Why Do Pirates Love Parrots?

by David Feldman

  While there might be some psychological elements at play, the physiological forces are probably dominant. When we stand, gravity pulls the fluid in our body down. The fluid can then pool in the legs and feet, putting pressure on the muscles, and eventually, even pain.

  When we move, the contraction of the muscles pushes the fluids back up, and the veins contribute by sending blood back to the heart. Walking increases the circulation not just to your heart, but all over your body, including to not-insignificant organs, such as your brain.

  Even sitting for a long time can cause circulation problems. As we discussed in Why Do Clocks Run Clockwise?, swelling feet (edema) can be traced to passengers’ lack of movement and sedentary state on airplanes. In extreme circumstances, passengers can suffer from DVT (deep vein thrombosis), when a blood clot develops. That’s why most physicians recommend walking around a bit on long flights, or at least stretching your calves periodically—which might be safer than dodging the service carts in the aisle.

  Airplane seats force your legs to be perpendicular to the floor, so it’s easy for fluid to build up, still another reason why we’re antsy on flights. To the extent that antsyness while standing or sitting straight causes us to fidget or move, our discomfort is serving an evolutionary advantage. But the La-Z-Boy devotee has the right idea. By propping up your feet while you sit, you’re not only catching more zzz’s, but preventing edema.

  Submitted by Gerald S. Stoller of Spring Valley, New York. Thanks also to Dot Finch of Soddy-Daisy, Tennessee; and Claudette Hegel Comfort and Bob Parker of Minneapolis, Minnesota.

  If Thanksgiving Is a Harvest Celebration, Why Is It Held in Late November?

  The Pilgrims contended with horrendous conditions in freezing New England in the early seventeenth century—blizzards, famine, and epidemics that decimated their population were no picnic. So perhaps we needn’t needle them for picking a time to give thanks for Nature’s harvest when about the only harvestable crop was snow cones.

  Actually, the accounts of the first Thanksgiving are remarkably sketchy—all we know is based on two written accounts by colonists. The most detailed account was written by Edward Winslow, three-time governor of the Plymouth colony, who said that the first celebration took three days. The fifty-two surviving colonists invited “some 90” Wampanoag Indians to the feast, who proceeded to thank the Pilgrims by killing five deer, “which they brought to the Plantation and bestowed on our Governor, and upon the Captain and others.” Winslow makes clear that the celebration was in honor of the harvest, and that they dined on “fowls” (unspecified in nature, but almost certainly not turkeys). The second account, which corroborates most of the information in Winslow’s letter, was written by William Bradford (another Plymouth governor), in a book written twenty years later.

  Significantly, neither version referred to the harvest celebration as “Thanksgiving” nor indicated the exact date of the festivities. Most likely, the colonists were heartened by their first bountiful crop, and were inspired by traditional English harvest celebrations. If they thought they were starting an important new holiday, they probably would have repeated the revelry the following year—but they did not. Historians at the Plimouth Plantation believe that the three feast days occurred sometime between September 21 and November 11, 1621.

  Chances are, the Pilgrims would have been dismayed by the appropriation of the word “Thanksgiving” to describe their three-day party. To the Pilgrims, thanksgivings were days of solemn prayer and contemplation in church, not festivities featuring eating, singing, dancing, games, and merriment.

  Over the next couple centuries, a series of proclamations declared official holidays of Thanksgiving. The first attempt to make a holiday of gratitude was in 1676, when the Massachusetts council proclaimed the balmy date of June 29 as a day of Thanksgiving, although obviously not a harvest festival. The first time all thirteen of the original colonies celebrated on the same date was in 1777, to commemorate the victory over the British forces in Saratoga. George Washington proclaimed a national day of thanksgiving; but soon Thomas Jefferson yanked it away. Up until the Civil War, Thanksgiving celebrated different things at different dates in different places.

  Before the Civil War, most communities celebrated local harvest festivals. The dates of the festival tended not to be fixed, as harvest dates in the same locale varied from year to year (farmers didn’t feel like celebrating before the crops had been picked). Most local Thanksgivings were held between mid-September and mid-October, just after crops had been harvested.

  You’d think that the middle of the Civil War wouldn’t be an opportune time to launch a new holiday, but then it would be hard to conceive of someone as obsessed with the subject as Sarah Josepha Hale, a novelist turned media star, who became the editor of the influential women’s magazine, Godey’s Lady’s Book. Hale used her soapbox to create a mythology about the first Thanksgiving that lives on today—that the Pilgrims supped on plump, stuffed turkeys, and polished off the meal with pumpkin pie. But Hale didn’t stop with Martha Stewartish features about Pilgrim cuisine. She used her editorial page to lobby for a national Thanksgiving holiday, and privately lobbied politicians and other prominent people.

  The American Civil War lasted from 1861 to 1865. Why did Abraham Lincoln declare Thanksgiving a national holiday in the middle of the war, 1863, when he must have had much more pressing matters on his mind? Although Hale was relentless in her pressure, she had been railing at presidents for decades without success.

