Are Lobsters Ambidextrous?

by David Feldman

  Hairstyles today are not as flat as before. I wear fluffier bangs that I don’t care to have matted down after I blow-dried them just perfectly. When my hair was all one length, years ago, I lived in hats!

  Several male readers confessed that when they wore hats, their hair was left with “that helmet look” when they took the hat off. Barbara Zygiel of Alexandria, Virginia, notes that the advent of hairspray also enabled women to “keep a hairdo tidy without confining it under a hat.”

  Kent State University at Tuscarawas professor Dan Fuller goes so far as to blame the blow dryer, along with longer hairstyles spearheaded by the Beatles, for hurting hat sales. Fuller points out that although we tend to associate long hair on men with the counterculture, mainstream popular culture figures like Johnny Carson, by the 1970s, were sporting long hair:

  To realize the abrupt shift in attitudes, go back and read how Joe Pepitone was ridiculed in the press for being the first professional athlete to bring a blow dryer into the locker room. It was my wife, however, who first articulated for me the truth that no one who has spent twenty bucks for a hair-style and has spent many minutes spraying and blowing it dry wants to crush it down and create what she calls “hat-head.”

  2. Unisex-androgynous fashion. Our ever-persistent Bill Gerk argues that many fashionable women today have a “tomboy” look, while many trendy men sport an appearance that once would have been called feminine. Gerk believes that both men and women today want to show off their hair, and that traditional hats, which are clearly demarcated as men’s or women’s apparel, would ruin the androgynous effect.

  3. Informality. Emil Magovac of Sacramento, California, makes the important point that baseball caps are almost as popular now as fedoras used to be, so we haven’t rejected hats per se. Magovac mentions watching old films from baseball games in the first half of this century, “where it seemed as if every male in the crowd was in a suit and tie and wearing a fedora.” Of course, today neither men nor women usually wear hats for formal occasions, even Easter.

  4. Sunglasses. We never would have thought of this imaginative suggestion from Vicky Peterson of San Jose, California:

  Prior to the invention of sunglasses, there were very few solutions to the problem of protecting tender eyes and face from the intense glare of the sun. Hats or bonnets with brims were the more practical answer. We now have sunglasses, which do a better job, don’t get blown off as often, and don’t mess up our hair.

  Lifestyle Theories

  We have more sympathy with lifestyle theories.

  1. We are now an indoors culture. Typical of the many readers who emphasized this point was this letter from Judy R. Reis of Bisbee, Arizona:

  There no longer is much reason to wear a hat. In the good old days, people didn’t step out of their centrally heated homes into their heated cars and drive to their heated places of work. They lived in poorly heated houses and worked in poorly (or unheated) buildings or outside. And when they traveled, they walked, rode horses, or rode in unheated carriages. Since the head is one of the body’s points of greatest heat transfer, wearing a hat made some sense—indoors and out in the winter, to keep the heat in; outdoors in summer to keep the heat out. Hats once had a practical function, although our unceasing efforts to differentiate between the haves and have-nots eventually turned them into fashion statements as well.

  Anyone who doubts the practical advantages of hats is advised to visit Chicago in the dead of winter. Somehow, the Windy City’s denizens are able to brush off fashion constraints and cover their heads when the wind kicks up.

  2. More women in the workplace. Catherine Clay, who works for the State of Florida Department of Citrus and has been a valuable source for us in the past, relates a personal story that indicates that hats may not be welcome at work sites for the ever-increasing number of employed women:

  Hats draw attention to the person wearing them, making them stand out in a crowd. Since I like being unique, wearing hats seems only natural. About five years ago, however, my (male) boss told me that I should not wear hats if I wanted to be “accepted” in the South. He said people react negatively to the image of a woman in a hat.

  I don’t really buy that concept, but I’ve abided by his request during the workday. Perhaps hats don’t really go well in the work place, and more women work today than ever before.

  Once the critical mass of opinion goes against a fashion, it takes true courage to keep it up. Let’s be honest: How would we react to a coworker who wears a Nehru jacket to work? Or a polyester pants suit? At most jobs, conformity, rather than fashion statements, is rewarded.

  3. Today’s baseball cap, unlike the traditional hat, has become a means of self-expression rather than a signal of one’s occupation or status. Dan Fuller argues that at one time, a working man’s hat signaled his occupation and was designed for function rather than aesthetics:

  Newspaper pressmen wore brimless hats made of newspaper to keep ink and lead out of their hair; mechanics wore brimless cloth caps to protect their hair (they worked out of the sun so they needed no brim); truck drivers, service station attendants, and policemen wore the short billed “officer’s cap,” either with or without the support of internal “points”; cowboys are obvious, but farmers traditionally wore a straw with a medium brim or simply an old dress hat instead of the very wide brim of the Western hat. And so on and on.

  Dan is currently working on a long, scholarly article about this very Frustable and has interviewed several hundred farmers, construction workers, and outdoorsmen, and his conclusion is that, unlike most of the hats mentioned above, the cap has distinct advantages:

  The cap is a clear choice over the hat because it doesn’t come off in the wind. It can be pulled down tightly, and whether on a tractor, a drill rig, or a golf course, you don’t have to worry about chasing down your hat.

