Why Do Pirates Love Parrots? (10 page)

E
ver since we inquired into the origins of why there are ten hot dogs in a package and eight hot-dog buns (even we don’t drop enough franks off the grill to justify the shortfall), we’ve been wary of finding any logic in the world of food packaging. We were a little surprised at how many people within the cheese and dairy industry couldn’t answer this Imponderable. But luckily we found two experts who could: David Brown, senior extension associate at Cornell University’s food science department, and Dean Sommer, a cheese technologist at the Wisconsin Center for Dairy Research in Madison, Wisconsin.

Traditionally, most cheeses were made in round form, and this includes most of the cheeses we find now in rectangular form, such as Cheddar and Swiss. The classic Cheddar was made in forty-pound wheels, and in England, most Cheddars still are round. The Swiss often created much bigger wheels, as heavy as 200 to 220 pounds. Sommer points out that even in the United States, you can see vestiges of these traditions in half-round Cheddar and in colby longhorns or Cheddar longhorns. For these popular cheeses, the shape has no influence on its flavor or texture. If you look at recipes for making cheese, the shape of the finished product is usually optional.

So if one shape isn’t inherently superior in making better cheese, what accounts for the rectangles we see on grocery shelves? One reason that both our experts mentioned was that rectangular packages were easier to stack on grocery shelves, with less wasted space than round ones.

But more important is that the “conversion” from big blocks of cheese to consumer-sized pieces be accomplished with the least amount of scraps. Sommer wrote us:

Brown adds that sometimes retail accounts, such as gourmet stores, ask for five-to ten-pound bricks (to sell as is or from which to cut smaller pieces), and these are also more easily created from rectangular bulk cheese.

But the round cheese is far from extinct. Because round cheeses are associated with traditional methods, most artisanal cheese is made in this shape, even when there is no technical reason to do so. But some cheeses are more easily made round, as Sommer explains:

Many hard cheeses, especially ones that are brined or smoked, work best when made in a wheel or cylinder, where the flavoring on the outside, whether salt or brine, can evenly penetrate the interior. Provolone was traditionally made in the shape of salami. Authentic provolone is smoked, and David Brown speculates that the 200-pound provolone might have hung next to salamis and other cured meats in smokehouses in Italy.

Mozzarella was traditionally created in balls, probably to promote evenness in the brining process, and you still see them in Italian markets and gourmet stores, but because it has become a mass-market item, you can find rectangular specimens in stores, along with the shredded mozzarella for lazy pizza makers.

Submitted by Julie Erskine of Columbus, Ohio. Thanks also to Zoe Klugman of Guilford, Connecticut.

O
n June 6, 1944, 156,000 Allied soldiers headed to the shores of France (most famously, in Normandy), as part of Operation Overlord, the code name for the entire Allied invasion of northwest Europe. Not all of the soldiers landed on the beaches on June 6, but that day became known as D-Day, the beginning of the pivotal Battle of Normandy.

In an unscientific sampling of friends and acquaintances, we received all kinds of guesses about what the D might represent. Some of the guesses included: Decision, Disembarkation, Debarkation, Doomsday, Deliverance, and most commonly, Dunno.

We contacted the D-Day Museum in Portsmouth, England, and a representative wrote
Imponderables
that the museum’s own Web site’s explanation was as good as any:

Both the U.S. and British military have the same designations for “D” and “H” in military planning. We haven’t been able to find its first use in England, but in the United States it dates back at least to World War I. According to the U.S. Army Center of Military History,

Submitted by Lance Tock of Brooklyn Park, Minnesota.

A
lthough an elephant’s trunk seems to be wide as the back of a Lincoln Continental, the big lugs’ proboscises are named after their resemblance to a tree’s trunk. As veterinarian Myron Hinrichs wrote
Imponderables:

The first recorded use of the word “trunk” to describe an elephant’s nose was in 1565, in a translation by Richard Eden, an English translator of many books on travel, geography, and navigation. According to the
Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology,
“trunk” was first used to describe the main stem of a tree only a century before.

