Why Do Pirates Love Parrots?

by David Feldman

  So we know how bats roost upside down; now let’s look at the why.

  1. Bats’ legs are weak. In exchange for the unique ability of bats to fly, Mother Nature saddled them with unusually weak legs, with light and slender bones. Light legs allow bats to fly faster, but lower their ability to stand, walk, and support their own weight so that they could perch like birds.

  2. Roosting upside down improves bats’ takeoffs. Although bats are efficient flying machines once aloft, their wings aren’t strong enough to enable them to take off from the ground the way birds can. If bats are attacked by a predator, their roosting position allows them to escape quickly, even if they are in torpor, by simply dropping off their roosting spot. Some bat researchers believe that at one time in their evolution, bats might have been gliders rather than flyers, as their takeoff pattern suits an animal unable to fly.

  3. Predators are foiled. Bats’ predators include owls, hawks, snakes, raccoons, and in many places, humans. Bats evade many of their predators simply by being active when their enemies are asleep. But roosting upside down allows bats the opportunity to find roosting sites unappealing to or unreachable by predators, such as the roofs of caves or the ceilings of attics and barns.

  Submitted by David O’Connor of Willoughby, Ohio. Thanks also to Renee Gonsiewski of Villa Park, Illinois; Michael Wille of Springhill, Florida; Michael Cipoletta, Jr. of Malden, Massachusetts; Sharri Browne of Fort Nelson, British Columbia; and Christian Morrow of Santa Barbara, California.

  Why Are Most Bibles Printed in Two Columns?

  As a clergyman is one of the three readers who asked this Imponderable, we had a sneaking suspicion that the answer lies not in religious conviction but in convenience. Although it contains only what later became five books of the Old Testament, the first iteration of the Bible, the Jewish Torah, presented enormous logistical difficulties to produce. The Torah was hand-scribed on sheepskin scrolls; if unfurled, one measured approximately 150 feet long. The earliest Bibles, written in ancient Hebrew and Greek, were all in scrolls. Imagine the logistical nightmare if each line ran the total length of the scroll—thus columns were a necessity.

  The use of columns continued in codices, the earliest books. According to Erroll F. Rhodes, biblical scholar and translator of The Text of the Old Testament: An Introduction to the Biblia Hebraica, the important surviving biblical manuscripts from the fourth to the seventh centuries A.D. range in format from a single column to four columns. The first English-language Bible, handwritten in English in the 1380s by John Wycliffe, also used a two-column format.

  But perhaps the most influential historical precedent was the first printed Bible, created by Johann Gutenberg in 1455. The Latin text was first presented in pages of two columns with forty lines per page (although this was quickly changed to forty-two lines in later printings). Other printers followed suit, as Rhodes described to Imponderables:

  The first printed English Bible (1535) continued the tradition, and the adoption of the King James Version of 1611 probably led to the popularity the format enjoys today. Economy of space may have played some role, but the traditional association of form with content was undoubtedly a factor for many, both publishers and readers, to whom the Bible was primarily an icon for traditional stability and values.

  The two-column format is adopted by many other printed works, especially reference books such as encyclopedias and dictionaries. Kang-Yup Na, a religion professor at Westminster College in New Wilmington, Pennsylvania, thought that the answer to this question lies more with readability than tradition or faith:

  I have a hunch that it has more to do with facilitating a clearer and faster reading of the text. The width that the eyes can scan quickly cannot be much wider than what you see in Time magazine—at least not for the average reader. The columns allow for a more accurate reading because you’re less likely to skip or repeat a line.

  Or as one biblical expert, who asked us to remain anonymous, put it a tad more bluntly:

  This question is not scholarly but rather a trade question.

  Submitted by Mrs. Elmer Neumann of Granite City, Illinois. Thanks also to Gregg Hoover of Pueblo, California; and Reverend Duane Breaux of Pierre Part, Louisiana.

  Why Do Bottles Have Necks?

  Bottles date back to the ancient civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia. Historians think that wine consumption started there as far back as 5400 B.C., but their bottles didn’t resemble ours at all—they were amphorae, clay flasks with necks shorter than an NFL lineman’s. Relics indicate amphorae were stoppered with cloth, pieces of leather, or fired clay.

  When glassblowing was developed during Roman times, most of the vessels were squat and onion-shaped, probably because these were easier to manufacture. This shape was badly suited for winemakers, in particular, because wine bottles need to be stored on their sides, in order for the wine to stay in contact with the cork (dry corks crumble and may allow air to enter the bottle—oxygen is the enemy of aging wine properly).

  Before mass production of glass bottles, there was no uniformity in size, but by the nineteenth century, most wine bottles were 700 to 800ml, with 750ml not becoming the standard until well into the twentieth century. The long-neck glass bottle has only been with us for a couple hundred years, so we were a little surprised when an authority like renowned bottle collector Lieutenant Commander J. Carl Sturm replied to our query with: “This question has never been raised that I know of in my 44 years of collecting old bottles. I can only theorize as I know of nothing in print.”

