Are Lobsters Ambidextrous? (37 page)

Readers’ objections to our treatment of animals extends to animated critters, too. Thaddeus J. Kochanny of Chicago, Illinois, proffers another explanation for why Mickey Mouse has only four fingers on each hand. He thinks the tradition dates back to

 

depictions of trolls, leprechauns, meneuni, and other mythical “persons” that predate cartoons. In virtually all such carvings, the characters have three fingers. I believe this was done to show the image was nonhuman. This has nothing to do with the ease of drawing.

I collect wood carvings of Anri, an Italian cooperative headquartered in the Italian Alps at Santa Christina, Italy. When the carving is a troll or mythic creation, it has three fingers and a thumb on each hand. When it is a person, such as a boy eating grapes, there are four fingers and a thumb on each hand of the figure.

 

Actually, we mentioned in
When Do Fish Sleep?
that Disney had a habit of giving humans in his cartoons, or at least lead characters, four fingers and a thumb as well. But every animation expert we’ve ever consulted concurs with our explanation
.

While we’re on the subject of hands, Dr. Jerry Tennen of Toronto, Ontario, wants to add another reason why most people wear wristwatches on their left hand: “If you wear a standard wristwatch on your right wrist, the stem eventually frays the cuff on your shirtsleeves. Too bad you didn’t consult me first.” Evidently so
.

Jeff Reese of Mosinee, Wisconsin, wishes we had contacted him too—before we wrote in
When Do Fish Sleep?
that dollar bills can’t be counted by machines. We overstated the case. There are machines that count bills, but they are expensive and can’t discriminate among different denominations. The expense
of the bill-counting machines discourages many vendors from using machines that accept dollar bills
.

Now that reader Gabe Raggiunto is too mature to fling single shoes around his neighborhood (see “The Frustables That Will Not Die”), he sits back and reads the paper, luckily for us. He sent us an Associated Press newspaper story that recounts the same origins of the name Dr. Pepper, that we discussed in
Do Penguins Have Knees?
But some citizens of Rural Retreat, Virginia, the real Dr. Pepper’s home town, think otherwise. The town’s mayor (and dentist), Dr. Doug Humphrey, claims that Dr. Pepper himself invented the drink (those medicos always stick together) and that a lovesick Wade Morrison (the hero of
our
story) stole the formula and sold it in Waco, Texas, as shameless revenge against Dr. Pepper, who would not let Morrison marry his daughter. We’ll stick with our version, although we hear that Oliver Stone is trying to option the memoirs of Dr. Humphrey
.

Speaking of conspiracies, readers are still upset about disappearing socks. But have you ever wondered whether this is a problem in France? We guess not:

 

At least one person has solved the sock problem to his satisfaction. I have read that Jerry Lewis never wears a pair of socks more than once and that he throws them away after wearing. That means no washing/drying/coupling or worry about the odd sock. He has been criticized for this extravagance by those who feel he should have the socks washed and then given to charity. But Lewis, being the lovable fellow we all know and adore, told the critics to perform a physically impossible act. You see what this sock business can generate in a person.

 

D
ANIEL
J. T
IREN
Laurel, Maryland

 

We sure do, Daniel. It can drive people to composing horrible puns: Tiren speculates that missing socks have gone into a special, merry resting ground in the sky—the
hozone.

We heard from several engineers and technicians who had information to add about why the numbers on tape counters on
audio and video tape players don’t seem to measure anything. Electronics engineer Kevin Holsinger of Menlo Park, California, explains

 

In either a VCR or audio tape player, the tape is moved past the play/record heads when a motor turns the little wheel inside the cassette housing. The unit of measurement on the counter is related to how many times that motor has turned—but each count on the front panel might represent one revolution, five revolutions, one-tenth of a revolution, or whatever else they decide on.

Although manufacturers did not agree on what the counts represent, they did agree on how fast the motors will turn. That doesn’t result in a constant tape speed, though, because the reel the tape winds onto is getting larger as tape winds onto it. In one revolution, a reel with a larger diameter will pull more tape onto itself, which means that the tape is passing the read/write heads faster toward the end of the movie than it is at the beginning. You can’t see or hear the difference in speed because it was recorded that way, too (and because the change in speed isn’t really all that large, since an empty reel’s diameter is still around 70% of a full reel). The motors, rather than the tape, run at a constant speed, because it is much less expensive to build things that way.

 

And while we’re speaking of measurement, David Maier of Beaverton, Oregon, offers a simpler explanation (than we did in
When Do Fish Sleep?)
for why gas gauges move faster as you empty the fuel tank of an automobile:

 

Most gas gauges are hooked to a float that measures the depth of gas. But because tanks don’t have straight sides generally, volume doesn’t vary linearly with depth. Consider a V-shaped beer glass—each time you drink an “inch” of beer, you are getting a smaller swallow.

 

Talk of beer always reminds us of baseball. How’s that for a smooth segue into a discussion of why females “throw like a girl”? Anita Gertz of Farmington Hills, Michigan, felt we didn’t cover all the bases in our discussion of the topic in
When Do Fish Sleep?
Her genetics professor at Eastern Michigan University told her that when a person stands with the arms slightly away from the sides and the palms are facing forward
,

 

the angle the bones of the forearm and upper arm make at the elbow (sometimes called the “carrying angle”) is fifteen degrees in males and twenty-five degrees in females. Because the angle in males and females is different, so is their throwing ability. The explanation for the larger angle was that it evolved in females because they carried babies and small children much more often than males.