  May we bring up the dreaded word, politics? After many victories, the Union encountered a series of reversals in 1863. Robert E. Lee’s troops were wounded but not routed at Gettysburg, and then Major General William Rosecrans’s troops were crushed by Confederate forces at Chickamauga Creek in Tennessee. More than 35,000 Union soldiers were lost at Chickamauga, and Lincoln referred to Rosecrans as “confused and stunned like a duck hit on the head.”

  While spirits were low and casualties were high, Lincoln had something else to worry about—reelection. In his Thanksgiving Proclamation, Lincoln alluded to the war as being “of unequaled magnitude and severity,” but parts of it read like a political campaign speech:

  peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere except in the theatre of military conflict; while that theatre as been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union. Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defence [sic], have not arrested the plough, the shuttle, or the ship; the axe had enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore.

  The second and last paragraph of the Proclamation is uncompromisingly religious. Lincoln was consciously detaching “his” Thanksgiving from its agricultural roots both by moving the holiday past harvest times and by giving the national holiday a religious justification that also attempted to soothe the wounds of war for both North and South:

  And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to his tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility and Union.

  Lincoln was likely sincere in his comments, but he was also a politician, up for what would probably be a bitter election in one year. He wrapped his proclamation in the trappings of religion in a way that would have horrified the Pilgrims.

  Although a national Thanksgiving continued to be celebrated on the last Thursday of each November after Lincoln’s assassination
, it was not officially a national holiday—technically, each Thanksgiving was proclaimed by the sitting president annually. Thanksgiving didn’t become an official national holiday with a set date until another cataclysmic event—the Great Depression. FDR decided that rather than being celebrated on the last Thursday of November, it should be on the fourth Thursday of the month. Most years, the two dates would be the same, but in 1939, there were five Thursdays in the month, just as there were earlier in his term, in 1933. In that earlier year, when the economy was in even worse shape, the business community lobbied Roosevelt to move up the date of Thanksgiving, because most Christmas shoppers waited until after Thanksgiving to start spending on gifts. During the Depression, businesses needed every break they could get. Roosevelt resisted their pressure in 1933, but acquiesced six years later.

  FDR’s decision was met with all kinds of abuse. Traditionalists didn’t want to change the long-held custom. Schools and some businesses didn’t have enough time to change their vacation schedule. Calendar makers weren’t given enough lead time to make the change not just for 1939, but for 1940. All this was bad enough, but FDR was even messing up football schedules. The mayor of Atlantic City, New Jersey called the rescheduled holiday “Franksgiving.”

  Many states refused to comply with FDR’s edict, which caused further problems, as families from different states couldn’t meet on a Thursday to chow down on the turkeys that the Pilgrims never ate. Twenty-three of the forty-eight states adopted November 23, 1939 as the date for Thanksgiving, while twenty-three refused to alter from November 30; two enlightened states, Colorado and Texas, honored both dates. In 1940, a few more states went along with the fourth-Thursday scheme, but finally, in 1941, Congress took the power out of the presidents’ pens and officially declared Thanksgiving to be on the fourth Thursday of November.

  And so it stands, until, perhaps, another crisis comes along. The weird timing of Thanksgiving has much to do with economics, politics, religion, and tradition, and little to do with agriculture or the Pilgrims.

  In a Chicago Tribune column, aptly dated November 25, 2005, Eric Zorn chronicles some of the oddities we have discussed, and tries to spearhead a return of the holiday to its Pilgrim roots, in October, but his motives are not just to honor history, and he’s willing to take on his state’s most illustrious politician in the process:

  Thanksgiving in October would mean no need to surf the Web on Saturday evening wondering if you’ll make it back home the next day or if you’ll spend Sunday night sleeping on an airport cot or in the median of the interstate where your mini-van finally came to rest.

  Lincoln didn’t know from airports or interstates, but what’s our excuse for perpetuating his mistake?

  Submitted by a caller on the Mike Rosen Show, KOA-AM in Denver, Colorado.

  Why Do Self-Service Gas Stations Usually Disable the Automatic Handle on Gas Pumps?

  When fate takes us to the turnpikes of New Jersey, a state where service stations, by law, must provide full service, we always admire the gas jockeys at the rest stops. They set the automatic clip on the gas pump handle while fueling and run around from car to car, free as birds. But when we stop at a self-service station, we are stuck with our hands fastened to the pump handle tighter than a Jennifer Lopez Oscar dress. Why is there discrimination against us self-service habitués?

  We contacted two major oil companies and they passed the buck rather quickly. “It’s not up to us,” they replied. As Don Turk, a spokesperson for Mobil Oil Corporation put it, “The general rule is that the use of these devices is regulated by the local or state fire codes.”

  Sure enough, automatic fuel clips are outlawed in many states. The National Fire Protection Association endorsed the safety of particular brands and models, and in those states where clips are legal, it is common for these models only to be permitted. But even in states where clips are allowed, relatively few service stations use them in practice. Gasoline is expensive enough—why do service stations have to torture us with manual labor?