  Plus, the logos on caps are now a way of projecting an individual identity rather than just one’s profession.

  4. The automobile. As Judy Reis mentioned, the average worker in America used to toil outdoors or take public transportation to reach his or her job. In either case, the worker would be exposed to the elements. Today, the majority of American workers drive to the job site. Many readers pointed to the automobile as sounding the death knell for hats. Automobiles shielded commuters from the cold, but presented a new problem—a low roof. As Catherine Clay puts it, “Who wants to keep taking a hat on and off?”

  You may argue that automobiles were around long before the demise of the hat. True, but they were built differently, as William Debuvitz of Bernardsville, New Jersey, observes:

  The modern car has too low a roof to accommodate a hat. But if you look at old photos of earlier cars with drivers (or look at the movie Bugsy), you will see that men wore hats when they drove because the car roofs were high enough.

  We don’t think there is an answer to this Frustable, but we think we’ve pretty much covered all the bases.

  Submitted by Kent Hall of Louisville, Kentucky. Thanks also to Douglas Stangler of Redmond, Washington.

  A complimentary copy goes to Dan Fuller of New Philadelphia, Ohio, in hope that his own article will plumb new depths in the area of disappearing-hat research.

  FRUSTABLE 4: How and why were the letters B-I-N-G-O selected for the game of the same name?

  As you know, all Frustables start as Imponderables that we research—unsuccessfully. Although we rarely try to answer Imponderables with information gleaned from books, we couldn’t find live human beings who could help us solve this problem. We ended up finding many written citations about the origins of Bingo, but they seemed dubious to us.

  Several readers found the same books we did, and it points out the problem with “believing everything you read.” If Writer A publishes false information, the mistruth is perpetuated if Writer B thinks of Writer A’s “facts” as sacrosanct. For this reason, we’re always suspicious of the stories of origins of products or enterprises that seem too neat and colorful.<
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  In this case, written sources seem to agree that in December 1929, Edwin Lowe, described as either a toy salesman or a just-laid-off toy salesman, was traveling in Jacksonville, Florida, or Jacksonville, Georgia, or outside Atlanta, Georgia, and stopped at a carnival, where he saw a game called Beano being played. The game was the same as the Bingo we know now but used dried beans for markers. When a winner was called, he or she yelled out “BEANO.”

  Supposedly, Lowe was observing the game (depending upon the account, either at the carnival or after he tried out the game at home) and heard a young girl, excited at her victory, stutter “B-B-B-I-N-G-O” (depending upon the account, there are three to seven “B’s” in her “BINGO”), and a light bulb flashed above Lowe’s head. He rechristened the game Bingo and marketed the game within months.

  We also know that Lowe consciously marketed the game as a church fund-raiser from its inception, and that he faced an early obstacle when a priest from Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, complained that with the twenty-four-card sets that Lowe initially marketed, one game often produced too many winners to turn a profit for the church. So Lowe employed Carl Lefler, a mathematician at Columbia University, to compose 6,000 different Bingo cards with nonrepeating number groups.

  Having suffered through many other shaggy dog stories to explain origins of names, our guess is that Lowe actually changed the name from Beano to Bingo to avoid lawsuits from the gentleman running the carnival game, whose rules he borrowed. Actually, Beano had its roots in similar European games, such as the original Lotto, that date from the sixteenth century. But we’ll probably never know the truth for sure, certainly not if half our written sources say that Bingo was born in Florida and the other half in Georgia.

  One other little bit of trivia about Edwin Lowe. Several years after his Bingo success, he marketed another game with a nonsense name that would earn him additional millions—Yahtzee. But once again, Lowe did not invent the game. A married couple created the game, which they called “Yacht Game,” and asked Lowe to print up a few as gifts. According to Milton Bradley, which acquired the E. S. Lowe Company in 1973,

  Lowe liked the game so much he offered to buy all rights. The couple was not interested in receiving royalties, and they readily signed away their rights in exchange for a few copies of the game. Lowe went on to make a huge profit from the game whose name he changed to “Yahtzee,” but was never able to remember his benefactors’ last name.

  Is there any better recipe for success than knowing what products the public will buy but (conveniently) forgetting to acknowledge their inventors?

  Submitted by Daniel J. Harkavy of Buffalo, New York.

  A complimentary book goes to Ken Giesbers of Seattle, Washington (the first reader to send book excerpts). Thanks also to Richard Miranda of Renton, Washington; and Bill Gerk of Burlingame, California.

  FRUSTABLE 5: Why do they always play Dixieland music at American political rallies when Dixieland isn’t particularly burning up the hit parade at the moment?

  We were first asked this question by Jeff Charles, the first radio host who ever interviewed us for an Imponderables book. In the last six years, we have spoken to the Republican and Democratic parties, numerous jazz scholars, the New Orleans Jazz Club, and many other sources. No luck.

