Do Elephants Jump? (7 page)

Ah, the irony. Although their product is used as a fastener, staple manufacturers must turn to a competitor to fasten the staples together. Those clumps of staples, more properly called “strips,” are kept together by glue.

Staples are made out of wire. A machine called a “wire winder” wraps the wire around a spool. According to Lori Andrade, of staple manufacturer Stanley Bostitch, the cement is applied while the wire is wrapped around the spool. Then the flat wire is rolled off the spool, is cut into strips, and is pressed into that lovable staple shape.

Would you be heartbroken if we told you that just about everything they taught you in elementary school about Pilgrims was wrong? We at Imponderables Central remember being forced to draw pictures of Pilgrims during elementary school, presumably to obscure the food stains on our families’ refrigerators during the Thanksgiving season. We remember not liking to draw Pilgrims, because they wore boring black and white clothing, and the men wore those long black steeple hats sporting a gold or silver buckle.

So it is with more than a little feeling of righteous vengeance that we report that we were sold a bill of goods. Pilgrims might have worn hats, and those hats might have even been tall. But they were rarely black and never had a buckle on them.

How were generations brainwashed into thinking that Pilgrims wore buckled hats? For many Americans, there is confusion between the Pilgrims and Puritans. The two groups weren’t totally unrelated: Both were early settlers in America in the early seventeenth century, and both groups fled England to escape what they considered to be an authoritarian and tyrannical Anglican Church, the state-sponsored religion of their government.

But in spirit, the two groups were far apart. The Pilgrims were separatists, who wanted to practice a simple religion without the rituals and symbolism that they felt had spoiled the “Protestant” church. Pilgrims first tried emigrating to Holland, but the poor economic conditions there, along with some religious intolerance, led one contingent to come to America. Approximately sixty of the one hundred passengers aboard the
Mayflower
were separatists (i.e., Pilgrims), and they settled in or near Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1620.

Puritans, on the other hand, did not want to sever their relationship from the Anglican fold completely, but sought to “purify” the church. Puritans wanted to eliminate many of the reforms of the Protestant movement, and return the church to more traditional practices. Several hundred Puritans moved to America in 1629, and settled the Massachusetts Bay Colony in what is now Cape Cod.

Both Puritans and Pilgrims have reputations as authoritarian, humorless, and conformist in their beliefs, but this stereotype characterizes the Puritans (who later in the century went on to conduct the Salem witch trials) more than the Pilgrims, who were much more democratic and inclusive in style. For example, the Pilgrims did, indeed, befriend local Native Americans, although it is unclear whether this pact was motivated by feelings of brotherhood or an arrangement for mutual self-defense.

Both Pilgrims and Puritans would probably be appalled that they are lumped together in Americans’ consciousness today. Puritans would probably consider Pilgrims to be hopeless idealists, and too tolerant of dissent; Pilgrims would probably have deemed Puritans intolerant of others, and too timid to sever their links to the Anglican Church.

The two groups’ different attitudes toward religion and democracy were reflected in their apparel choices. It was the Puritans who dressed the way Pilgrims are often depicted — with dark, somber clothing. Pilgrims, on the other hand, dressed much like their counterparts in England at the time. They did not consider it a sin to wear stylish or colorful clothing — indeed, several of the men who made the original trip on the
Mayflower
were in the clothing or textile trade. Many dyes were available to the Pilgrims, and they favored bright clothing — wills, provisions lists, written inventories, contemporaneous histories, and even sparse physical evidence all indicate that male
Mayflower
passengers wore green, red, yellow, violet, and blue garments along with the admittedly more common white, gray, brown, and black ones. The Pilgrim men wore many different types of hats, including soft caps made of wool or cloth, straw hats, and felt hats with wide brims. Wealthier Pilgrims might have worn more elaborate silk hats with decorative cords or tassels — but nary a buckle in sight.

