Why Do Pirates Love Parrots? Page 8

  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.

  In Bowling, Why Is a Strike on the “Wrong” Side of the Headpin Called a “Brooklyn Strike”?

  Most bowlers are right-handers, and their tendency is to throw the ball with a natural hook, with the ball moving from right to left. Right-handers with hooks aim the ball just to the right of the headpin (the “one pin”) so it simultaneously hits the three-pin, too. If the ball hooks a little too much to the left, and the ball knocks the headpin straight on, a dreaded, impossible-to-convert split is often the fate.

  But when the right-hander misses by a greater margin and the ball heads to the left of the one-pin, the bowler often lucks out with a strike, even though the target has been missed by a wider margin. Professional bowlers are sheepish when they’ve “achieved” a Brooklyn strike; if you want to irritate serious bowlers, have an opponent of theirs win a match by employing one. As one frustrated amateur admitted on an online bowling bulletin board:

  I never give a high-five to a Brooklyn strike. On the times when it’s been offered by the bowler, I’ve simply told them they have to do better than that to get a high-five from me.

  How was Brooklyn chosen to designate this errant but lucky strike? Mort Luby, publisher of Bowlers Journal International, wrote Imponderables:

  Brooklyn was considered the wrong side of town. Thus, strikes resulting from balls striking the “wrong” side of the headpin were so-named.

  Who would have enough of an “attitude” to make fun of Brooklyn in this way? Of course, it’s the New Yorkers who think they live on the right side of the town: Manhattanites. And if you need further evidence that Luby’s theory is correct, keep in mind that although the term “Brooklyn strike” also applies to left-handers who knock down ten pins by hitting the one-three pocket instead of the desired one-two, another term used to describe a lefty Brooklyn strike is a “Jersey strike,” traditionally New Yorkers’ other favorite location for barbs.

  Submitted by Michelle Marsaglia of Salem, Oregon.

  Why Are the Number 13 and Friday the Thirteenth Considered Unlucky?

  Although these are two of the most frequently posed mysteries by readers, we’ve resisted answering them for a couple of reasons. When in doubt, we try not to use mysteries that can be answered only by other books. But since we can’t travel back in time, nor channel the long-deceased to answer this Imponderable, we are stuck with written sources.

  Most of the books we have consulted leave us frustrated. There are literally scores of books about superstitions, and just about all of them address the fear of 13. Most of them contend that the fear of 13 stems from the Last Supper, where Judas was the thirteenth guest to sit at the table.

  The other most common theory is that the superstition predates Christianity, and is based on an ancient Norse legend in which Baldur, the god of light, is killed by the evil Loki. In a story quite reminiscent of the Last Supper, twelve gods are dining in Valhalla when they are “crashed” by the evil Loki. Baldur is killed soon afterward, because of the plotting of Loki.

  Most books about superstitions assume that Friday is particularly reviled because it was the day of the Crucifixion. In other variations, it is the day that Adam ate the apple.

  But there are problems with all of these theories and we thought the arguments were too shaky to include in an Imponderables book. Then one day, while visiting one of our favorite bookstores—the Tattered Cover in Denver, Colorado—a book with the title of 13 caught our attention (and not just because it happened to sit next to Do Elephants Jump?—we would never, ever go to a bookstore just to check how a book of ours is selling). Written by Nathaniel Lachenmeyer, 13 is a fascinating cultural history of “the world’s most notorious superstition.” In the book, Lachenmeyer articulates our misgivings about prior explanations, and through meticulous research, offers informed opinions about the origins of triskaidekaphobia (the fear of 13).

  Lachenmeyer swats away most of the conventional wisdom. Yes, there is a Norse legend of Baldur, but there were actually 13 gods, not twelve, when Loki appeared on the scene, so 14 should be the unlucky number. Yes, there were twelve “regular” seats for the gods at Valhalla, but there was a “high-seat” for the supreme Odin, and there is no mention of 13 (or fourteen, for that matter) in the legend itself. There isn’t even any evidence that this supposed ancient superstition predated Christianity. Lachenmeyer says that the first recorded source of the Baldur myth is in the Prose Edda, written in the fifteenth century, “two centuries after the conversion of Iceland to Christianity.”

  And there are just as many holes in the Last Supper theory. Nowhere in the accounts of the betrayal of Christ is the number 13 mentioned, while twelve is mentioned several times. Lachenmeyer also argues that the twelve Apostles and Jesus had many meals together (so why weren’t the others unlucky?) and that it is

  inconceivable that the New Testament’s authors would have wittingly embraced the blasphemy of implying that a group that included Jesus Christ—the son of God, the savior of man—was unlucky.

  On the contrary, Lachenmeyer contends that 13 had positive connotations for Christians,

  precisely because of its association with Christ and his twelve disciples. To the Christian, 13 represented the benevolent 13 of Christ and his disciples in general, not the fateful 13 of the Last Supper.

  Lachenmeyer lists many examples of prominent Christian theologians, such as St. Augustine, invoking the number 13 positively.