Submitted by Michael Green of New York, New York. Thanks also to Jennifer Erin Hester of Albany, Georgia.

I
n
Do Penguins Have Knees?
, we answered a similar Imponderable about the weird distance between the pitcher’s mound and home plate (sixty and one-half feet), and concluded that most likely the culprit was a misread of architectural drawings that called for a nice, even sixty feet. Although no one knows for sure, including the National Football League and the Pro Football Hall of Fame, our guess is that some faulty arithmetic might be to blame for the weird asymmetry of the football field.

Bob Carroll, executive director of the Pro Football Research Association, is our go-to guy about football history, and he filled us in on the ever-shifting dimensions of football fields. In the early days of football, the field was 420 feet by 210 feet—a tidy 2:1 ratio. But in 1881, the length was reduced to 330 feet or 110 yards. All of this length was used for the game itself; end zones did not exist because the forward pass had not yet been introduced. But in 1881, the width was not reduced to exactly half the length; 160 rather than 165 feet was chosen as the width, possibly because it was an even number, possibly because someone hadn’t done a very good job comprehending their pre-algebra lessons. The playing area was later reduced to 100 yards, with two ten-foot end zones, but the damage had been done: The 2:1 ratio of length to width was a thing of the past.

Submitted by John Martin of Sebastopol, California.

A
lmost ten years ago, we received a thick envelope from Bill C. Davis of Portland, Oregon. He posed this Imponderable and mentioned that he stumbled upon a book that was a “gold mine of pages left intentionally blank.” The book, an instruction manual for the Microcom QX/2400t Error-Correcting Modem, might not have been a bestseller, but it was a perfect illustration of Bill’s point. He noted that the blank pages were numbered and each blared “This Page Intentionally Left Blank,” with each word capitalized.

For proof, he included a sample of each of the blank pages:

For Bill, Margaret, and the other readers who have pondered this mystery, we’re here to help.

As we wrote in our first volume of
Imponderables,
most books have a few empty pages at the front or the back. We in the publishing biz are cool enough to let them bask in their nakedness. But let the lawyers, financial titans, and technical writers and editors get involved, and weirdness ensues. Englishman Guy Chapman, who has seen a technical manual or two in his days in the computer industry, wrote a perfect preamble to this Imponderable:

There are slight variations to the wording. Every writing teacher tells students to make their writing punchier by using more verbs and fewer adjectives and adverbs. Some choose to transform the dowdy “This Page Intentionally Left Blank” to the downright adventurous and sinewy, “This Page Is Intentionally Left Blank.” Chapman found one manual writer who was so chagrined at the thought of the TPILB paradox that the bereft page was marked with “The page on which this statement has been printed has been intentionally left such that this statement is the only statement printed on it.” That writer, evidently, was paid by the word.

Reader Harvey Kleinman opened up the prospectus for a mutual fund, Vanguard Windsor II, and realized that the last page (not the cover or inside back page) contained these magic five words. He noted that just as books are not printed on individual sheets but on larger collections of eight, sixteen, or thirty-two pages, the prospectus was a folded four-sided piece of paper. Because the prospectus is a legal document, which must be issued to investors, it wasn’t the right venue to casually insert an advertisement for other funds, a random illustration, or a photo of Catherine Zeta-Jones. As Chapman points out, in some instruction booklets, you will find “Notes” as a header on otherwise empty pages, which makes it look like the producer cares enough about you to provide you with a writing area, when in fact it is to hide the embarrassment of a naked page.