We contacted Caleb Johnson, a Mayflower descendant who has written the 1,173-page book
The Complete Works of the Mayflower Pilgrims
and hosts a Web site devoted to all things Pilgrim at www.mayflowerhistory.com. Johnson confirmed what we had read in other histories:

So if Pilgrims didn’t wear buckles, why have we always seen depictions of Pilgrims wearing what turns out to be nonexistent doodads on hats that they never actually wore? Johnson implicates writers:

We also heard from Carolyn Freeman Travers, research manager and historian for the Plimoth Plantation, a “living-history museum” in Plymouth, Massachusetts (“Plimoth” was the preferred spelling of William Bradford, the first governor of the colony). The Plimoth Plantation boasts a replica of the
Mayflower,
a re-creation of a Pilgrim village, arts and crafts, and no buckles. She dates the buckle-obsession to the early twentieth century, and thinks artists were the key perpetrators:

Buckles did adorn hats in the late seventeenth century, though. We corresponded with the manager and curator of Plymouth’s Pilgrim Hall Museum, Peggy Baker. Her museum features a cool Pilgrim-era felt hat processed from beaver furs that can be seen at www.pilgrimhall.org/beav_hat.htm. Baker concurred with our experts that buckles weren’t around in the early seventeenth century, but came into vogue later:

Baker agrees that artists are probably to “blame” for the buckle misconceptions:

The action may be on the football field, but the traffic congestion is usually on the sidelines. In NFL games, but especially in big-college football schools, the area around the benches is teeming with as many people as Grand Central Station at rush hour. Who
are
all these guys? As Bob Carroll, executive director of the Pro Football Researchers Association puts it, the sidelines are full of

Restrictions on issuing credentials for access to the sidelines are surprisingly loose, especially in the pros. Faleem Choudhry, a researcher at the Pro Football Hall of Fame, told
Imponderables
that there isn’t a hard and fast rule limiting the number of sidelines personnel, or even visitors: “Anybody the team deems necessary can be there.” One team might want the electrician who supervises the lighting of the stadium to stay near the bench; another team might banish him to the stands.

The problem of overpopulated sidelines is greater in the college ranks, and the Big 10, known for its impassioned football competition, is among the most restrictive conferences in regulating credentials. The Big 10 allows a maximum of forty credentials for the bench area of each team, including all of the absolutely essential non-playing personnel, such as coaches, trainers, and physicians. According to Cassie Arner, associate sports information director of the University of Illinois, the bench area has a dotted line 50 yards long around it, usually starting at one 25-yard line and running to the other 25-yard line. The bench area zone does not extend all the way back to the stands, so cheerleaders and other credentialed personnel (in some cases, marching bands, press, and security) can stay behind the bench zone.

Here’s how Arner estimates the University of Illinois allocates its credentials:

Ten to fifteen coaches

Approximately ten team managers (whose jobs range from handling balls to charting statistics for the team)

Five full-time equipment managers, who are responsible for mending damaged paraphernalia

Ten to fifteen trainers, of whom perhaps five are full-time doctors

The rest are student assistants there to get water, help with taping of bandages, and other relatively unskilled tasks

But other folks somehow manage to creep down to the bench area as well. In this category, Arner includes the team chaplain, security, and occasionally someone from the event management or operations department of the school. But the University of Illinois does not issue credentials for alumni. Occasionally, a big donor or a dignitary from another team might be brought down to the “forty zone” during timeouts or at the quarter breaks. An occasional “honorary coach” is given credentials — usually a professor from the university who has helped with recruiting.

Tom Schott, sports information director at Purdue University, concurs with his Illinois counterpart, although it sounds like Purdue is a little looser in issuing credentials. As he says, “It’s really up to the school’s discretion, except for the forty in the bench area.” On occasion, Purdue will issue a sideline pass to a former player or corporate bigwig, expecting them not to crowd the bench area. Schott observes:

As long as participants in the game are not being harassed or distracted, the NCAA and NFL don’t want to get involved in regulating the population flow on the sidelines. And even if the colleges don’t like having to turn down entreaties for sideline passes, sometimes the alternative is worse. Case in point: Purdue. Schott remarks:

The answer seems obvious: Crickets chirp at night because that’s when
we’re
trying to sleep. But perhaps our application of Murphy’s Law (the Imponderables Corollary: “All acts of nature can be explained by their ability to annoy us to the maximum extent”) isn’t what is uppermost in crickets’ minds. Come to think of it, very little is likely to be uppermost (or bottommost) in crickets’ minds.