  Another problem with tracing the ancient roots of triskaidekaphobia is that there is no written record of a fear of 13 before the second half of the seventeenth century, in England, when the notion developed that it was unsafe if 13 people sat at a table (often expressed as the fear that one of the 13 would die within a year). Lachenmeyer attributes the fright to the Great Plague of 1665, and the genuine panic caused by London losing nearly 15 percent of its citizens to the epidemic.

  The European fear of 13 sitting at a table crested in the nineteenth century, when triskaidekaphobia mutated into a general fear of 13, but it was slow to migrate to the United States, which had positive associations with the number 13, because of the original 13 states. The 13-gun salute was the norm at patriotic gatherings in the United States, eventually yielding to the 21-gun salute (the origins of which we discussed in Why Do Clocks Run Clockwise?), but only after Vermont was added to the Union as the fourteenth state.

  Considering the separate superstitions about Friday and 13, it’s surprising that there is no recorded evidence of any special fear of Friday the thirteenth until the twentieth century. Lachenmeyer traces the fear of Friday in the United States to the New Testament and the Crucifixion, although he notes that Friday was also the traditional day for executions in the United States.

  But what spawned the growth of the new fear? There is no smoking gun answer. Newspapers started taking note when Good Friday landed on the thirteenth in the early twentieth century, an indication that the superstition was gaining currency by the first decade of the last millennium.

  But one huge event occurred in 1907. Thomas W. Lawson published a novel, Friday, the Thirteenth. As Lachenmeyer writes:

  it was this novel that redefined the coincidence of unlucky Friday and the 13th as one superstition, and launched Friday the 13th in the popular imagination. Lawson kept the superstition front and center from the opening sentence…to its dramatic conclusion…. [W]ith a plot that hinged on a speculator’s attempt to manipulate the market on Friday the 13th, Friday, the Thirteenth was as successful as it was awful.

  And Lawson’s success did not end with a print bestseller. In 1916, a feature length silent movie version of Friday, the Thirteenth was released, furthering the superstition’s grip. Sixty-four years later, Jason Voorh
ees carries on the tradition of trying to scare the dickens out of us with the first of the Friday the Thirteenth movies, even as the grip of the superstition withered.

  So we buy the notion that a combination of the Last Supper, Good Friday, and Thomas Lawson is responsible for triskaidekaphobia, but it’s important to remember a point that Lachenmeyer makes in 13, perhaps the main reason we were reluctant to tackle this Imponderable until we read his book. Most of the books about superstitions were cavalier about ascribing the fear of 13 to one particular cause, and discussed the superstition as if it had not been mutated by different times and cultures:

  However, continuity of belief needs to be proved, not assumed. This is all the more critical in the case of number superstitions because numerology has been so widely practiced in so many cultures throughout history that it is difficult to find a number between 1 and 24 that has not been considered unlucky by more than one culture.

  Exactly. You have to be methodical and analytical to untangle the messiness of irrational thinking.

  Submitted by Mark Carroll of Nashville, Tennessee. Thanks also to Scott Comstock of Leavenworth, Kansas; Rose Marie Mielke of parts unknown; Patrick M. Premo of Allegany, New York; Pat Ryan of Churchville, New York; Destiny Montague of Peachtree, Georgia; Steve Brunton of Orlando, Florida; Wayne Goode of Madison, Alabama; Robert Bredt, via the Internet; and Lance Tock of Brooklyn Park, Minnesota.

  Since Doughnut Holes Are So Popular, Why Can’t We Buy Bagel Holes?

  In Why Do Clocks Run Clockwise?, we recalled the legend of Captain Hanson Gregory, who “invented” the doughnut—and the doughnut hole—when he impaled a solid fried cake on the spokes of the steering wheel of his ship. If Homer Simpson were a reader of ours, we know that his Imponderable would be: “What happened to that perfectly good doughnut hole that got punched out! And can I eat it?”

  Bagels might not be as sweet as doughnuts, and reader Nora Corrigan may be no Homer Simpson, but as a bagel lover, she wonders why you can go into a Dunkin’ Donuts or Krispy Kreme store and buy doughnut holes, but bagel holes seem to be nowhere in sight. The answer lies in the different ways bagels and doughnuts are produced.

  Doughnuts are cut from a continuous sheet of dough. Two rings—one that forms the outline and the other that creates the center holes—are cut into that sheet before the dough is fried. Bagels start as slightly irregular strings—a hot dog–like shape—and are wrapped around a mandrel, a metal bar that helps form the distinctive bagel shape. Although many bagels are still handmade, bagel-making machines have been used since the early twentieth century, and they merely automate the same method.

  So if the bagel hole is not stamped out but surrounded by dough, does that mean bagel holes are difficult or impossible to produce? According to the American Institute of Baking’s “Dr. Dough” Tom Lehmann,

  It would be entirely within the production capability of most bakeries to create “bagel holes” as small round-shaped pieces of bagel dough that are processed in the same manner as bagels are, but to the best of my knowledge this has not been done commercially.

  Who wants to be a millionaire?

  Submitted by Nora Corrigan of Reston, Virginia.

