Why Do Pirates Love Parrots? (8 page)
Read Why Do Pirates Love Parrots? Online
Authors: David Feldman
Perhaps women believe more strongly in psychic phenomena. And maybe female practitioners have more talent at “reading” others, or at least more skills in conveying empathy. But our money is on the sociological explanation. Frederick Woodruff sees the obstacles to men joining the ranks of the psychics, but is optimistic about the future:
Imagine a child telling her father, “Dad, I want to be a numerologist when I grow up,” and the dad saying, “Sure! Let me take the money I set aside for your college education and find you a good occultist!
…But this is starting to change. The oppression of the feminine realm is beginning to lift, and these intuitive, reflective, and imaginative qualities are beginning to reassert themselves into everyday life.
The skeptic would look at the same set of facts and observe that as feminine values are more highly regarded, and women are given more opportunities in the workplace, women will have less need for the paranormal to help them cope with everyday life. While this transition is taking place, there will still be more female sitters and readers.
Submitted by Kathryn Rutherford of Grissom AFB, Indiana. Thanks also to Dennis Estes of Cascade, Maryland.
Y
ou don’t know Jack? Neither did reader Phil Hubbard, who admitted that he first submitted this Imponderable as a joke, “assuming that this was still another use of the word “jack” that does not refer to an actual person.”
But then Phil went to Merriam-Webster’s Web site and found that the dictionary ascribed the etymology to an “alteration of David Jacks, nineteenth-century California landowner.” How did a landowner in Monterey become associated with California’s most popular native cheese?
David Jacks, a Scottish immigrant, moved to California during the gold rush in the mid-nineteenth century, where he amassed wealth by selling dry goods to miners. Jacks gobbled up land and quickly became one of the largest landowners in Monterey County. Jacks was known to lend money to insolvent borrowers, using their land as collateral: He was not shy about foreclosing.
Jacks was not a cheese maker, but he did acquire approximately fifteen dairies as part of his real estate portfolio. Although there is some controversy about the etymology of Monterey Jack, the California Dairy Research Foundation’s explanation is the most widely dispersed:
As the story goes, sometime in 1882 David Jacks began shipping from his dairies a cheese branded with his last name and the city of origin, Monterey, to San Francisco and other western markets. Eventually the “s” was dropped and people began asking for “Monterey Jack.” While there are alternative explanations for the cheese’s origins—such as that the cheese was first made using a “jack” (or press)—David Jacks is the one most often credited for its distinctive name.
Although Jacks might have given the cheese its popular name in the United States, chances are Monterey Jack is a descendant of cheeses that were first brought to California by Spanish missionaries a century before. The missionaries called their cheese
queso del pais
or “country cheese.” In the 1850s, Dona Juna Cota de Boronda, a housewife with a disabled husband and fifteen children, started selling her queso del pais door-to-door in Monterey. Those who credit Boronda with being queen of Jack cheese claim that Jacks usurped a name already in circulation, because of the press used to make the cheese. Judge Paul Bernal, San Jose, California’s official historian, is clearly in this camp:
Some consumers looking for Boronda’s cheese would ask for the “jack” cheese (cheese made with a press or jack). Some would ask for Monterey Cheese. Capitalizing on the confusion of terms and producers, David Jacks cleverly renamed his brand “Monterey Jack Cheese” so all buyers would gravitate toward his cheese. Of course, Boronda was wiped out and Jacks became wealthy, enabling him to build the Jose Theatre [built in 1904 and still standing], among other enterprises.
There are other claimants to the throne of originators of the cheese, all of whom argue that the jack in question refers to the press used to make the cheese. About the only group not trying to claim credit are the Franciscan monks who created the cheese in the first place.
Thanks to Phil Hubbard of Williamsburg, Kentucky.
T
his Imponderable would be
so
easy to answer if the sun, moon, and Earth would get together and agree on a uniform schedule. But they refuse to do so, keeping astronomers and astrologers in business, and making it hard for us to provide a simple answer.
Here’s the simple answer, anyway. The moon does not shine by its own light. When we see the moon, it’s only because we are seeing the reflection of sunlight bouncing off its surface. You can see the moon in the daytime when the sun and the moon are located in the same direction in the sky. As the moon proceeds on its (approximately) twenty-nine-day orbit around the Earth, at times it’s on the opposite side of the Earth from the sun.
Although we may remember this only when we’ve been indulging in too many recreational substances, the Earth is also spinning on its axis once every twenty-four hours, a much shorter time than it takes the moon to revolve around us or for the Earth and moon together to orbit around the sun (a year). Though we perceive the moon as rising and setting as it “moves” across the sky, it’s really the Earth rotating on its axis (“underneath” the moon) that causes this effect. In one day, the moon doesn’t move much relative to the sun or to the Earth, even though during these twenty-four hours, we see a complete cycle of day and night because of our planet’s spinning.
Viewing of the moon is also contingent on the state of the Earth’s atmosphere. The stars are “out” during the day, but we can’t see them because the scattered light from the sun is bright enough to drown out the relatively dim light from the stars. But the moon is the second brightest object in the sky, next to the sun, so even though it appears pale, we can usually see it during the day if it is close in direction to the sun. But on days with excessive glare or cloudiness, the moon may not be visible, especially just before and after a new moon.
