How Does Aspirin Find a Headache? (34 page)
Read How Does Aspirin Find a Headache? Online
Authors: David Feldman
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.
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.
FRUSTABLE 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.