  So we threw out the gauntlet to our readers. While there is no simple answer, you are brimming with ideas.

  One point that just about everybody made, including Bruce Walker of San Pedro, California, is that Dixieland is upbeat, happy, American music:

  The music has to be peppy, since they want to fire up the faithful to go out and slave away for Senator Foghorn, not go to sleep or go away crying. It has to be American music, since patriotism is a theme of almost all political campaigns.

  Many readers noted that Dixieland has become a tradition at political rallies, and caters to the ever-present nostalgic cravings of Americans.

  A television programming executive named Paul Klein developed the “least objectionable program” (LOP) theory, which posits that the prudent programmer puts on shows that offend the fewest number of people. Once glued to the set, only an “objectionable” show will drive viewers to change channels. Many Imponderables readers believe that the answer to this Frustable lies in LOM—that is, Dixieland is the “least objectionable music.” We enjoyed this discussion by Vladimir Kazhin of Towson, Maryland:

  Much music carries with it certain intellectual and emotional baggage, and politics in America today is an attempt to be inoffensive above all else. For example: Classical music is considered too “highbrow,” too “arty”; jazz is considered too “earthy,” too sensual, as of course, is rock (still the devil’s music to some people); country is too “white”; soul too “black”; and new wave music is too “harsh,” etc.

  I am not saying that there is any truth to these stereotypes, only that they exist, which is enough for most politicians. Dixieland doesn’t really have a big following: No one really likes it [on this we’ll have to disagree before the hate mail rolls in], but no one dislikes it either. In short, it is a nice, inoffensive, basically pleasant background music.

  We received a fascinating letter from Russell Shaw, a journalist from Marietta, Georgia, who has a unique perspective—he covers both political campaigns and the music industry. Russell made all of the points discussed above but also offers a unique argument—that the popularity of Dixieland music at political rallies, despite its lack of radio airplay, might have a partly economic basis. Most music radio stations today employ niche programming, directing music at a particular age and/or demographic group:

  When something is totally noncontroversial, it is likely to be warm and bland—the same frailties that if not present, would foster listener demand and a niche for a musical form like Dixieland on radio.

  Yet even this inability to inspire passion has its assets. One of the ways consumers express passion in the entertainment marketplace is to buy records, and attend concerts and clubs featuring their favorite kind of music. Since Dixieland rates low in the passion/demand continuum, there are few full-time opportunities for Dixieland musicians. They, like most of us, are more concerned about the eagle flying than the saints marching.

  Hence, Dixieland attracts practitioners who perform almost as a hobby. Not being full-time musicians, they likely will not be union members, and thus come more cheaply than, say, a large orchestra. Dixieland also requires fewer musicians and less in fees. Many of the above principles also apply to the popularity of bluegrass at political events—especially here in the South.

  We’d be negligent if we didn’t mention that Dixieland was nonexistent during the 1992 Democratic convention in New York City. Clearly, the Clinton/Gore campaign’s strategy was to emphasize the ticket’s youth and theme of “change” by showcasing the candidates dancing and singing along with the original recordings of Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop” and Paul Simon’s “You Can Call Me Al.” This musical watershed did not go unnoticed. On CNN’s “Capital Gang,” columnist Robert Novak named the absence of “Happy Days Are Here Again” from the convention as his “Outrage of the Week.”

  We’d still love to know exactly when and where Dixieland first became associated with political rallies, but then we’re used to being frustrated.

  Submitted by Jeff Charles, formerly of Minneapolis, Minnesota. Where are you now, Jeff?

  A complimentary book goes to Russell Shaw of Marietta, Georgia.

  FRUSTABLE 6: Why does eating ice cream make you thirsty?

  Nothing much new to report. All of the reader responses to this question named one or more of the following culprits as the thirst inducer:

  1. Salt

  2. Sugar

  3. Butterfat (which is left on the tongue and in the mouth and throat after consuming ice cream). Only drinking eliminates the filmy fat coating.

  The answer may lie in any one or all three of these alternatives. Yet one could name foods with greater concentrations of any of these ingredients th
at don’t make you as thirsty. Expert after taste expert we contacted in both sensory studies and the ice cream industry denied that this phenomenon even exists, and refused to single out any or all of the nominees as definitely causing thirst. To which we reply, “Then why do most ice cream parlors, such as Baskin-Robbins, have water fountains in them?”

  We were so frustrated divining the truth that a letter from A. A. Spierling of Van Nuys, California, became our favorite discussion about this topic: “Ice cream doesn’t make me thirsty—riding buses does. I can consume a quart of fluids after riding two or three buses, going shopping, etc. Going by car doesn’t make me thirsty.” Good thing they don’t let you eat ice cream on the bus. You would have to carry a canteen with you.

  Submitted by Kassie Schwan of Brooklyn, New York. Thanks also to Ricky E. Arpin, current address unknown; Lisa Kodish of Albany, New York; and Phil Feldman of Los Angeles, California

  A complimentary book goes to A. A. Spierling of Van Nuys, California, for best evasion of this Frustable.