 

Our exercise physiologists still insist that girls could “throw like boys” if they were trained to do so. But let’s not argue. We have more important things to squabble about. Like George Strait’s hats (“Why Are There Dents on the Top of Cowboy Hats?” in
Do Penguins Have Knees?).
Lee Denham of Warnock Hat Works in Pharr, Texas, sent us a picture of the country and western singer wearing a hat with “dents” (Lee recommends we call these “creases”), and says that all of Strait’s hats have creases. We swear that we’ve seen George in a creaseless hat, but for now we’ll concede the point, Lee, and hope we haven’t forever tarnished Strait’s reputation by implying that he has the same fashion sense as Hoss Cartwright
.

And any discussion of high fashion has to end on this high note: Why do old men wear their pants higher than young men? We shared many theories on this subject in
Why Do Clocks Run Clockwise?,
but David Campion, MICP, wants to add two more:

 

Many older men experience deterioration or settling of the bones that comprise the pelvic girdle. It is possible that displacement of the iliac bones (the crests of which form the hips) may render the hips useless as a perch for one’s pants.

On close inspection, one will find that old men with high-riding pants are often wearing suspenders. I say “on close inspection” because old men frequently wear sport coats capable of concealing the suspenders. This combination may create the illusion of pants that are intentionally pulled up when, in fact, the underlying cause may simply be a snappy pair of suspenders.

 

Janyce E. McLean of Beeville, Texas, wrote to complain about our statement that Rinx Records was the first company to produce music specifically for skating rinks. Janyce says that her mother worked for a company called Skatin’ Tunes, which
produced organ music for rinks all over the country. The company was based in Babylon, Long Island, and “was begun sometime in the early 1940s by Hilliard Du Bois, who also used the professional name Allan Strow.” Can any reader provide more information about this company
?

Several readers, including Dr. John Hardin of Greenfield, Indiana, who first posed the Imponderable, found it hard to believe that the green tinge sometimes found on potato chips was the harmless chlorophyll we claimed it to be in
Do Penguins Have Knees?
We’ve rechecked our sources and are happy to reiterate: Relax. Toxins can form on potato chips, but they reside on the peel. The toxins, glycolalkaloids, develop at the same time as the chlorophyll, but there is no connection between the “poison” and the green stuff on potato chips
.

In
Why Do Dogs Have Wet Noses?
we declared that men’s nipples were vestigial organs, ones that could conceivably disappear in the distant future. Bill Cohen-Kiraly of Lyndhurst, Ohio, took us to task for our sloppy, nonpoetic license:

 

Evolution does not necessarily rid bodies of things that are vestigial unless they offer some disadvantage to the evolutionee before he or she can reproduce and raise young to adulthood. So as long as nippleless men don’t reproduce faster or better than nippled men, there is no reason for the nipples to disappear. Because of the sexual sensitivity of nipples, the reverse is probably true.

But there is a bigger problem with your contention that they will disappear from men, however. Evolution is a genetic process and the genetic differences between men and women are relatively minimal, only one part of one chromosome. Many structural distinctions are the result of hormonal differences. In short, you could not eliminate the nipples on men without eliminating them on women because the genes that create them are not gender specific.

 

It’s settled. No more government grants for research on male nipple elimination, then
.

Sometimes we hear from correspondents who want to argue with other letter writers. One young reader from Interlochen,
Michigan, has a bone to pick with SUNY professor Noel W. Smith, who wrote in
When Do Fish Sleep?
that the role of pubic and underarm hair was not primarily as a sexual attractant but as a lubricant to facilitate movement of arms and legs. Prof. Smith, meet Ben Randall:

 

If your lubrication theory is correct, why don’t young kids get chafed when doing activities? Wouldn’t they need “lubrication,” too? I’m a mere eighth-grader and even I can see this.

And another thing. Little kids move around a lot more than older, lubricated adults that I’ve seen.

 

Kids can be tough. But then so can adults. We recently received this letter from Paul C. Ward of Ligonier, Pennsylvania:

 

I am currently reading your book
Do Penguins Have Knees
? with much pleasure and have enjoyed several of your other books. However, one thing bugs me. Why do you almost always answer a question in three hundred words or more when it could be answered in a fraction of that amount? Is this because authors are paid by the word?

 

Yes
.

Do allow us one indulgence. In
Do Penguins Have Knees?
we closed with a letter from a woman whose lover read to her from
Why Do Clocks Run Clockwise?
But we found even a better use for Imponderables in bed:

 

Norman Cousins attributed his recoveries to viewing laugh-provoking films. One of your Imponderables recently evoked a far more spectacular response. A friend suffered a stroke with serious sensorimotor deficits and was rendered aphasiac.

During protracted hospital course, responses remained refractory. One afternoon, I was reading aloud from
When Do Fish Sleep
? and burst into laughter. Pausing for breath, into the silence threaded a wavering whisper, my friend’s first successful attempt at communication. I bent closer, capturing the long awaited sound, borne aloft like a triumphant banner.

My stricken friend crisply voiced, “Oh, read that again, read
that again!,” her face ablaze in smiles. All of us are glad your mother had you!

 

S
ALLI
K
AMINS
Venice, California

 

Thanks, Salli. You made our year
.

And to all of our Imponderable friends, thanks for all of your support. We’ll meet you again at the same place, same time, next year
.