Are Lobsters Ambidextrous?

by David Feldman

  FRUSTABLE 4: Why do the English drive on the left and most other countries on the right?

  We heard from Stanley Ralph Ross, of Beverly Hills, California, who once had the imposing task of writing the script for the Sound and Light Show at London Bridge in England and later at Lake Havasu City, Arizona. The tremendous research available to him led to some interesting conclusions about this Frustable:

  In the 1600s, London Bridge had many buildings erected on it: homes, stores, etc…. Although the width of the bridge was about forty-two feet, the incursion of the buildings made it only twelve feet wide at certain points. The Bridge was the only way one could travel from the city to the country and often had as many as 75,000 people cross it in 24 hours. At that time, there were no traffic laws whatsoever and people just pushed past each other.

  In 1625, on a hot summer day, a horse drawing a wagon dropped dead of a heart attack in one of the areas only twelve feet wide. This caused the Mother Of All Traffic Jams, and nobody could get through in either direction. Upon hearing of this, the Lord Mayor of London, one John Conyers, decreed that all traffic going into the city be on the upstream side of the Thames (left) and all traffic going to the country be on the downstream side. And that was the first traffic rule, a totally arbitrary decision by Conyers.

  Ross explains that Conyers’s fiat was soon extended to the city of London, then to the boroughs of Westminster and Chelsea, to all of England, and then exported overseas.

  FRUSTABLE 8: Why do women in the United States shave their armpits?

  Several readers have taken us to task for not emphasizing the role of advertising in creating the “sudden desire” of women for shaving armpits around 1915. It is true that deodorants were aggressively marketed at this time (ladies’ razors were soon to follow) and that women’s magazines of the time, ever desirous of pleasing advertisers, chimed in with advice to shave.

  But fashion came first. The Mack Sennett Bathing Beauties had an immediate impact on fashion, and many of the first ads for deodorants showed women in “his” bathing suits. Advertisers are responsible for spreading the practice, but probably not for creating it.

  FRUSTABLE 9: Why don’t you ever see really tall old people?

  Dr. Daphne Hare, of Buffalo, New York, was kind enough to send us a story summarizing an Ohio study of men who died of natural causes. The conclusions were startling, indicating that each additional inch in height corresponded to a reduction of 1.2 years in life expectancy. A 5′4″ man can expect to live almost ten years longer than a six-footer.

  According to the Buffalo News, an earlier study showed “an average age of death of 82 for men less than 5 feet, 8 inches tall and 73 for those more than 6 feet tall.” Is this why H. Ross Perot is always smiling?

  Frustables First Posed in When Do Fish Sleep? and First Answered in Why Do Dogs Have Wet Noses?

  FRUSTABLE 3: How, when, and why did the banana peel become the universal slipping agent in vaudeville and movies?

  In Do Penguins Have Knees?, we mentioned that a law student told us about old tort cases involving banana peel slipping, and that Oliver Wendell Holmes actually rendered an opinion on said topic. One enterprising reader, Robert W. Donovan, of Wenham, Massachusetts, went to his attic and dug through old law books to find the cases, and he was successful.

  Holmes, when he was the chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, rendered a decision in the case of Goddard v. Boston & Maine R.R. Co. in 1901. Mr. Goddard slipped on a banana peel lying on a railway platform just as he exited the train. Holmes ruled that Goddard could not collect, because the peel “may have been dropped within a minute by one of the persons who was leaving the train.”

  But not all banana-peel slippers are skinned by the court. Ten years later, in Anjou v. Boston Elevated Railway Co., the pratfaller won, as Donovan explains:

  The distinction turned on the color of the banana peel. In Anjou [the plaintiff, not the pear], the plaintiff slipped on a brown banana peel that had presumably been on the ground for quite awhile. The court ruled that the railway was negligent in failing to keep its station free of ever dangerous banana peels. In Goddard, the banana peel was a fresh yellow color, indicating that it had been thrown on the ground shortly before Mr. Goddard had slipped on it.

