Uncle John’s Giant 10th Anniversary Bathroom Reader (40 page)

Desperate lonely loser
, SWM, 32, tired of watching TV and my roommate’s hair fall out. Seeks depressed, unattractive SWF, 25-32, no sense of humor, for long talks about the macabre.

Here are more cosmic queries you don’t need to answer, from the Internet and our friends at
“The
Edge.”

Who needs rhetorical questions?

Why do they sterilize the needles for lethal injections?

How do they get the deer to cross the road at the yellow sign?

Why do kamikaze pilots wear helmets?

What do you do when you discover an endangered animal that eats only endangered plants?

If women wear a pair of pants and a pair of glasses, why don’t they wear a pair of bras?

Twenty-four hours in a day…twenty-four beers in a case…coincidence?

Why do they put braille dots on the keypad of the drive-up ATM?

When you’re sending someone styrofoam, what do you pack it in?

If 7-11 is open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, why are there locks on the doors?

If someone with multiple personalities threatens to kill himself, is it considered a hostage situation?

How can there be self-help
groups?

What’s another word for
thesaurus?

Do witches run spell-checks?

If it’s tourist season, why can’t we shoot them?

Is it true that cannibals don’t eat clowns because they taste funny?

When you choke a Smurf, what color does it turn?

If dolphins are so smart, why did Flipper work for television?

If you haven’t understood me to this point, why do I bother? If you have understood me, why are you listening?

We gave you a brief history of the microwave oven on
page 51
. Now here’s the rest of the story—the science that makes it work.

W
HAT ARE MICROWAVES?

Here’s the first thing you should know about “microwaves”: Like visible light, radio waves, and X-rays, they are waves of electromagnetic energy. What makes the four waves different from each other? Each has a different length (
wavelength)
and vibrates at a different speed (
frequency).

• Microwaves get their name because their wavelength is much shorter than electromagnetic waves that carry TV and radio signals. (For more info about electromagnetic waves, see
page 381
.)

• The microwaves in a microwave oven have a wavelength of about four inches, and they vibrate 2.5 billion times per second—about the same natural frequency as water molecules. That’s what makes them so effective at heating food.

• A conventional oven heats the air in the oven, which then cooks the food. But microwaves cause water molecules in the food to vibrate at high speeds, creating heat. The heated water molecules are what cook the food.

• Glass, ceramic, and plastic plates contain virtually no water molecules, which is why they don’t heat up in the microwave.

MICROWAVE MECHANICS

• When the microwave oven is turned on, electricity passes through the magnetron, the tube which produces microwaves. The microwaves are then channeled down a metal tube (
waveguide
) and through a slow rotating metal fan
(stirrer),
which scatters them into the part of the oven where the food is placed.

• The walls of the oven are made of metal, which reflects microwaves the same way that a mirror reflects visible light. So when the microwaves hit the stirrer and are scattered into the food chamber, they bounce off the metal walls and penetrate the food from every direction. Some ovens have a rotating turntable that helps food cook more evenly.

• Do microwave ovens cook food from the inside out? Some people think so, but the answer seems to be no. Microwaves cook food from the outside in, like conventional ovens. But the microwave energy only penetrates about an inch into the food. The heat that’s created by the water molecules then penetrates deeper into the food, cooking it all the way through. This secondary cooking process is known as “conduction.”

• The metal holes in the glass door of the microwave oven are large enough to let out visible light (which has a small wavelength), but too small to allow the microwaves (which have a larger wavelength) to escape. So you can see what’s cooking without getting cooked yourself.

YOU CALL THAT COOKING?

According to legend, shortly after Raytheon perfected its first microwave oven in the 1950s, Charles Adams, the chairman of Raytheon, had one installed in his kitchen so he could taste for himself what microwave-cooked food was like. But as Adams’s cook quickly discovered, meat didn’t brown in the oven, french fries stayed limp and damp, and cakes didn’t rise. The cook, condemning the oven as “black magic,” quit.

When sales of microwave ovens took off in the late 1980s, millions of cooks discovered the same thing: Microwaves just don’t cook some foods as well as regular ovens do. The reason: Because microwaves cook by exciting the water molecules in food, the food inside a microwave oven rarely cooks at temperatures higher than 212°F, the temperature at which water turns to steam.

Conventional ovens, on the other hand, cook at temperatures as high as 550°F. High temperatures are needed to caramelize sugars and break down proteins, carbohydrates, and other substances and combine them into more complex flavors. So microwave ovens can’t do any of this, and they can’t bake, either.