  We spoke to or corresponded with nearly thirty experts on bottles—bottle collectors, glassblowers, bottle manufacturers, and winery executives—and we were offered plenty of theories but no smoking-gun answers. We couldn’t even gather a definitive conclusion about whether the longish neck was a byproduct of the glassblowing process, an aesthetic decision, or a utilitarian feature.

  Steve Fulkerson, general manager of Saint-Gobain Containers, a company that makes many different kinds of bottles, including bottles for Simi Winery, advocates the by-product theory:

  Early glass containers were hand blown by inserting a tube into a gob of molten glass and blowing on the tube by mouth. As the bubble expanded the outside of the bubble was shaped by the use of a wooden paddle. A container with a neck was easier to handle as the inside of the neck surrounded the last few inches of the tube, making it less likely that the gob would fall from the tube as it was being shaped.

  Rick Baldwin, Midwest regional director of the Federation of Historical Bottle Collectors, adds that:

  A neck, the end of which was tooled to form a heavier lip, afforded a smaller area for a closure/seal. A smaller area would be easier for the glassblower to form a nice, “perfectly circular” sealable lip, and the task could be done faster.

  But just as many experts felt that the neck had nothing to do with glassblowing methods. Sturm is in this school:

  There are quite a few containers with wide mouths that were used for food storage, etc. The glass blower had the knowledge and capability of cutting the container so that it didn’t have a neck.

  The glassblowers we contacted agreed, and pointed out the same design advantages of necks that most of the bottle historians noted:

  1. Bottles with necks are easier and cheaper to seal. Fred Holabird, historical consultant and owner of Holabird Americana auction house, told Imponderables that

  My guess is that it’s cheaper to have a stopper that’s small. If you put the equivalent of a mason jar lid in a wide bottle, the cost is proportionally higher. So it’s cheaper to make an enclosure with a small lid.

  John Pritchard, operations manager of Simi Winery, notes that the neck of the bottle has always been used to hold the cork. Necks have been “pretty much” standardized now to a length of two and one-half inches in order to hold a two-inch cork effectively. The narrow neck decreased evaporation (important when early bottles were used to hold expensive perfume oils) and exposure to air.

  2. Nec
ks provide a handle. Rick Baldwin, who notes that “you’ve already caused me to lose three nights’ sleep pondering the question,” observes that long necks were long ago applied to large, bulbous flasks “so that they could be drunk from directly.” Paul Bates, who with son Tom established the Museum of Beverage Containers and Advertising in Millersville, Tennessee, points out a practical advantage to the long neck that was particularly true in the past—in the early days, bottles were much heavier than they are now. Without a neck, these bottles would have been more likely to slip out of one’s hands. And for wines, in particular, the neck acts as a handle when grabbing a bottle stored horizontally.

  3. Necks facilitate pouring. Traffic jams are referred to as “bottlenecks” for a reason. Rick Baldwin argues that a neck, and its smaller diameter opening, affords a slower and more restricted flow of contents, whether one is decanting a liquid into another vessel or swigging it straight from the bottle.

  Bottle manufacturer Steve Fulkerson told Imponderables that the neck plays an important part in the “pourability” of a bottle. He dared us to try to pour wine from a wide mouth jar into a wine glass (no thanks, we have enough problems pouring from a bottle).

  The pourability is a key psychological component in the customer’s appreciation of a bottle and its contents. Fulkerson once had a customer who asked if his company could manufacture a ketchup bottle that allowed the ketchup to pour more smoothly. The customer noted Heinz’s success with boasting about the slow progress of its ketchup from bottle to plate, and wanted his thinner product “to pour with the same ‘anticipation’ as Heinz.”

  Despite attempts by beer marketers to push stubby alternatives, we seem to have a love connection with swanlike long-necks, whether we are pouring wine, beer, or ketchup.

  Submitted by Matt, via the Internet.

  Why Is the Pitcher’s Mound Elevated on a Baseball Diamond? And Come to Think of It, Why Is There a Pitcher’s Mound in the First Place?

  Pitcher’s mounds were not mentioned in the official baseball rules until 1903, when Rule 1, Sec. 2 specified that “the pitcher’s plate shall not be more than 15 inches higher than the base lines or home plate.” As we discussed in Do Penguins Have Knees?, since the beginning of baseball, the pitcher has been moved progressively farther and farther away from the batter. As overhand pitching started to replace the underhand delivery, batters were given more and more distance from the pitcher. In the 1870s, the pitcher stood forty-five feet from home plate; in 1881, the rule was changed to fifty feet; in 1887, fifty-five and a half feet, and only in 1893 did today’s weird but enduring sixty-feet, six-inch standard prevail. The farther you move back the pitcher, the more offense can be generated. Batters needed the extra space to try to figure out the velocity and movement of the ball.

  An elevated mound benefits the pitcher because it provides them an artificial height advantage. Batters prefer hitting a “flat” ball coming at them—the extra downward angle from a pitch off the mound makes it harder for the batsman to make solid contact. The elevated mound also allows gravity to further assist the pitcher: given the same thrust off the pitcher’s hand, a ball thrown from a higher elevation will gather more kinetic energy and a little more speed by the time it reaches the batter.

