FRUSTABLE 7: Why are belly dancers so zaftig?
Our curiosity about this subject stems from our wondering why belly dancers, who spend their professional life manipulating their abdomens, don’t seem to have toned abdominal muscles. Professionals we originally contacted disagreed about the reasons why, but we heard from quite a few belly dancers, and they were in unexpected agreement.
As you may have guessed, we receive a lot of unusual mail here at Imponderables headquarters. But the first person ever to send us an 8 × 10-inch color glossy was Stasha Rustici of Berkeley, California. By training, Rustici is a social anthropologist, whose interest in folkloric dancing drew her into practicing the ancient art herself. For the last fifteen years, she has been belly dancing professionally, traveling all over the world.
No doubt, her interest in this Frustable was piqued by the fact that although she may have other problems in life, being zaftig isn’t one of them, as her publicity still makes abundantly clear. She has a unique perspective on the subject, and answers our Frustable in both cultural and technical terms:
The standards of beauty differ from place to place in this world. Traditionally, in the areas where food is not plentiful, a plump woman is a sign of wealth. She can afford to eat! In these arid desert regions, this maxim holds true. I can’t tell you how many times a Middle Eastern person in my audience has told me I’m too skinny. Even Cairo, today, hasn’t the selection and availability [of food] that we enjoy in the West. So socioeconomically, plump is pleasing.
Although the lateral oblique muscles are active in this dance form, the rest of the abdomen and the diaphragm are not. In fact, the undulating spine movements, as well as the most ancient move of all, the undulation of the stomach muscles (commonly referred to as the “belly roll”) necessitate a supple, yet somewhat flaccid muscle structure. Furthermore, some additional weight reinforces the quality of this dance’s earthy movements, a dance whose “center of gravity” is at the hips. As you can see by the publicity photo, I’m not the standard of Middle Eastern plumpness. I can testify that it’s harder for me to achieve some movements that my more zaftig sisters perform easily. So physiologically, plump is pleasing.
Karen Kuzsel, publisher of Middle Eastern Dancer, told Imponderables that from the days of the sultans, heavier women were prized by men as status symbols. But another reason why we wouldn’t cast Heather Locklear as a belly dancer is that in the Middle East, where dancers are prized for their expressive range, most belly dancers are not spring chickens. Belly dancing is complicated technically, and true artistry doesn’t come easily. According to Karen, the most accomplished dancers are usually at least forty years old; even in the ageist United States, most belly dancers are over forty.
Honestly, this Frustable was not an attempt to make fun of belly dancers. We’ve been known to be a little zaftig ourselves. And we can’t execute belly rolls. Yet a few of our belly dancer correspondents were a tad defensive. For example, lapsed belly dancing student Beth Eastman of Richfield, Minnesota, was inspired to deliver a passionate defense of belly dancer physiognomy:
If belly dancers looked like Arnold Schwarzenegger, their movements would make their skins appear to be lined with live snakes! Yecch! Also, while retaining cuddlability, the strengthening and toning of the muscles beneath and the increased flexibility of the body gives a real boost to the sex life of the dancer. Go for it, girls!
A complimentary book goes to Stasha Rustici of Berkeley, California.
FRUSTABLE 8: How was hail measured before golf balls were invented?
This started out as one of those comedian-inspired Imponderables that we detest. Any stand-up comic can get a laugh out of “Why do we drive on parkways and park on driveways?” But we have to answer these rhetorical questions/jokes everyone from Gallagher to Andy Rooney muses about and then discards without pursuing.
Pardon our self-pitying whining—we feel better now—and forgive us for thrusting this very difficult Frustable on our generous readership. But, truth be told, most of our correspondents didn’t come up with anything more concrete than we did. Most of you counterpunched with jokes of your own about hail. (Our favorite: Mark Buesing of Peoria, Illinois, reminded us that David Letterman, when he was a weatherman in Indianapolis, once referred to falling hail as “the size of canned hams.”)
