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  Sometimes scientists can be killjoys. For some reason, ornithologists prefer to use the term bill. Why anyone would prefer the bland bill to the cool beak, we can’t figure out, but a look at the scientific literature will confirm what Allison Wells, communications director of the prestigious Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology told us:

  We use only bill around the Lab. Though bill and beak refer to exactly the same thing, bill is the more proper term, and it’s the one we use. However, you will see beak used occasionally in some literature on birds.

  Indeed, veterinarians treat a serious disease called psittacine beak and feather disease. In the less scientific bird press, you’ll see references to “beaks,” especially when discussing birds with large bills, such as flamingos, pelicans, or parrots.

  Just like we tend to apply “beak” to humans with large schnozzes, so do birds with large mandibles receive the more colorful appellation. But to say the least, confusion reigns. We remember from this old limerick by Dixon Lanier Merritt as starting with these words:

  A wonderful bird is the pelican

  His beak can hold more than his belican

  Look up “The Pelican” on the Internet and you’ll see the limerick with bill at least as often as beak, while the rest of the limerick is identical.

  Submitted by Mark Kramer and Kevin McNulty of San Diego, California.

  What Does “Legitimate” Theater Mean? Where Can You Find “Illegitimate” Theater?

  Call us grumpy, but we think laying out a hundred bucks to listen to a caterwauling tenor screech while chandeliers tumble, or watching a radical reinterpretation of Romeo and Juliet as a metaphor for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is plenty illegitimate. But we are etymologically incorrect; the use of the word legit dates back to the end of the nineteenth century, when it was used as a noun to describe stage actors who performed in dramatic plays. It soon became a term to describe just about any serious dramatic enterprise involving live actors.

  And to this day, “legitimate” is used to describe actors who toil in vehicles that are considered superior in status to whatever alternatives are seen as less prestigious. As Bill Benedict of the Theatre Historical Society of America points out, one of the definitions of legit in The Language of American Popular Entertainment is:

  Short for legitimate. Used to distinguish the professional New York commercial stage from traveling and nonprofessional shows. The inference is that legit means stage plays are serious art versus popular fare.

  Back in the late nineteenth century when the notion of “legit” was conceived, live public performances were more popular than they are today, when television, movies, the Internet, DVDs, and spectator sports provide so much competition for the stage. Even several decades into the twentieth century, other types of amusements, such as minstrel shows, vaudeville, burlesque (with and without strippers), magic shows, and musical revues often gathered bigger crowds than legitimate theater.

  “Illegitimate” actors had a shady reputation, as most were itinerant barnstormers who swept in and out of small or medium-sized towns as third-rate carnivals do today. Their entertainments tended to be crude, with plenty of pantomime, caricature, low comedy, and vulgarity, so as to play to audiences of different educational levels, ethnicities, and even languages.

  Cleverly, promoters of “legitimate” theater appealed to elite audiences, who could afford the relatively expensive tickets and understand the erudite language. Theater critics emerged well into the nineteenth century in the United States, trailing behind the British, who already featured theater reviewers in newspapers. The more affluent the base of the newspapers, the more critics would tend to separate the “mere” entertainments from the aesthetic peaks of serious theater.

  These cultural cross currents are still in play today. Theater critics in New York bemoan the “dumbing down” of Broadway shows, Disney converting animated movies into theater pieces, and savvy producers casting “big name” television or movie stars in plays for their marquee value. And the stars are willing to take a drastic reduction pay in order to have the status of legitimate theater bestowed upon them; they appear on talk shows and proclaim, “My roots are in theater.” We’ve yet to see a leading man coo to an interviewer: “My roots are in sitcoms.”

  Not everyone takes these distinctions between “legit” and “illegit” so seriously. When Blue Man Group, with its roots in avant-garde theater, brought its troupe to the Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas, Chris Wink, cofounder of the Blue Man Group, proclaimed: “Now that Vegas has expanded its cultural palette and embraced Broadway-style legitimate theater, it feels like a good time to introduce some illegitimate theater.”

  Submitted by Carol Dias of Lemoore, California.

  Why Do Pianos Have 88 Keys?

  Our pianos have a peculiar configuration, with 52 white keys and 36 black keys, ranging from A, 3½ octaves below middle C, to C, four octaves above middle C. Why not 64 keys? Why not 128?

  Before there were pianos, there were pipe organs. In medieval times, some pipe organs included only a few keys, which were so hard to depress that players had to don leather gloves to do the job. According to piano historian and registered piano technician Stephen H. Brady, medieval stringed instruments originally included only the white keys of the modern keyboard, with the raised black keys added gradually: “The first fully chromatic keyboards [including all the white and black keys] are believed to have appeared in the fourteenth century.”

  Clavichords and harpsichords were the vogue in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but they kept changing in size and configuration — none had more than four octaves’ range. Octave inflation continued along, as the ever more popular harpsichord went up as high as a five-octave range in the eighteenth century.

  In 1709, a Florentine harpsichord builder named Bartolomeo Cristofori invented the pianoforte, an instrument that trumped the harpsichord by its ability to play soft (piano) or loud (forte) depending upon the force applied on the keys by the player. Brady notes that the first pianos looked very much like the harpsichord but

  were fitted with an ingenious escapement mechanism which allowed the tones to be produced by tiny hammers hitting the strings [the mechanism attached the hammers to the keys], rather than by quills plucking the strings as was the case in the harpsichord.

  Others soon created pianos, but there was little uniformity in the number of keys or even in the size of the piano itself.

  Michael Moore, of Steinway & Sons, theorizes that it was a combination of artistic expression and capitalism that gave rise to the 88-key piano. Great composers such as Mozart were demanding instruments capable of expressing the range of the music they were creating. Other composers piggybacked on the expanded range provided by the bigger, “modern” pianos. Piano makers knew they would have a competitive advantage if they could manufacture bigger and better instruments for ambitious composers, and great changes were in store between 1790 and 1890, as Stephen Brady explains:

  By the end of the eighteenth century, toward the end of Mozart’s career and near the beginning of Beethoven’s, piano keyboards had reached six full octaves, and a keyboard compass of six and a half octaves was not uncommon in early nineteenth-century grands. For much of the middle to late nineteenth century, seven full octaves (from lowest A to highest A) was the norm. A few builders in the mid-nineteenth century experimented with the seven - and - a - quarter - octave keyboard, which is in common use today, but it did not become the de facto standard until about the 1890s.

  Steinway’s grand pianos had 85 or fewer keys until the mid-1880s, but Steinway then took the plunge to the 88 we see today, and other manufacturers rushed to meet the specifications of their rival. But why stop at 88? Why not a nice, round 100? Michael Moore explains:

  Expansion into still greater numbers of keys was restrained by practical considerations. There is a limit to the number of tones that a string can be made to reproduce, especially on the bass end, where low notes can rattle, as well as a limit t
o the tones that the ear can hear, especially on the treble end. There is a type of piano, a Boesendorfer Concert Grand, which has 94 different keys, [and a full eight-octave range, with all six of the extra keys added to the bass end], but by and large our 88 keys represent the extent to which pianos can be made to faithfully reproduce tones that our ears can hear.

  Even if more keys would gain the slightest advantage in tones, there is also the consideration of size and weight. The Boesendorf is almost ten feet in length, exceeded only by the ten-feet, two-inch Fazioli Concert Grand. Only a handful of compositions ever ask to use these extra keys, not enough reason to motivate Boesendorfer to add the keys in the first place. According to Brady, “The Boesendorfer company says the extra strings are really there to add sympathetic resonance and richness to the regular notes of the piano’s range.”

  Submitted by Guy Washburn of La Jolla, California.

  Why Do Rice Cakes Hold Together?

  Our correspondent, duly reading the ingredient list on his package of rice cakes, notes that only rice and salt are listed. He rightfully wonders how rice cake makers manage to keep together what would seem to be fragile rice. Is there a secret binding ingredient in the mix?

  We’re sure the rice cake producers would say that the secret ingredient is love, but emotion has nothing to do with it. We contacted several rice cake producers and received the same explanation from all of them (a rarity in the Imponderables business) about how rice cakes are formed.

  First, uncooked rice is soaked in water and then mixed with a little salt (and in some cases, with a bit of oil). This soaking is important, because the moisture from the rice is going to help puff it up when it is heated in the grain-popping machine, as Quaker Foods and Beverages explains:

  A rice cake is formed when heat and pressure are added to the grain, causing it to expand abruptly. A portion of grain is set onto a round, metal pan — like a mini–baking pan. As a hot cylinder presses down onto the pan, sizzling pressure is released. The heat is so intense that after only a few seconds, the grain makes a loud popping noise as it bursts. This process causes the grains to “pop” and interweave. There are no oils, additives, or binding ingredients used during this process.

  If the rice cake is flavored, the seasonings are applied after the popping process, and doesn’t affect the sticking together of the rice itself.

  Rice cakes date back to 3000 B.C. in Southeast Asia, and home cooks have never been privy to the specialized equipment that modern commercial rice cake makers enjoy. Home cooks in Asia make rice cakes by soaking glutinous rice overnight, steaming the rice until it is soft, grinding the heck out of it with a mortar and pestle, and then pounding the mashed rice with a mallet. Then they knead the rice like bread dough and cook it, resulting in a rice cake (or rice ball) with a smoother consistency than that of Western cakes.

  Whether using the traditional methods or specialized metal molds designed only for rice cake production, bakers seem to have no trouble getting rice cakes to hold together — now if only they could manage to produce some taste!

  Submitted by Dane Bowerman of Muir, Pennsylvania.

  Why Doesn’t the Water in Fire Hydrants Freeze During the Winter?

  There may be no such thing as a dumb question, but there are certainly ones that are based on false assumptions. The water doesn’t freeze in hydrants for the same reason that the water in empty ice cube trays doesn’t form cubes. You can’t freeze what’s not there!