  In this case, the court reasoned that although the railroad owed a duty to its passengers to keep its stations clean, it was not reasonable to expect it to assign a maintenance worker to follow around every passenger who may be inclined to eat a banana and carelessly discard its peel…

  We will assume that Anjou was not diabolical enough to carry around a mottled banana peel with her—those were more innocent times.

  But our most exciting discovery came from film buff Irv Hyatt, who was gracious enough to send us a videotape of the man who might hold the key to the whole banana peel mystery—legendary film producer Hal Roach (who produced Laurel and Hardy, Harold Lloyd, and the “Our Gang” comedies, among many others). When he was presented with his honorary Oscar in 1983, the ninety-two-year-old producer spoke of how the banana peel became the universal slipping agent in movies.

  Roach recounted that when he first started working in Hollywood, in 1912, he was paid one dollar a day, plus carfare and lunch. The lunch consisted of two sandwiches and a banana. Every day, after lunch, the prop man would pick up the discarded banana peels and put them away, lest anyone trip over them.

  In the famous Mack Sennett comedy shorts of the era, comics took pratfalls on cakes of soaps or puddles of oil. But Hal Roach had a brainstorm. Why not use banana peels? They were available, plentiful, recognizable on-screen, and best of all, absolutely free for Roach.

  Producer and screenwriter Jeffrey J. Silverstein, of Brooklyn, New York, sent us a letter arguing that, from a comedic standpoint, it is strategically essential for the audience to be aware of the identity of the slipping agent before the “slipee” discovers it. Silverstein, having read our chapter about the selection of colors in traffic lights, feels that the fact that yellow is the most visible color from a distance didn’t hurt its acceptance among directors:

  Plus, the banana has the additional advantage of giving a natural “accidental” setup. The person eating it doesn’t deliberately trip the “slipee”—it is unintentional and therefore funnier.

  FRUSTABLE 8: Why do kids tend to like meat well done (and then prefer it rarer and rarer as they get older)?

  All of the theories we discussed in Why Do Dogs Have Wet Noses? and Do Penguins Have Knees? were psychological or physiological in nature. But we received a fascinating letter from James D. Kilchenman of Toledo, Ohio, who has spent decades in the restaurant and catering businesses. He believes that the most important influences in preferences for meat doneness are socioeconomic and cultural. The higher the socioeconomic status of a group, the rarer they want their meat. In Kilchenman’s catering experience, middle-class white groups invariably order prime rib medium-rare. Working-class black groups tend to order the roast medium-well or sometimes well done. But Kilchenman thinks that class is much more decisive than race: Affluent blacks tend to order meat rarer than less affluent whites.

  How can we explain the socioeconomic taste disparity? Kilchenman attributes the difference to exposure to different types of meat. The better the cut of meat, the more essential it is to have it cooked rare. As Kilchenman puts it, no one walks into Wendy’s and demands a rare burger. Less affluent people are used to cooking cheaper cuts of meat, cuts that often need to be cooked longer to become tender.

  Kilchenman argues that like poor adults, most children have limited exposure to the best cuts of meat. When Mom and Pop take Junior to the restaurant, chances are Junior isn’t going to order filet mignon for dinner. He’ll usually have a hamburger. Kilchenman notes that whenever he has seen children ordering meat rare, they were always from affluent families.

  Just as drinkers start with Singapore Slings and end up drinking martinis, or start as children with Kool-Aid and move to sweet white
wine and later to dry red wine, so do children start with burnt hot dogs. But with exposure to the “finer things in life,” they will end up consuming rare filets as they watch their cholesterol levels rise.

  Frustables First Posed in Why Do Dogs Have Wet Noses? and First Answered in Do Penguins Have Knees?

  FRUSTABLE 1: Does anyone really like fruitcake?

  We heard a disturbing report from Joseph Redman, of Lincoln, Illinois, about nutritional standards in the military:

  In 1968 and 1969 I served two tours in Vietnam as a helicopter ambulance medic. On many occasions we flew around the clock with no regular breaks for hot meals from the mess hall, which meant our option was to eat C-rations. The typical C-ration meal included a main dish of canned meat, sometimes with potatoes; a can of fruit; a can of cheese and crackers or crackers with peanut butter or jelly; and a can of cake.

  The three cakes I remember were pound cake (everyone’s favorite), a nut-cinnamon cake, and fruitcake. The first two were always in short supply. This left great stacks of round, canned fruitcake available for the taking. When one is hungry, one will eat just about anything.

  Our fighting men and women reduced to scavenging for fruitcakes! And they wonder why morale is bad in the military.

  FRUSTABLE 3: We often hear the cliché: “We use only 10 percent of our brains.” How was it determined that we use 10 percent and not 5 percent or 15 percent?

  We heard from two professors who found academic studies that could have been the basis for the cliché. Prof. Michael Levin, of the City College of New York, did some calculations based on the work of neurobiologist Harry Jerison. We’ll save you the gory details and focus on Levin’s conclusions: “The human brain turns out to have about 8.8 billion to the total neurons in the brain is about 1/10.” But Levin offers even more tantalizing evidence:

  According to Harold Jerison, the relation of brain mass E to body mass P in the typical mammal is given by E= .12p2/3. This much brain is assumed to be necessary for housekeeping functions. Anything extra may be assumed to be used for “higher” cognitive functions.

  The ratio of an animal’s actual brain weight to the brain-weight predicted by the equation is what Jerison calls its “encephalization quotient.” It tells us how many times larger the animal’s brain is than it needs to be for basic housekeeping functions.

  The average human male weighs 55,000 grams. Using the above equation, his “expected” brain weight is about 175 grams. The “encephalization quotient” is 7.79—call it 8, or rounding off to the nearest order of magnitude, call it 10. Roughly speaking, we need only 10% of our brains. Of course, what that means is that we need or use only 10% of our brains for the basic functions performed by all mammalian brains. Presumably, the rest is for “higher” functions.

  Jerison’s early research was conducted in the 1970s, after the birth of our cliché, but this is still fascinating stuff.

  Robert P. Vecchio, Franklin D. Schurz Professor of Management at the University of Notre Dame, sent us a copy of some pages from a textbook he read as an undergraduate, Foundations of Physiological Psychology, written by Richard F. Thompson. Could this Frustable have stemmed from a misunderstanding of the physiology of the brain?

  …Perhaps the greatest source of confounding in the analysis of whole brain tissue is the fact that the majority of cellular elements in brain are not even nerve cells. Ninety percent of the cells in the brain are glial cells and only 10 percent are nerve cells…glial cells have often been considered as connective tissue, serving the same general kind of supportive function as connective tissue in most organs.

  This textbook was reporting on research conducted by J. Nurnberger in 1958 and S. DeRobertis in 1961, well before any of the sources mentioned in Do Penguins Have Knees? To be honest, though, more than any insight into this brain stuff, we are dazzled by the fact that Professor Vecchio can remember anything from an old college textbook.

  While these scientific studies could, theoretically, have provided the inspiration for the 10% figure, they aren’t well enough known or disseminated to have hatched our cliché. So we continued our search for the phrase in popular culture.

  We mentioned in Do Penguins Have Knees? that friends of ours swore they had read about the “10%” cliche in a Robert Heinlein novel, but James Gleick thinks he’s now found the passage, and no numbers are involved. In Citizen of the Galaxy (1957), a fictional character says, “He proved that most people go all their lives only half awake.” Same idea, but not the nail in the coffin.

  That’s why we were so excited when we heard from Allan J. Wilke of Toledo, Ohio:

  I’ve been involved in a Dale Carnegie course these last few months. Required reading includes How to Stop Worrying and Start Living. Mr. Carnegie frequently quotes the psychologist William James. On page 146 of this book, there is a paragraph that reads:

  “The renowned William James was speaking of people who had never found themselves when he declared that the average person develops only ten per cent of his or her latent mental abilities. ‘Compared to what we ought to be,’ he wrote, ‘we are only half awake. We are making use of only a small part of our physical and mental resources. Stating the thing broadly, human individuals thus live far within their limits. They possess powers of various sorts which they habitually fail to use.’”

  As is his habit, Carnegie doesn’t cite where he found this quote. But Carnegie’s bestselling book was first published in 1944 and has been taught in courses for nearly fifty years. Who better to spread the word?

  Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to confirm the James quote, although in his letter to W. Lutoslawski, in 1906, James comes tantalizingly close:

  Most people live, whether physically, intellectually, or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness, and of their soul’s resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole bodily organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger. Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.

  Ultimately, it may not matter whether James actually uttered the words ascribed to him—for it is much more likely that Carnegie, and his disciples, spread the word than James, himself.

  But perhaps our favorite new pronouncement on this Frustable came from Matthew Cope of Westmount, Quebec:

  Sorry, I don’t know who first claimed that we only use 10 percent of our brains. But presumably, whoever it was, there’s a 90 percent chance he was wrong!

  FRUSTABLE 24: Where, exactly, did the expression “Blue Plate Special” come from?

  We’re hurt. We can’t even convince some readers that blue plate specials were actually served on blue plates. Jan Gable, of Cedar City, Utah, insists that “blue” refers not to the color of the plate but to the collars of the workers who purchased inexpensive, complete meals in diners.

  Allison Berlier demurs. Blue doesn’t refer to the plate, she chastises us, but to the food being served!

  During the depression, the most plentiful, and therefore, cheapest meal available, was the locally caught bluefish…

  Honestly, Jan and Allison, there were blue plates. Many live people remember them. Authors even write about them. In fact, reader Jan Saul notes that Mary Higgins Clark, in her book, Loves Music, Loves to Dance, was so inspired:

  A blue plate used to the special of the evening at a cheap restaurant. Seventy-five cents bought you a hunk of meat, a couple of vegetable, a potato. The plate was sectioned to keep the juices from running together. Your grandfather loved that kind of bargain…

  Robert Klein, of Paramus, New Jersey, has conducted extensive research into the history of this phrase. He sent along a copy of John Egerton’s discussion of the blue plate special in Southern Food. Egerton notes that restaurants featuring blue-plate specials “came early to the region, and many of the best of them have survived to this day, withstanding the fast-food revolution and other gastrono
mic upheavals.” The typical blue-plate lunch, according to Egerton, consisted of a main dish, three or four vegetables, bread, and a drink, all for one low price. Klein concludes that the blue-plate special probably began in Tennessee or Kentucky during the 1920s.

  FRUSTABLE 5: Why does the traffic in big cities in the United States seem quieter than in big cities in other parts of the world?

  Nityanandan Ashwath, who first posed this Frustable, lurked in the bushes until he read our write-up in Do Penguins Have Knees? Now he offers three more reasons why foreign traffic seems noisier:

  1. Most engines in vehicles on a U.S. street are large gasoline-powered four-stroke automobiles. These are inherently the quietest type of engine ever invented. Most other places have a high percentage of diesels (buses/trucks), two-strokes (scooters), and small four-strokes (motorcycles) that are all much noisier.

  2. The smaller vehicles overseas result in a greater density of exhaust population. That is, an observer on a street corner has more individual sources of sound within a 100-yard radius because bikes and minicars take up less street space per unit.

  3. Most U.S. cars have automatic transmissions that limit the rpm buildup of the engine during acceleration. Drivers elsewhere have more opportunity for shrieking starts from a traffic light.