But two enterprising readers lurched, as John McLaughlin would say, “uncontrollably into the truth.” Brad Tucker of Syracuse, New York, happened to be reading Commerce of the Prairies, a book by frontiersman Josiah Gregg, who joined a wagon train in 1831. Gregg refers to seeing “hail-stones larger than hen’s eggs…”
But Dallas Brozik of Huntington, West Virginia, was so inspired by this Frustable that he conducted quite a bit of original research. He found two different citations that manage to avoid what every weathercaster in the world seems to find inevitable—comparing the size of hail to a golf ball:
The 1880 edition of the Library of Universal Knowledge…describes hailstones “…which may have any size from that of a pea to that of a walnut, or even an orange…” The entry goes on to mention an incident when hailstones the size of half a brick were found…
The 1940 edition of Nelson’s Encyclopedia…shows a photo of “Hailstones Larger Than Eggs” [of course, golf balls were invented before 1940]. I checked a number of other sources during this period, and most of them refer to the size of hailstones as “one-half to three inches in diameter” or some other measure in inches.
So there is at least part of your answer. If you do not play golf, consider fruits, vegetables, and Euclidian geometry.
Submitted by Donald E. Ullrich of Burlington, Iowa. Thanks also to Edward Hirschfield of Portage, Michigan; and R. W. Stanley of Bossier City, Iowa.
A complimentary book goes to Dallas Brozik of Huntington, West Virginia.
FRUSTABLE 9: Why did 1930s and 1940s movie actors talk so much faster than actors do today?
For some reason, this Frustable didn’t inspire a great number of responses from readers, but radio talk-show hosts were fond of the topic, and many callers across the country contributed their theories.
Some ascribed the change in speed to technical advances in sound recording. This may explain why early 1930s films often sound fast to our ears. Irv Hyatt, a film buff and collector from Woodbridge, New Jersey, wrote Imponderables that many early 1930s movies were recorded with sound on disc rather than on film, which resulted in a higher pitch in the finished recordings:
These discs were later converted to sound on film, and oft-times to synchronize these it was necessary to adjust these recordings as the negative was being made. Some late 1920s and early 1930s films had scenes that were still shot silent, and some even with hand-cranked cameras left over from the silent era.
But we were referring more to the machine-gun delivery of stars like Humphrey Bogart, Katharine Hepburn, Rosalind Russell, and Jimmy Cagney in classic comedies and dramas. One would think that as the moviegoing audience became more sophisticated, the pace would speed up. Certainly, movies today are visually paced at a hysterical rate compared to movies sixty years ago.
Author Nat Segaloff of Cambridge, Massachusetts, who wrote a popular biography of director William Friedkin, sent us a letter full of possible explanations. He notes that superior recording devices allowed rapid-fire dialogue without hiss and distortion. These technical improvements enabled theater-trained writers to construct scripts and stage actors to perform at a pace to which they were accustomed before live audiences. The theater is a more dialogue-driven medium than film, since the numerous and seamless set and costume changes in movies are impossible to duplicate on a proscenium stage. Most writers for the stage were not trained to allow music or crosscutting to compensate for reams of dialogue.
Segaloff believes that the key to the speed regression was the rise of Method acting, spearheaded by teacher-actor-director Lee Strasberg. Actors like Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, Julie Harris, and Kim Hunter, who “went for feeling and truth rather th
an speed and artifice,” changed the pace of delivery. While Marlon Brando searched for his motivation in a scene, Jimmy Cagney would have polished off a page of dialogue. Like their style or not, Method acting rendered the faster cadence of 1930s actors artificial and superficial.
Segaloff suggests that the slower pace of today’s dialogue might be a suggestion that contemporary audiences are less, not more, sophisticated. Frank Capra’s screwball comedies were paced so quickly because of Capra’s conviction that
people sitting together as an audience comprehend things faster than they do as individuals, and for that reason he directed his actors to speed up their delivery by as much as one-third.
Howard Hawks later introduced overlapping dialogue to increase the sensation of speed. Today, Robert Altman uses the same technique, but without the same commercial success.
Segaloff muses about whether we may return to the “amphetamine school of acting,” if only for the crassest commercial reasons:
Ironically, we may be experiencing an unheralded return to speeded-up dialogue. Some videotape manufacturers are now “compressing” (speeding up) longer movies by as much as eight percent to squeeze them onto shorter, cheaper cassettes. One of the first examples: Walt Disney’s 1942 Fantasia, which was painstakingly and publicly restored to its original length of 124 minutes, only later to be speeded up to 120 minutes to become the best-selling title in home video history.
The same compression techniques are being used in advertising to cram more words into fifteen or thirty seconds, and in radio, where cutting five seconds from a song allows a station to insert more commercials while still claiming they play more music.
Submitted by Bob Hatch of Seattle, Washington.
A complimentary book goes to Nat Segaloff of Cambridge, Massachusetts.
FRUSTABLE 10: Why does meat loaf taste the same in all institutions?
Your response to this Frustable was as inspiring as…meatloaf. Not that we have anything to offer.
But don’t despair. We’ve solved some other Frustables that eluded us the first time around. Read on.
The Frustables That Will Not Die
As you have just learned in the “Frustables Update,” solving Frustables is, by definition, frustrating. Although we can’t demolish every Frustable the first time around, we have just begun to fight. In this section, you’ll see the reader contributions from the past year.
Please remember we do not have the space to review all the theories we’ve already advanced; this section is meant as a supplement, not a substitute, for our discussions in previous books.
Frustables First Posed in Why Do Clocks Run Clockwise? and First Discussed in When Do Fish Sleep?
FRUSTABLE 1: Why do you so often see one shoe lying on the side of the road?
In his column “The Straight Dope,” our fellow savant Cecil Adams mused about our devoting seven entire pages to this topic in When Do Fish Sleep? Little did he seem to know that we have published more about this subject in every subsequent book. We’re afraid that the mysterious appearance of roadway single shoes is one of those problems that will not stay in the closet or just go away if left unattended. To those who may scoff at the frequency of SSS (single-shoe syndrome) or the very real suffering it can inflict, please read these testimonials and see if you can keep from dabbing suddenly moist eyes.
First of all, we cannot ignore the direct correlation between SSS and soaring juvenile delinquency rates. Gabriel Raggiunto, of Lebanon, Pennsylvania, bravely allows us to share secrets from his sordid past:
When I was in my late teens, I used to play a game with old shoes. My friends and I would go to second-hand clothing stores, yard sales, and our closets to get old worn-out shoes. After gathering a dozen or two, we would go on a long drive to throw the shoes out. Score was kept by how many road signs were hit and by the size of the sign. The low scorer would end up buying the drinks. The smaller the sign, the more points were awarded.
As they say, (whoever “they” is), kids can be cruel. But juvenile deviants don’t have to be old enough to drive to create SSS, as Dave Moreau of Wappingers Falls, New York, reports:
The mean kids I knew would grab someone else’s sneakers, tie them together, and throw them on to the electric lines. The sneakers would dangle above, so close and yet so far, until the laces eventually weathered (it took almost a year), broke, and the sneaker fell to the street. Of course, this doesn’t explain why one sneaker subsequently disappears, but it could help to explain how they got there. This cruel act was not isolated to my neighborhood alone; traveling through adjoining areas, I noticed this same phenomenon at least three other times.
Michael Levin, professor of philosophy at New York City’s CUNY, adds that drug dealers often fling tennis shoes atop power lines to mark their territories.