Some people feel this is the microwave’s Achilles heel. “The name ‘microwave oven’ is a misnomer,” says Cindy Ayers, an executive with Campbell’s Soup. “It doesn’t do what an oven does.”

“It’s a glorified popcorn popper,” says Tom Vierhile, a researcher with
Marketing Intelligence
, a newsletter that tracks microwave sales. “When the microwave first came out, people thought they had stumbled on nirvana. It’s not the appliance the food industry thought it would be. It’s a major disappointment.”

Adds one cooking critic: “Microwave sales are still strong, but time will tell whether they have a future in the American kitchen.” In the meantime, Uncle John isn’t holding his breath—he’s too busy heating up leftovers.

MICROWAVE FACTS

• Have you heard that microwave ovens are dangerous? In 1968 the Walter Reed Hospital tested them to see if the microwaves leaked out. They did—and the government stepped in to set the first federal standards for microwave construction. Today all microwaves sold in the U.S. must be manufactured according to federal safety standards.

• If you microwave your foods in a square container and aren’t happy with the results, try cooking them in a round one. “Food cooks better in a round container than in a square one,” says Jim Watkins, president of the company that makes Healthy Choice microwave food products. “No one really knows why.”

• Irregularly shaped foods, such as a leg of chicken that is thick at one end and thin at the other end, cook unevenly.

• Food that has been cut up will also cook faster than a single, large piece of food, for the same reason: the microwaves penetrate completely through smaller pieces of food, but not through larger pieces.

• Aluminum foil reflects microwave energy the same way mirrors reflect light energy. That’s why you can’t use foil in a microwave…unless, for example, you’re using it to shield some food items on a plate while others are being cooked. But be careful: if too much food is shielded with foil, the microwaves can overload the oven and damage the magnetron.

Common knowledge is frequently wrong. Here are a few examples of things that most people believe…but just aren’t true.

M
yth:
Watching TV in a dark room is bad for your eyes.

Fact:
As Paul Dickson and Joseph C. Goulden write in
Myth-Informed
, “The myth was created in the early 1950s by an innovative Philadelphia public relations man named J. Robert Mendte, on behalf of a client who manufactured lamps.”

Myth:
For every cockroach you see in your house, there are 10 more you didn’t see.

Fact:
According to studies conducted by the Insects Affecting Man and Animals Laboratory of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the number is actually closer to 1,000 to 1.

Myth:
Flamingos are naturally pink.

Fact:
Flamingos are grey when chicks. They turn pink as adults because the sea creatures they eat turn pink during digestion. The pigment is then absorbed by the bird’s body and colors its feathers. If flamingos are fed a different diet, they’re white.

Myth:
Johnny Weissmuller’s famous Tarzan yell was his voice combined with a high C sung by a soprano and a hyena’s howl recorded and played backward.

Fact:
Fooled us. It was all Weissmuller’s own voice.

Myth:
All your fingernails grow at the same rate.

Fact:
If you’re right-handed, nails on your right hand grow faster; if you’re left-handed, nails on your left will.

Myth:
Tonto’s nickname for the Lone Ranger, Kemo Sabe, means “faithful friend.”

Fact:
In Apache
Kemo Sabe
means “white shirt,” and in Navaho it means “soggy shrub.” But George Trendle, who created the Lone Ranger, didn’t know that. He took the name from a summer camp he went to as a boy.

Myth:
The artist Vincent Van Gogh cut off his entire ear.

Fact:
The famous episode followed two months of hard work, hard drinking, and an argument with his best friend, Paul Gauguin. Van Gogh was despondent and cut off only a small part of his earlobe.

Myth:
Hens cannot lay eggs without a rooster.

Fact:
Almost all eggs we buy in the store are unfertile eggs, laid by hens with no help from a rooster.

Myth:
More women in the U.S. have had face lifts than any other type of cosmetic surgery.

Fact:
Nope, the cosmetic surgery performed most frequently on women in the U.S. is liposuction. The second most popular process: collagen injections.

Myth:
John Kennedy is one of many presidents buried in Arlington National Cemetary, in Virginia.

Fact:
Actually, there are only three. William Howard Taft (27th president) and Woodrow Wilson (28th president) are the other ones.

Myth:
The largest pyramid in the world is in Egypt.

Fact:
The Quetzalcoatl pyramid southeast of Mexico City is 177′ tall, with a base covering 45 acres and a volume of 120 million cubic feet. Cheops, the largest in Egypt, though originally 481’ tall, has a base covering only 13 acres and a volume of only 90 million cubic feet.