Crickets chirp at night because that’s when they are most active. Most cricket species — and there are about 100 just in North America — are nocturnal. They come out at night to find their two most pressing needs: food and crickets of the opposite sex.

During the day, crickets are relatively dormant, hiding from predators beneath rocks, in the grass or trees, or in soil crevices. By lying low when the sun shines, they are hoping to avoid confrontations with small owls, snakes, mice, frogs, raccoons, opossums, and other creatures that might try to hunt them for food.

Most entomologists believe that only male crickets chirp. They chirp by rubbing the two covers over their long wings together by using what is usually called the “scraper and file” technique. The cricket lifts one wing cover to a forty-five-degree angle (the scraper) and rubs the front end of it against the other wing cover (the file). Specialized veins in the wing covers make this possible: the file surface is rough while the scraper is relatively sharp. Crickets are “ambidextrous chirpers” — each wing can serve as both the scraper and file, and commonly crickets will switch off, presumably to prevent fatigue and excess wear on the file. The chirping sound will be the same regardless of which wing cover is used, but different species of crickets can be identified by slight differences in their “songs.” The cricket is so famed for chirping that its name is of “echoic” origin (
cricket
is derived from the Old French
criquet,
an attempt to echo the chirping sound of the insect).

The primary purpose of chirping seems to be to attract female crickets. As Blake Newton, an entomologist at the University of Kentucky put it:

Since each species creates a slightly different song, a female cricket of one species will not be attracted to a cricket from the wrong side of the tracks. Females are more active at night. Like their male counterparts, they are hiding from male predators during the day, and according to David Gray, biologist at California State University, Northridge, they are also busy laying most of their eggs in the daytime.

But sex isn’t the only thing on a chirping cricket’s mind. David Pickering, owner and webmaster of Chamowners Web (http://chamownersweb.tripod.com/), a site devoted to chameleons and crickets, wrote to
Imponderables
: “There are special songs for courtship, fighting, and sounding an alarm.”

Chirping in the nighttime confers several other advantages to crickets regardless of what they are seeking when they sing, as Blake Newton elaborates:

Sound travels best when the air is calm, so nighttime is the right time for crickets. As anyone trying to sleep when crickets are chirping can attest, they can be quite loud. Cricket chirps have been known to travel over a mile in ideal conditions, but some crickets aren’t content to leave their range to the vagaries of weather. In some cricket species, the wing itself acts as an amplifier; others burrow into long holes in the ground and chirp while inside, creating the kind of tunnel effect that echoes and augments the volume.

Entomologists used to believe that chirping was crickets’ only way of communicating with one another, but we know now that they are capable of vocalizing. The sound generated is so high-pitched that humans are incapable of hearing it. The vocalizations seem to be some form of male bonding (female crickets don’t seem to “talk”), perhaps a way of one male to tell another male of an impending predator.

Blake Newton mentions that the time of day or night that crickets chirp seems to be species-specific: Some species of crickets do chirp primarily when the sun shines. Captive crickets, such as those studied by entomologists in laboratories, are apt to chirp at any time, but with a definite bias toward the nighttime.

And yes, crickets do have a preference for hot weather. They
do
chirp more in the summer. When the weather gets cold, crickets not only stop chirping, they stop moving! Like other insects, crickets are cold-blooded. When the temperature rises, their metabolism increases, and the scraping of their wing covers is faster — so they chirp faster on hotter nights than cooler ones.

The relationship between chirping rate and temperature is so established that it is common folk wisdom to count chirps in lieu of consulting a thermometer. Just count the number of chirps from a cricket in fifteen seconds, and then add forty to that number. The sum is supposedly the current temperature in degrees Fahrenheit!