  But the biggest advantage of throwing off the mound is the aid it gives to the pitcher’s mechanics, as baseball historian and author Bill Deane wrote to Imponderables:

  Throwing a ball downhill is always easier than throwing on a level or slightly uphill. The extra momentum which the slope allowed the pitcher to generate in the downward shift of his weight and lead foot and the overhand thrust of the throwing arm [and thrust of the torso] made for increased velocity—always an advantage in baseball.

  Before the 1903 rule, there was no standard for the elevation of mounds, and pitchers presumably had a hard time adjusting to varying heights and slopes of different ballparks. Bill Deane notes that photographs from the 1880s indicate that pitching mounds grew higher and higher as overhand pitching became the vogue. Fielders must have had a hard time chasing down pop flies in the vicinity of the pitcher’s mound, when they didn’t know, with their eyes on the ball in the sky, whether they were about to trip over a molehill or bump into a mountain. For the safety of the players and to mollify pitchers and teams upset at the tendency of some ballparks to install eccentric mounds, there was a need for the standardization which was imposed in 1903.

  But the standard did not stand. In an effort to bring more offense to Major League Baseball, the pitcher’s mound was reduced to the height of ten inches in 1969. The shift did coincide with an era of better hitting statistics, so the change might have served its purpose. Yet as the average height of pitchers keeps growing, today’s typical 6 foot 3 inch pitcher, let alone a 6 foot 10 inch–Randy Johnson, doesn’t stand much lower on the mound than his predecessor a century before.

  We can’t conclude, however, that the original purpose of the elevated pitcher’s mound was solely, or even mostly, to aid the pitcher. Most likely, the initial impetus for the elevated mound had more to do with groundskeeping than pitching. By installing a slope on an otherwise flat field, much better drainage was afforded a busy part of the diamond when the weather turned inclement. As Deane puts it,

  A game couldn’t be played if the pitcher’s area was a quagmire. After rain storms or rain delays during games, it was probably the practice to throw some sand or dry soil onto the mound to absorb excess moisture. Probably the sheer accumulation of these treatments accounted for the rising elevation of the mound area.

  Submitted by “Jerry,” a caller on the late John Otto’s show, WGR, Buffalo, New York. Thanks also to John Ryan of Portsmouth, Rhode Island.

  Why Are Most Psychics Women?

  Every expert we consulted agreed that the percentage of female professional psychics lies somewhere in the 75 to 90 percent range. If you include storefront fortune-tellers and palm readers, who are almost exclusively female, the percentages would go up.

  In order to solve this Imponderable, at least three separate questions must be answered: Do women, in general, have more skills or qualities necessary to do this job? Is there a reason why patrons might prefer to consult a female than a male psychic? And are there economic, psychological, or sociological reasons why women might gravitate toward this job (or why men might be repelled by the notion, or not have the opportunities that women are afforded)?

  In order to unravel all of these threads, we went a little nuts here at Imponderables Central, speaking to some of the most prominent psychics and skeptics, gypsies engaged in fortune-telling, and police specializing in fraud, and also reading scores of books on the subject. Not one written source addressed this Imponderable head on, but every person we contacted directly had an opinion on the subject.

  QUALITIES NEEDED TO BE A PSYCHIC

  Many of our sources contend that women, in general, are superior listeners and talkers compared to men. Communication skills mean little, however, if a potential professional does not possess the abilities to “read” a potential “sitter” (a client of a psychic). Is there any substance to the notion of a “woman’s intuition”?

  Dr. Doreen Virtue, “spiritual counselor” and author of Goddesses and Angels and Divine Prescriptions, and a certified professional counselor as well as a Ph.D. in counseling psychology, argues that there is. Virtue feels that women’s roles as child bearers and, usually, child nurturers, are instrumental in their developing the skills necessary to be a psychic counselor. Virtue told Imponderables that women must trust their instincts about the needs and feelings of their babies at a time when the child cannot communicate desires through words; through this experience, women gain greater confidence in exploring nonverbal realms.

  James Randi, president of the James Randi Educational Foundation, and perhaps the world’s most prominent skeptic and psychic debunker, agrees with Virtue that women’s traditional role as child nurturers has “hardwired” them to become more observant of the “lit
tle things”—emotional nuances and relationship frictions—that men might not notice. But he sees no evidence that women are superior to men in predicting the future or in mastering the paranormal; only in “reading people” more successfully. Randi’s foundation offers a one million dollar prize to anyone who can prove verifiable psychic ability. So far, no woman (or man) has been able to gain the prize.

  Most of the psychics we interviewed for this book endorse the view of Brian Edward Hurst, a spiritual medium from Reseda, California, who was a teacher of the bestselling author-psychic James Van Praagh, and author of Some Go Haunting. Hurst believes that although more women demonstrate strong intuitive skills, the few men who “get in touch with their psychic energies” are every bit as effective as women.

  Psychics felt that most men are less open to the spiritual realm than women. Many studies have shown that people who believe in psychic phenomena “before the fact” are much more likely to experience it. Virtue goes so far as to say that some men would not accept as valid a psychic experience that has just happened to them because it conflicts with their belief system.