Even though the moon and sun often appear to be close together, the sun is always about 400 times farther away from Earth than the moon. We can see the moon during the daytime when the sun and moon are relatively close in direction, but not too close! When they are aligned too closely, we can’t see the moon because the sun is directly behind it and can’t light up the side of the moon facing us. When they are in opposite directions, in the daytime, the sun is overhead but the moon is on the opposite side of the Earth.
When the moon is overhead, you do see it, but it is night because the sun is on the other side of the Earth. It’s when the moon and sun are at right angles, or close to it, that you can best see the moon during the day—the sun, moon, and Earth form a big triangle, and the sun is “in front” of the moon to light up the side of the moon that is visible to us, and it’s daytime because the sun is up in the sky above us.
Still confused? Maybe this analogy from Tim Kallman, an astrophysicist at the Laboratory for High Energy Astrophysics at NASA, will help:
It might be useful to think of the sun as a large light bulb, and the moon as a large mirror. There are situations where we can’t see the light bulb, but we can see the light from the bulb reflected in the mirror. This is the situation when the moon is out at night. We can’t see the sun directly because the Earth is blocking our view of it, but we can see its light reflected from the moon. However, there are also situations where we see both the light bulb and the mirror, and this is what is happening when we see the moon during the day.
Submitted by Glen Kassas of Concord, New Hampshire. Thanks also to Caroline and Cathy Yeh, of parts unknown; Margaret Paul Vitale of Palermo, Italy; and Terry Keys, Jr. of Friendswood, Texas.
T
he origins of Hershey Kisses lay more in technology than romance. Before Kisses, Hershey sold a molded candy called Sweetheart. It was cone-shaped and featured a kiss imprint on its base. No one knows for sure if Sweetheart inspired the Hershey Kiss. According to Pamela C. Whitenack, director of the Hershey Community Archives, and the source for most of our information in this chapter, the word “kiss” was already a common confectionary term for small candies when Hershey first marketed its Kiss in 1907.
The key attribute of the Kiss was its distinctive shape, and the difficulty in its production was developing machinery that could extrude chocolate at the proper temperature, and then cool it quickly so that the whirl on top remained intact. Hershey wasn’t able to figure out how to wrap Kisses by machine at first—every Kiss was individually wrapped by hand, with a small tissue (containing the Hershey trademark) surrounding the chocolate and housed inside the foil exterior. In
The Emperors of Chocolate: Inside the Secret World of Hershey and Mars
, Jöel Glenn Brenner points out the problems with this method:
To wrap a single Kiss was a delicate process: the tissues inserted in each one had a tendency to blow away, and were difficult to handle. A proper wrap required picking up the tissue, laying it on a foil, placing the Kiss on top and twisting the whole package together. But this process took too much time. Some workers were known to pick up a Kiss, lick the bottom, dab it on a pile of tissues, then deposit that on the foil and twist.
Another weakness of the early Kisses was that there was no clear indication of the Hershey name on the exterior. Kisses were first sold in bulk at approximately thirty cents per pound. Hershey needed a way to make its confections distinctive and identified with its brand, and the solution came in the form of the little tag, which Hershey calls a “plume.” The plume was made possible by the creation of a suitable wrapping machine in 1921.
Although the single-channel wrapping machine has since given way to a complex wonder that can wrap up to 1,300 Kisses in an hour, even the current machine essentially duplicates the process of the hand wrappers. The foil and the plume material are brought to the wrapping area in continuous rolls, and then threaded separately through the wrapping machine so that the plumes are placed on top of the foil. The two materials are then precision-cut to exact specifications, so that the plume pokes its head out of the foil. Naked pieces of chocolate are centered on the foil-plume combination and the wrappers are twisted before exiting the machine. Then the finished individual Kisses are sent to another station for inspection, weighing (there are ninety-five Kisses to a pound) and bagging. When multiple color foils are used, such as for holiday Kisses, the additional foils are blended together at this stage.
Where did the name “Kiss” come from? No one seems to know. Pam Whitenack told
Imponderables
that although “kiss” was used to describe bite-sized candies in the nineteenth century, it didn’t stop after the introduction of the Hershey Kiss, either:
I have a page from the
Confectioner’s Journal
(a trade publication from the turn of the twentieth century) that shows more than two dozen different kinds of confectionary kisses. Jolly Rancher Bites were marketed as “Kisses” prior to the company’s acquisition by Hershey Foods Corporation. The product name was changed to avoid confusion with Hershey’s older and more recognizable product.
It was not until 1923 that Hershey obtained a registered trademark for Kisses, and that wasn’t for the name alone, but for the “basic shape, size, and configuration of Kisses, with its foil wrap.”
Is it a coincidence, corporate espionage, or cosmic fate that in the same year that Hershey Kisses were introduced in the United States, 1907, Perugina launched its line of small chocolates, Baci, in Italy? The Italian chocolate also sports a similar but not identical swirl on top. Baci offers no plume, but includes a love note (in four languages) inside every chocolate. Oh, one other thing:
Baci
just happens to mean kisses in Italian.
Submitted by Anthony Cusumano of Ashburn, Virginia.