  We asked this question of Paul Fiori, executive vice president of the Service Station Dealers of America, and he wouldn’t buy conspiracy theories. He wasn’t sure, but speculated that fuel clips tend to break, some customers don’t know how to use them properly, and the end result is usually more expense for the dealer.

  Citgo service station owner Maurice Helou, of Lyndhurst, Ohio, backs up Fiori:

  I have been a gasoline dealer for 25 years. There are many procedures a self-service gasoline customer should practice that may result in a request from the cashier at the store, such as “pull up to the next pump,” “no smoking please,” etc.

  People do not like to follow instructions, requests, or commands from the “lowly cashier.” Since the gasoline nozzle and its assembly is a piece of equipment subject to failure and misuse, the result of which would cause a spill, by disabling the clip, the consumer is forced to control the flow of gasoline into their tank, avoiding a costly spill and its resulting complaint from the consumer.

  Most fire departments require the customers to control the gas nozzle. Take away the clip and that’s one less request.

  Bah humbug! In our experience, the shutoff mechanism always works, and at a self-service station, it’s still up to the consumer to place the nozzle of the pump into fuel tank. Based on some of the folks we’ve seen at gas stations, we’d trust an inanimate clip more than humans to prevent spills. When we challenged Helou with these assertions, he swatted them away with gusto:

  At the tip underside of the nozzle spout there is a small hole. When the gas tank is full, gas backsplashes into the little hole, which triggers the gas nozzle to shut off and release the clip, therefore stopping the flow of gasoline. If there is a malfunction anywhere in the process, the nozzle may not shut off and gas will continue to flow. That’s why it is necessary for the customer to remain with the pump when filling the tank.

  It wouldn’t be necessary to remove the clip and force the customer to stay with the pump if they would simply comply. Customers are time-starved and multitask when buying gas. They set the nozzle to pump their gas and then they use the restroom, or buy products in the store while leaving the pump unattended.

  When a spill occurs, then it is a hassle to collect the sale. Even when customers are manning the pump, if they attempt to “top off” after the nozzle automatically shuts off, they can overfill and cause a spill.

  We spoke to Pat Moricca, president of the Gasoline Retailers Association of Florida, who confirmed that the spill issue was the paramount reason for disabling automatic fuel clips. If enough gasoline is spilled, the HazMat crews from the local environmental agency must be called, leading to lost sales. If a customer trots in with a lit cigarette, the consequences can be worse.

  The reason why you see automatic clips used at full-service pumps is because the service station worker can wash the windows or check the air pressure of tires while fueling, but if there is a malfunction, he’s in the vicinity to troubleshoot. Ultimately, the disabling of fuel clips is there to force the customer to stay with the car.

  And remember Paul Fiori complaining about fuel clips breaking? What causes this problem? According to Louis F. Ferrara Jr., a Sunoco station owner in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the fault lay not with the clips, but with the customers who engage them:

  Though it sounds crazy, customers forget that the pump handle is in the gas tank. They pull the car away, causing damage to the pump. We’d rather they hold the handle until they are finished.

  Submitted by Jeffrey Joyner of Raleigh, North Carolina.

  Can Women Use “Just For Men” Hair Coloring?

  This Imponderable was posed by Marty Flowers, a woman with a name usually associated with men. Perhaps her experiences as a female Marty made her wonder:

  What happens if a woman uses it? Is it really just for very short hair? If a woman has really short hair, could she use this product successfully, or would she hate the results? If a guy has long hair, shou
ld he not use this product? So shouldn’t it be called “Just for Short Hair”?

  You’ve got the right idea, Marty. Just For Men comes from Combe Incorporated, the same folks that bring you Grecian Formula. If you care to blaze new trails, Marty, feel free to try Just For Men. It won’t do any damage, except to eradicate gray hairs, just as it’s safe for men to use Secret deodorant (despite the harrowing knowledge that Secret was “made for a woman”). Would it hurt men to smoke Virginia Slims? Whoops, bad example. But at least cigarettes are equal opportunity offenders—they will harm both men and women!

  Grecian Formula does not contain dye and compensates for the lost melanin that results in white or gray hair. It is applied over many weeks, and the user’s hair darkens gradually over time. The melanin in black hair is no different in hue from a blond’s melanin—there’s just more of it in the dark hair (so chances are, it will take longer for Grecian Formula to restore a black-haired user’s natural hair color than it would a redhead’s).

  Just For Men is a more conventional hair colorant, which comes in eleven different shades. It is rinsed out after five minutes and, with luck, achieves the desired result after one application.

  We don’t want to give the impression that the differences between Just For Men and women’s coloring products are nonexistent, but to emphasize that Just For Men’s advertising and marketing is clearly designed to assuage men’s defensiveness and skittishness about using coloring products. Stress is put on the elimination of gray hair rather than the change of color. Like Grecian Formula, Just For Men “targets the gray” rather than trying to convince men to frost their hair or change from brunette to blond. Many women’s coloring agents are marketed as fun fashion statements, even ones meant for use on a special occasion. But Just For Men is aimed squarely and dourly at getting out the gray and retaining the original hair color, as Ralph Marburger, marketing director for men’s haircolor at Combe Inc. explains: