FRUSTABLE 6: Why do dogs tilt their heads when you talk to them?
In Do Penguins Have Knees?, we heard from readers arguing passionately whether dogs tilt their heads for better vision or better hearing. Reader Fred Lanting wrote with the best discussion reconciling these two viewpoints that we have seen:
Dogs have a very poor focusing ability because the fovea (focusing depression) in the retina is less developed for that purpose than, say, the fovea of a hawk…It’s a tradeoff, since dogs have very good night vision and ability to detect motion better than we do. The dog tilts his head for the same reason we do: to get an almost imperceptibly different but significant new perspective—a better 3-D brain image of distance.
The dog uses a combination of eyes and ears for this sharpening of the incoming sensory messages. Ears are set apart from each other for a reason: The tiny additional fraction of time it takes sound to reach the second ear tells dogs whence come the sounds. Thus a dog can find you in the dark or behind hiding places if you make a little noise.
He tilts his head even if there’s no noise we can hear because he wants to get the benefit of not only sight but any sound that might be forthcoming. He’s trying to get all the sensory input he can because he’s very interested in it.
One of our favorite correspondents, David Altom of Jefferson, Missouri, wrote to us about his cockapoo, Midnight, who he owned in the 1970s. Like many dogs, Midnight responded not only to the wail of police sirens outside their home but to the sound of sirens on television:
Every time the sound of a police siren came on “Kojak,” “Baretta,” or “McCloud,” Midnight would perk up his ears and tilt his head as if trying to understand that sound. His attention was directed to the speaker, not the picture. Once or twice, he went up and sniffed the TV speaker.
Midnight also had two favorite songs: “Sister Golden Hair” by America and “One of These Nights” by the Eagles…
“Sister Golden Hair”? I thought dogs were supposed to have good hearing?
FRUSTABLE 7: Why and where did the notion develop that “fat people are jolly”?
Our 10-percent-of-the-brain expert, Prof. Michael Levin, took us to task for making fun of the validity of somatotypes, developed by William Sheldon about fifty years ago:
There are three basic somatotypes: mesomorphic (muscular), ectomorphic (skinny), and endomorphic (fat). A good deal of valid research has established a correlation between mesomorphy and extroversion, aggressiveness and a domineering temperament. Criminals tend overwhelmingly to be mesomorphs, or slightly endomorphic mesomorphs.
…ectomorphs tend to be introverted, inhibited, and restrained. So, comparatively speaking, endomorphs tend to be “jollier” than either mesomorphs or ectomorphs. They are relatively less inclined to try to dominate others, and are relatively less introspective and reserved. The perception of this is probably the origin of the (correct) stereotype of the jolly fat man. (The writer of this letter is mesomorphic, but has no desire to force his opinions on you.)
Sure, but because we are jolly endomorphs, we’ll let you mesomorphic musclemen cram your opinions down our ineffectual throats.
FRUSTABLE 9: Why does the heart depicted in illustrations look totally different than a real heart?
In Do Penguins Have Knees? we mentioned Desmond Morris’s theory that the heart was an idealized representation of the female buttocks. But reader Barth Richards, of Naperville, Illinois, offers a striking amplification of this theory.
During the Middle Ages, many Germanic and Scandinavian people, particularly pagans, used “runes,” letter and symbols that had phonetic and often symbolic meanings. Runes were used not only in language but in magical rituals. One rune was our idealized conception of the heart. In the book Futhark: A Handbook of Rune Magic, the interpretation of the heart symbol is given as
(actually an ancient representation of female genitalia and buttocks)—sensuality, eroticism, love. In Old Norse books of magic the sign often appears in spells of love magic; a symbol of sexual intercourse.
Richards theorizes that when Christians tried to subsume pagan culture, they retained the “love” connotation of the heart symbol, while eliminating the sexual components.
The literal meaning of the symbol was altered to that of a “heart,” which fit the Christian belief of the heart being the vessel of the emotions, including love.
This also meshes nicely with one of the other suggested solutions you printed in Do Penguins Have Knees?, which said that the arteries of the systemic arch of many animals closely resemble the shape of the “heart” symbol. This coincidence would surely add to the Christians’ sense of justification in referring to the pagan’s love symbol as a “heart.”
FRUSTABLE 10: Where do all the missing pens go?
Reader Jim Kasun claims to have accumulated about 4,400 pounds of them. (“At an average weight of .3 ounce, this translates to approximately 234,600 pens.”) Although this doesn’t account for every single lost pen, it surely explains the imbalance in Plano, Texas.
Jim believes that while countless pens have fallen out of pockets, as many are misplaced as lost. Look underneath sofa and chair cushions, Jim suggests—pens have a way of migrating deep into the innards of the furniture. Others are buried in overloaded drawers and cabinets.
Jim anticipated what was on our mind after reading his letter: “Why do I spend time doing this? I’m not sure…guess I just have a penchant for it.” Despite the pun, we can’t be too mad at him. After all, he sent us a pen “from the 1980-1985 group. Who knows? Maybe you once owned it.”
Letters
Maybe in the future we will publish a book of Letters to Imponderables. Until that day, we have room to print only a fraction of the thousands of letters we receive every year. This section is reserved not for new Imponderables, conjectures about Frustables, or even words of praise, but rather for readers who want to vent their spleen about what we’ve written in the past.
In August 1992, we republished all but the first Imponderables book in paperback, incorporating many of the suggestions and corrections of readers. It can sometimes take years to validate objections and change the text on subsequent printings, but we do so regularly.
We appreciate your suggestions and consider every one carefully. The letters published here are not the only valid criticisms or suggestions we received, just some of the more entertaining ones that we hope will appeal to a wide audience.
From now on, maybe we’ll need to put an expiration date on Imponderables. In Do Penguins Have Knees? we answered the question, “Why Are There Peanuts in Plain M&Ms?” Guess what? Hans Fiuczynski, external relations director of M&M/ Mars, writes to tell us that the premise of the Imponderable is now moot:
Historically, M&M/Mars has used the same milk chocolate in both M&Ms Plain and Peanut Chocolate Candies. This milk chocolate contained a small amount of finely ground peanuts.
At considerable investment in the plants producing these products, the chocolate production has been separated and the usage of any peanuts in the chocolate for M&M Plain Chocolate Candies eliminated, starting January 1992. However, as a precaution, we will continue to maintain the declaration of peanuts as an ingredient in M&Ms Plain Chocolate Candies. This is to provide protection to peanut-sensitive individuals in the event that a small amount of peanuts may inadvertently appear in M&M’s Plain Chocolate Candies.
We’re also sad to report that the Imponderable from our first book—“What Is the Purpose of the Red Tear String on Band-Aids?”—won’t make sense to kids in the next century. By the end of 1992, Johnson & Johnson will have phased out the tear strings altogether, substituting an adhesive strip.
But M&M/Mars and Johnson & Johnson aren’t the only corporations dedicated to reform. Jena Paolilli of Chelmsford, Massachusetts, writes:
In Why Do Dogs Have Wet Noses? you answered the question, “Why is there no expiration date on toothpaste?” by saying that there is none needed. I have found expiration dates on four tubes
of toothpaste: two on Colgate for Kids (different sizes), one on Tartar Control Gel Colgate, and one on Colgate’s Peak Baking Soda Gel…
We called the folks at Colgate, and they corroborated the recent appearance of an expiration date. “Why do you need one now if you didn’t a few years ago?” we asked. The consumer affairs representative indicated Colgate probably didn’t. The ingredients haven’t changed, and it isn’t at all dangerous to use toothpaste after the expiration date. But occasionally the flavoring or the fluoride in toothpaste breaks down chemically. The result is usually a watery consistency or a funny taste. In most cases, Colgate advised, the toothpaste is usable for at least a year after the date on the package.
In Why Do Dogs Have Wet Noses? we stated that, usually, the answer to “What vegetables are used in vegetable oil?” was: soybean oil. But canola oil has made great inroads, as Lauralou Cicierski, of the Canola Council of Canada, was pleased to inform us. Procter & Gamble’s Crisco and Puritan Oils now both contain 100 percent canola oil, and other brands’ ingredient lists increasingly say “canola oil and/or soybean oil.”
The times, they are a-changin’, we guess. And not only in the candy, oil, bandage, and toothpaste industries. It seems like there has been rampant inflation in Social Security numbers, too:
In your book When Do Fish Sleep? you state that the highest numbers assigned as the first three digits of a Social Security number are 575-576 in Hawaii. I don’t believe this is true. My wife and I both have SSNs that begin 585. In fact, most of the people I grew up with in Clovis, New Mexico, had 585 numbers.
HAROLD GAINES
St. Louis, Missouri
You’re right. Historically, New Mexico’s SSNs start with 525, but when they ran out of numbers, New Mexico, for a while, had the highest number, 585, of the fifty states. But several other states have been assigned bigger numbers since we wrote When Do Fish Sleep? (Mississippi, 587-588; Florida, 589-595; Arizona, 600-601; and California, 602-626). The highest numbers that the Social Security Administration issues, 700-728, still belong to railroad employees, although new numbers in the 700-series have not been assigned since 1963.
While we are focusing on geographical grumblings, we heard a chauvinistic chant from Ken Giesbers of Seattle, Washington. He asks us, “How dare you claim East Coast weather is weirder than ours?”
In Why Do Dogs Have Wet Noses? you state: “Of course, the volatility of weather in the East makes the job of a weathercaster considerably dicier than his West Coast counterparts.” You should be aware that the West Coast extends northerly past Southern California.
Weather prediction in the Pacific Northwest is considered the hardest in the nation. Having lived in the Portland and Seattle areas all of my life, I was shocked, on a recent trip to Boston, to hear a forecasted high temperature of 82 degrees. In Seattle, no forecaster would ever be so bold. The forecast would be for “a high in the upper seventies to mid-eighties,” and it would be wrong as often as right. The proximity of an ocean to the west, inland waterways, and mountain peaks with glacial networks all combine to make prediction very difficult indeed.
Heck, Ken, we think weather forecasting in the Northwest is a snap. “Cool, cloudy, chance of rain and showers” should work, oh, about 355 days of the year. And don’t assume the weather forecast of 82 degrees in Boston was correct, either.
Larry Mills of Southfield, Michigan, attributes the presence of the oft-discussed ball on top of a flagpole to weather factors—lightning, in particular:
The large ball is on top to greatly reduce the electrical tension that might build during electrical storms…this is opposite to a lightning rod, which comes to a sharp point to assure that electrical tension that may build at or near a structure will surely strike the rod.
We’ve never heard this theory before, and we’ve heard plenty on the topic.
But the flagpole ball Imponderable is a piker compared to all the letters we’ve received about why ranchers hang their boots on fenceposts, a staple of every Letters section. We are pleased to announce that we received only one new theory in the last year; perhaps we are starting to wean you from this topic. William Papavasilion, a teacher/folklorist from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, writes that in some areas, it was customary for folks to leave unneeded boots outside to be taken for the asking. Nowhere was this policy practiced more than at Boot Hill:
If a deceased person had a good pair of boots, the undertaker (usually) would place his boots near the entrance of the cemetery. If a person took a kindness to a pair of boots, he simply would take the pair.
Speaking of death, J. Stephen Paul of West Monroe, New York, reports the rare sighting of a bird dying in flight. But he concurs with our analysis of what happens to dead birds: “By the third day, it must have been scavenged or resurrected itself.” Paul’s son also watched a bird “whop down” in flight. (“Threw a rod, I guess.”) If Paul doesn’t seem too sentimental about death, it may be because he is a hospital consultant, and he supplied another reason why surgeons wear blue or green uniforms (see Why Do Clocks Run Clockwise?):
When medical personnel are operating, looking at red for a long time, a retinal imprint is established on the eye. When looking away, this appears as a greenish afterimage or “ghost image” wherever they look until it fades out. To counter this bothersome effect, which occurs any time a surgeon or assistant looks away to rest the eyes, the walls and clothing are colored a matching shade to render this effect invisible…
Can anyone confirm this theory?
Dead birds weren’t the only feathered friends on your minds. Several of you tried to help us out after we confessed in Why Do Dogs Have Wet Noses? that we didn’t know how “turkey” came to mean a show business flop. Terry Pruitt of Gadsden, Alabama, hypothesizes that a bad show is like a turkey trying to fly—it may sputter aloft for a while, but eventually it will flop to the ground. But several readers, Daniel J. Drazen of Berwyn, Illinois, being the first, found citations of this very topic in various books. Drazen located an explanation in Harry and Michael Medved’s Son of Golden Turkey Awards. According to the Medveds, the colloquialism was coined because vaudeville shows used to conduct Thanksgiving performances but attendance was poor. “Turkey Nights” were dreaded gigs for performers, and mediocre acts got stuck playing them. Such entertainers, without any clout, were called “Turkey Acts” and, eventually, simply “Turkeys.” In a recent issue of Variety, Jeremy Gerard contended that “turkey” was originally a Broadway term coined to denote a poor show—one that was performed not during bad attendance times but good:
…“turkey” was coined to denote a show of dubious merit mounted between Thanksgiving and the New Year in order to ride out the seasonal tourist trade regardless of the [critical] pans.
In Why Do Dogs Have Wet Noses? we tackled a couple of Imponderables about worms. “Are the nineties going to be the Decade of the Larva?” we mused about this obsession. Our joke didn’t sit too well with two of our Illinois readers, Neil B. Schanker of Palatine and Craig Cicero of Rockford. As both pointed out, worms are not larvae. They remain the same structurally as they grow. Schanker, by the way, is an assistant professor of biology at William Rainey Harper College. Craig Cicero is not yet a professor—he’s thirteen years old.
While we’re on the subject of insects, we have a ticklish issue to discuss. In When Do Fish Sleep? we quoted an entomologist as saying that crickets “chirp” by rubbing their legs together. In Do Penguins Have Knees? we ran an angry letter from another entomologist berating us, insisting that crickets rub the scrapers on their wings to cause the noise. We issued a groveling apology. Several readers have sent us textbooks, most with diagrams, indicating that the noise comes from scrapers on the legs. How can something so simple be in question? The final straw was when our eight-year-old nephew, Michael Feldman, found the following quotation in a book called Wings, written by Nick Bantoc: “Crickets chirp by rubbing their wings or legs together.” We give up.
On second thought, we don’t give up.
How can we rest when we are presented with a new, unsolved mystery by reader Stephen Hostettler of Chico, California?
I offer further evidence that fish do sleep. Several months ago, I got up to discover one of the swordtails missing from our tank. My wife found him swimming in a teacup on the far side of the double sink. Everything else on the counter and both sides of the sink were dry—proof positive that he was sleepwalking. The event so traumatized the little critter that he hasn’t closed both eyes.
How do you know your fish doesn’t take naps when you leave the room? Or don’t the Hostettlers sleep?
Paul J. Breslin of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, took us to task for our discussion of the role of dalmations in firefighting in Why Do Clocks Run Clockwise? He thinks we left the impression that the main task of dalmations was to run in front of the coach to clear traffic. Although we did read first-person accounts (from the firemen, not the dalmations) of dogs clearing traffic, we probably did put too much emphasis on this task. Breslin summarizes their main duties well: “The dalmation’s job was to keep the horses pulling together, to keep them from tangling the lines, to keep them apart, and to insure they were on the right lead.”
Are Lobsters Ambidextrous? Page 23