  Bob Ward, former president of the SPFAAMFAA (Society for the Preservation and Appreciation of Antique Motor Fire Apparatus in America), told Imponderables that there is a nut at the top of a hydrant that controls the flow of water to the hydrant. When a firefighter wants to open the hydrant, a wrench is used to open the nut. Attached to the shut-off nut is a long stem that goes to the valve at the bottom of the hydrant, underground, that controls the flow of water. When the water flow is closed, the standing water above the valve is drained automatically. As Ward succinctly puts it, “There is no water to freeze.”

  When a firefighter is finished with the hydrant, he or she closes the nut and the water drains below the shut-off valve automatically. The shut-off valve is located well below the frost line, so fire hydrants rarely encounter any freezing problems, even in lovely climes like Chicago’s or Oslo’s.

  Submitted by Todd Sanders of Holmdel, New Jersey

  Why Do So Many Bars Feature Televisions with the Sound Turned Off?

  We spare no financial expense, no mental duress, in order to plumb the depths of Imponderability. To research this question, we tore ourselves away from the plush confines of Imponderables Central to visit many taverns. Risking inebriation and worse, we confirmed that the “Yes, we have a TV on; no, we don’t have the sound on” phenomenon is alive and well in North America. What’s the deal?

  Somewhat to our surprise, we found bartenders uniformly negative about the boob tube and its role in their establishments. Why does management bother installing televisions? The thinking seems to run on the order of:

  Where there are bars, there are men.

  Where there are men, there is an interest in sports.

  Sports is televised.

  Sports on television equals male butts on our stools.

  If we don’t have televisions at our bar, men will go to the sports bar down the street instead.

  But the bartenders we spoke to analyzed this Imponderable more deeply. Televisions are important because they provide patrons with what Dan Sullivan, a Kiwi now living and bartending in Greece, calls “something to do with their eyes.” Single patrons are often uncomfortable and tense when alone. They may be lonely, or worried about looking like losers, or anxious about meeting potential mates. The television “makes it easier for them to be by themselves at the bar,” concludes Roger Herr, owner of South’s Bar in downtown Manhattan.

  Some bars and nightclubs also use televisions to run closed-circuit programming, anything from old Tom and Jerry cartoons to 1960s-style light shows to help set the appropriate mood for their establishments. One bartender compared this use of the television to installing fish tanks, a form of visual Muzak.

  Every bar employee we talked to indicated that as soon as the audio on a television goes on, some patrons are turned off. As Deven Black, former manager of the North Star Pub in New York City, put it,

  No matter how quietly the sound is on, it will offend someone, and you can never have it loud enough so everyone who wants to can hear it.

  Even manly men might not want to accompany their scotch-and-sodas with the mellifluous tones of NASCAR engines backfiring. And bartenders reported that most sports fans are perfectly content with the audio of their sports programs on mute, happily shedding commercials and colorless color commentators.

  All nightclubs and most bars feature music, whether a humble jukebox, live bands, or expensive sound systems. If the TV is going to interfere with the music, why pump dollars into the jukebox? If customers are going to listen to Marv Albert instead of Bruce Springsteen, what owner is going to be happy about installing a $20,000 sound system?

  But most of the bar industry folks we consulted make a more spiritual point. As bartender and beer columnist Christopher Halleron put it,

  People go to bars for conversation and socializing. When you turn up the boob tube, that element is taken away as people become fixated on whatever it spews and stop talking to each other. The same phenomenon occurs in the living room of the average American family.

  Exactly! If we wanted to sit sullenly and watch blinking images while avoiding human contact, we’d stay at home with our families.

  Liquor flows more freely when patrons feel festive, and music and dancing set the mood more easily than Wheel of Fortune or Everybody Loves Raymond. A blaring television sucks the energy out of a room.

  Some bars have used modern technology to solve the television-audio problem in a Solomon-like way: they turn on the closed-captioning option on their TVs. CC might not be the solution i
f patrons are trying to hear the New York Philharmonic on PBS, but then, they never are.

  Submitted by Fred Beeman of Las Vegas, Nevada.

  Why Do So Many Taverns Put Mirrors in Back of the Liquor Bottles Behind the Bar?

  No doubt, many tavern owners install mirrors in the back of their bars for the same reason most businesses do anything — because their competitors are doing the same thing. We were surprised that some bar owners couldn’t explain why they have mirrors behind their bars, but most of the same folks who weighed in on the last Imponderable had plenty of opinions about this one, too.

  Like a television, a mirror provides patrons something to look at when they might feel lonely, tense, or bored. And there can be more practical advantages, as Deven Black notes: “It allows patrons to check each other out discreetly.”

  Sometimes, the view might not be so pleasant (“Uh-oh, here comes my girlfriend! And I told her I’d be home at eight.”), but more than a century ago, some bars ensured that the view would be more pleasing to their clientele, as Gary Regan reveals,