TPILBs have been found in a myriad of documents. Let’s look at some of them, and find out why they appear:

Legal Documents:
Let’s say you are an associate at a big law firm, assembling a lengthy brief (oxymoron intended) full of documentation to support your case. You paginate these hundreds of documents and then at two in the morning, your managing partner calls and barks: “You know that Perlman affidavit? Yank it!” You follow orders, but what do you do with what are now incorrectly numbered pages? Before computerization, repaginating was a nightmare—now it is easier. But according to the lawyers we consulted, it is wiser to insert a TPILB than to try to repaginate, and not just because of the time wasted or the drudgery of reworking the numbers. According to Ed Swanson, an attorney in Los Angeles specializing in corporate and securities law, a lawyer has to worry about the accuracy of every cross-reference and page citation throughout the document.

Swanson mentions that in documents that require signatures, lawyers usually want all the signatures to be on the same page, and separate from other material. Or they might want to highlight a particular heading or caption. Depending upon the length of the material preceding it, the important material might best be accentuated by having an empty page preceding it—time to drag out the trusty TPILB—or sometimes just an “Intentionally Left Blank,” if most but not all of a page is empty. Why bother with the warning message? Lawyers are paid to contemplate every awful, even if unlikely, eventuality, and a nefarious type could insert unwanted material into the empty space. The “ILB” makes it clear, Swanson observes, that “Nothing funny is going on.” TPILBs occasionally appear in classified documents, especially military publications. Obviously, this is a sensitive area where the consequences of “nothing funny is going on” are anything but funny.

Sometimes, a TPILB is the result of sloth rather than meticulousness. We cajoled a lawyer into admitting that he has created a few TPILBs in his time, and he admits that sometimes they are put in documents out of “sheer laziness.” Paul Dahlman, an attorney in New York City, e-mailed us:

Financial Documents:
Most of the factors stated above apply here, which makes sense, as lawyers have their way with financial documents, too. Jack Suber, a lawyer and general manager of American Financial Printers, adds that one difference in financial documents is a greater incidence of right-hand TPILBs, which we’ve noticed in annual reports and prospectuses from financial institutions:

Customized Booklets and Manuals:
When you look at an electronics manual these days, often it will cover many different variations of the same model. It is easy to mistakenly read the right advice for the wrong product. That’s one major reason why, in the era of desktop publishing, many corporate customers demand custom manuals for the products and services they buy, ones that cover the exact configuration they have purchased. It’s a snap for the publisher to patch together modular, preprinted chapters, and even to provide custom pagination. But some of these chapters will end on a right-hand page, and the custom is for all new chapters to start on the right. Solution? TPILB.

SATs and Other Standardized Tests:
TPILB or “NTCOTP” (No Test Content On This Page) lets test takers know that they have reached the end of one section of these timed, standardized tests. The wrath of the College Board will be unleashed on the test taker who “mistakenly” flips beyond to the next section of the test before so instructed.

Musical Scores:
Imagine pounding on the piano, finding the time to flip the page in the midst of the performance, and seeing a blank page staring at you. Sheet music publishers try to pattern scores so that the fewest page turns are necessary, including defying publishing tradition by starting compositions on the left-hand page. TPILB lets the musician know that all is well.

Jack Suber believes that the majority of TPILBs occur because of our tradition of starting new chapters, and page one, on the right-hand side. Doing otherwise is so alien to customary practice that Suber says the finished product is called a “Chinese folio.” As we discussed in
Why Don’t Cats Like To Swim?
, this custom started before there were covers on books. If there was no binding, then there
was
no left-hand page at the start of a book. The technological reason for the right-hand first page no longer exists, but it remains as a curious vestige of the bygone days of printing.

But what if there is no left-hand page in a document today? TPILB has infiltrated the World Wide Web. The “This Page Intentionally Left Blank” Project fears that in the computer age, TPILB might be an endangered species, so it has issued this manifesto:

We’re proud to do our part to spread the five magic words, at http://www.imponderables.com/tpilb.php.

Submitted by Bill C. Davis of Portland, Oregon. Thanks also to Chris Curtis of Denver, Colorado; Harvey Kleinman of New York, New York; and Jonathan Ah Kit of Lower Hutt, New Zealand.