  Is There Any Logic to the Pattern of Train Whistles? Why Do You Often Hear a Signal of Long-Long-Short-Long?

  Are you sick of all the commercials on American radio? Don’t want to spend the bucks for satellite radio? One alternative is to tune in to the 160 to 161 megahertz bands to listen to one of the ninety-six channels that railroads use for internal communications—not a lot of music, but no commercials.

  But trains didn’t always have radio. Dating back to the days of the steam engine, railroad crews relied on other forms of communication, including whistle, horn, flag, and lantern signals, to let personnel within a train crew transmit important information.

  The signals were not completely uniform. We have charts from six different railroads detailing their signals, including Union Pacific, Northern Pacific, Southern Pacific, and B&O Railroads, and the codes are similar but not identical. In each case, though, manuals make distinctions between short and long “toots.” In every case, one short signal tells the brakeman to stop the train. Two long sounds say: “Release the brakes and proceed.”

  In the days of the steam engine, when a train stopped, it was the role of the flagman, who usually rode in the caboose, to leave his perch and walk behind the train to make sure no approaching train collided from the back. Many of the early whistle codes were methods for the engineer to communicate with the flagman. One short toot followed by three long ones asked the flagman to protect the rear of the train, and three longs followed by one short asked him to guard the front. Other signals prescribed from which direction the flagman should reenter the train.

  Generally, short signals indicate an urgent action. Even today, a series of short signals (usually at least seven) is a warning for a miscreant to get off the tracks—a train is approaching! When a train is moving and three short signals are sounded, it means that the train should stop at the next station; if a train is stopped, three shorts usually signal to proceed backward.

  There’s a reason why the poser of this Imponderable asks about two long, one short, and one long: it’s one of the signals that the average person is most likely to hear. This is a standard signal to indicate that the train is approaching a public crossing. Here’s the verbatim explanation for this signal from the 1943 Southern Pacific rule book:

  Approaching public crossings at grade, tunnels, and obscure curves; to be commenced sufficiently in advance to afford ample warning, but not less than one-fourth mile before reaching a crossing, and prolonged or repeated until engine has passed over the crossing.

  Of course, the loud warnings can be a bone of contention between railroad workers and the communities where the crossings are located. Fitz, a retired locomotive engineer from Chicago, Illinois complains:

  Today, all the yuppies complain about the noise. Few of them understand that without railroads, they wouldn’t have the houses that they own, and the city that they live in.

  Railroad workers required other signals to communicate with each other if one of the workers, such as a signalman, was out of earshot, or if conditions were too noisy for a whistle to be heard. Railroads have long used color signals to communicate the most basic commands. These colors could be signaled by a flag or by a stationary lantern at night. Red, of course, meant to stop; green said to go, but with caution. A white light signified that the coast was clear to go, and blue flags or lanterns were placed where men were working. Electronic color signals can now transmit more complicated information to train crews.

  We thought that the days of lantern and hand signals were long over, but this is not the case. Retired Burlington Northern Santa Fe locomotive engineer Charlie Tomlin told Imponderables:

  I personally prefer to use hand or lantern signals, because it gives one better control over the movement when there is a line of sight. In a busy railroad yard (such as Eola, in Illinois, where I worked a good deal), there could be several crews working on the same radio channel and there was the danger of not being heard or being “walked on,” not to mention the yardmasters giving instructions to the crews via the same channels.

  It was just so much easier to have a job brief and agree on hand or lantern signals, using the radio only in an emergency. When you are switching with a small cut of cars, it is senseless to use the radio when the crew members can see each other or a lantern. As an engineer, I know that the new people are trained in giving and passing on hand and lantern signals and that they are trained to “exaggerate” the signal. I always told the new guys to give “big” hand and lantern signals. It is well appreciated by most engineers.

  Lantern signals are simple, but dramatic, and not a little reminiscent of the movements of flag drill teams at football games. “Stop” is transmitted by a horizontal swing across the track—in an arm movement that mimics the “no” shake of the head. And the “proceed”
signal resembles a nod up and down, with the arm raised and lowered vertically. If a signalman swings his arms up and down in a circle at full arm’s length, watch out: the train has parted, not departed!

  Submitted by Lawrence Atkinson, via the Internet.

  Why Does Dog Food Have To Smell So Awful?

  We always hear about dogs’ vaunted sense of smell. The olfactory area in a human is about one-half of a square inch; a dog’s is twenty square inches. While humans tend to trust their senses of sight more, a dog evaluates food and other living things with its sense of smell.

  And with this heightened ability, the dog chooses to eat stuff that smells like dog food? Maybe we olfactory ignoramuses cannot savor the scent that is kibble, like children who can’t appreciate the bouquet of a fine Burgundy. But we’re not buying that. We’re going to have to agree to disagree with our canine buddies.

  Pet owners tend to anthropomorphize our dogs, so it’s surprising that designer dog foods haven’t been developed to make masters want to compete with Fido for the grub, but the pet industry maintains that its focus is on what pleases the pet. Robert Wilbur, of the Pet Food Institute, explains: