several readers, such as Jon A. Kapecki of Rochester, New York, took us to task for our discussion of peanut M&Ms:
Nuts may indeed be “the source of one of the most common food allergies,” as you assert on page 56 of Do Penguins Have Knees? However, peanuts—the subject of discussion—are not nuts, but legumes, specifically members of the pea family.
This is no pedantic distinction. People who are allergic to nuts are usually not allergic to peanuts and vice versa, and a failure to observe such distinctions can have fatal consequences.
That said, I enjoyed the book.
Gee, Jon, that’s a little like saying other than being mass murderers, we have a pleasant personality. But you are right. Peanuts are not technically nuts, and we should have been more careful in our terminology. Violent allergic reactions both to peanuts and other nuts are common, but someone who reacts to pecans or walnuts may suffer no adverse effect from consuming peanuts.
; Speaking of getting sick, two more faithful readers and correspondents, Rabbi Joseph Braver of Baltimore, Maryland, and Fred Lanting of Union Grove, Alabama, wrote to complain that our discussion of the snake emblem found on ambulances in When Did Wild Poodles Roam the Earth? was woefully incomplete. For the associations of the snake and the pole have Jewish and Christian as well as Roman and Greek significance. In Numbers 21, the wandering Israelites were afflicted by snakes sent by God to punish them for speaking against Him. Moses interceded on behalf of his suffering followers:
Then the Lord said to Moses, “Make a seraph figure and mount it on a standard. And if anyone who is bitten looks at it, he shall recover.” Moses made a copper serpent and mounted it on a standard; and when anyone was bitten by a serpent, he would look at the copper serpent and recover.