Just as troublesome as our crime rate is our soaring rate of divorce. We have learned from Oprah, Phil, Sally Jessy, and Geraldo that the hallmarks of all successful marriages are respect and communication. But how can one partner withstand the intrusion of SSS into an otherwise happy marriage? Cheryl Thompson of Ludlow Falls, Ohio, faced this heartrending problem:
One day my husband and I were going fishing, so I grabbed my old, ugly, dirty tennis shoes and threw them in the truck. As we were riding along, my husband reached over and picked one up and said, “I hate these shoes,” and chucked it out the window. I grabbed the other one to keep him from littering and never saw the other again.
Can this marriage be saved?
Justin Palmer of Granby, Connecticut, realizes that he who is not part of the solution is part of the problem:
While walking home from school late one evening, wearing flexible leather moccasins, I took a shortcut through a grassy field when one of my shoes slid off. I turned around and in the dark patted about only to find what I thought was a new shoe—one of the lost single shoes that everyone comes across!
After considerable time, I abandoned my search, content with my new shoe and acknowledging the loss of the other. Later, under a street lamp, I realized it was the same shoe stuffed with grass and fitting improperly. My negligence, however, could have contributed to the wealth of lost single shoes around the world!
There, there, Justin! Confession is good for the soul. Justin then relates another time when he recovered his own lost single shoe, but he’s turning that story into a made-for-TV movie.
Justin was kind enough to pass along an entry from Reader’s Digest’s “Life in These United States,” which tells the story of a man who innocently drove his slightly tipsy secretary home after an office party. That night, he and his wife were driving to a restaurant, when he noticed a high-heeled shoe lurking out below the passenger seat. Afraid his wife would misinterpret its significance, he waited until she looked away and flung the shoe out of the car. When they got to the restaurant, his wife squirmed a bit and asked, “Honey, have you seen my other shoe?”
Our guess is that the odds that this story is true are about 100 to 1 against. Still, the story is proof that SSS has achieved urban legend status.
Speaking of legends, Angel Kuo of West Nyack, New York, points out that another book claims to have the answer to SSS: Faeries, by Brian Froud and Alan Lee:
The Irish have their own industrious faerie, the Leprechaun (lep-re-kawn) or one-shoe-maker. He is a solitary cobbler to be found merrily working on a single shoe (never a pair) beneath a dockleaf or under a hedge.
Angel theorizes that leprechauns have emigrated around the world, making single shoes and then tossing them off the sides of the road.
Too fanciful and New Agey for you? Then how about a scientific theory from our new hero, Simonetta A. Rodriguez, of Endicott, New York, who has emerged as the philosopher king of SSS. How does Simonetta explain our phenomenon? Entropy and the second law of thermodynamics, of course. These two scientific principles argue that the universe and the systems within it tend toward greater randomness and increasing disorder over time. Take the floor, Simonetta:
We normally encounter shoes in pairs only because human life-forms are constantly working to keep them ordered, in pairs. We do not leave the system of shoes to itself; instead, we rigorously enforce extremely artificial pair-bonding in the system. Since we are life-forms, and highly ordered life-forms at that (well, I do know people who are no more ordered than amoeba, but I want to ignore them for the sake of this discussion), we must constantly work like this to prevent disorder, which is the same thing as death for us. We do not even notice our ceaseless efforts to fight entropy. Well, we don’t notice most of them—I gave up on a lot of housework I used to do when I was young and dumb, because what’s the point? Why fight the universe?
Once some shoes get away from us, the universe does not care about our obsessions. Entropy takes over. The details do not matter: animals, traffic, weather—anything the shoes encounter serves to increase the entropy of the system. If an entire pair of shoes gets away from us, the very first thing that must go is the pair-bond, because it was maintained only by extreme and very unnatural efforts…
I would be most astonished if I saw a pair of shoes by the side of the road, and I never have.
Simonetta must have done very well on essay exams.
From this point forward, we now have theoretical, scientific underpinnings for any future foray into SSS studies.
Are Lobsters Ambidextrous? Page 21