Why Do Pirates Love Parrots?

by David Feldman

  Gregg Stengel told Imponderables that

  Schweppes called many of their waters soda. The first reference to “club soda” was when the W.G. Pegram Company sold its beverage firm in South Africa to Schweppes in the 1920s. Pegram had a beverage which was called “club soda,” which added to Schweppes soda, table waters and tonics. It is believed the name came from the many social clubs that were prevalent during that time. These clubs had musical concerts and arranged cricket matches.

  Canada stakes its claim in the club soda sweepstakes, too. Many resorts in the Canadian Rockies have naturally carbonated springs, and the expression “club soda” became popular there. In the minds of many North Americans, club soda is associated with Canada Dry, a product that was indeed created in Toronto by pharmacist John J. McLaughlin. At first, he sold carbonated water to soda fountains (which were then almost always found in pharmacies), but in siphon bottles, to be squirted into fruit juices, fruit extracts, and syrups. Further complicating the Canadian “club connection” was the success of Hiram Walker, the first distiller to stop selling in bulk from wooden barrels and brand its product in smaller bottles for individual use. In order to give his product a touch of class, Walker called his product “Club Whiskey.” The success of Club Whiskey set off alarm bells in the U.S. liquor industry and xenophobia in Congress—mandating that Walker call his product “Canadian Club.”

  Marie Cavanagh, director of information services at the National Soft Drink Association, wrote Imponderables that she was surprised that there is so little information about the origins of club soda. She buys the theory that the soda was used as a mixer in social clubs, but she was unable to verify this information from her organization’s reference books.

  While we can’t claim to have a definitive answer, we did stumble onto one label on http://www.bottlebooks.com that gave us pause. Although the trademark was not registered until 1906 (still long before Schweppes sold its first club soda), an Irish company first sold a product called Cantrell & Cochranes Super Carbonated Club Soda in 1877. Is this the first club soda?

  Submitted by John Beton of Chicago, Illinois.

  Why Are There Holes in the Deposit Envelopes for Automated Teller Machines?

  Sometimes, a hole is not just a hole. Those openings in ATM envelopes are known as “security holes” and they serve a purpose beyond providing fresh air for your hard-earned cash or paycheck.

  In most cases, the party who is being protected by the security holes is the bank that operates the ATM. Customers are known to make mistakes and criminals are known to commit frauds. Joseph Richardson, of Diebold, Incorporated, told Imponderables:

  The holes in the ATM deposit envelope are an attempt by financial institutions to mitigate the risk of consumer error or intentional fraud. All ATM deposits are “subject to verification” of the content of the deposit envelope once it is opened. Without the holes, an empty envelope was only discovered once it was opened and disputes occurred about what happened to the contents. With holes, the ATM deposit handler can see that the envelope is empty and leave it intact, thus mitigating the opportunity for disputes.

  Some banks ask us to mark the outside of the envelope, indicating whether we are depositing cash or checks; others provide deposit slips that we slip inside the envelope. Most banks count the money by putting the cash deposits and checks into separate piles. Especially in the early days of ATMs, customers were reluctant to deposit cash, fearing that a random bank clerk would abscond with their money and head directly to the beaches of Cancun.

  Fear not—the banks are at least as paranoid as any customers. Standard procedure dictates that ATM coffers are opened in teams, with at least one supervisor and one clerk checking the contents of ATM deposits. The holes allow the employees to see whether cash is included. Even when patrons are asked to specify on the envelope whether cash is being deposited, a surprising number of bank customers, whether unintentionally or not, omit the cash or include less than stated. For obvious reasons, the banks are hardliners about such disputes, especially involving cash—otherwise, they would be sitting ducks for scammers.

  The location of the security holes is not random, either. They must provide visual access to the contents of the envelope but stay out of the way, as Richardson explains:

  ATMs are designed to print information regarding the transaction on the deposit envelope. This information is often used in balancing the transaction. Holes are placed on the envelope so that they will not interfere with the print line. Thus, the number and position of holes needs to be sufficient to quickly determine whether or not the envelope contains a deposit and still not interfere with the deposit handling module in the ATM.

  New ATM technology eliminates the need for any deposit envelope. Checks are imaged and read for processing and bills are counted and validated at the ATM!

  Most of the big banks in the United States are experimenting with image readers now. While most bank customers love withdrawing money from ATMs, many are still reluctant to deposit money to a machine, especially cash. Image readers confirm the amount of cash or checks deposited quickly, and the customer agrees to the amount before the money is snarfed by the ATM. The chances of a dispute have been lessened considerably, as the receipt for the transaction will always match the amount of money that the image reader confirms.

  Although these new-fangled readers are costly for banks to buy and install, the savings for them are not just in reducing human teller transactions; the biggest savings is in back office operations. With envelope deposits, employees must open the envelopes manually, sort the checks and cash, key in data, run the checks through encoders, and integrate the deposit into the customer’s account balance. With the new machines, the transaction itself can be processed right away. Whether this quicker processing leads to the customer getting credit for the deposit faster, we have our doubts.

  Submitted by Crystal Nie of El Cerrito, California. Thanks also to Greg Kligman of Montréal, Quebec.

  Why Do Women’s Hips Sway When They Walk? Is This Intentional?

  Sways with a wiggle, with a wiggle when she walks

  Sways with a wiggle when she walks…

  “What is love? Five feet of heaven in a ponytail

  The cutest ponytail that sways with a wiggle when she walks…

  “What Is Love,” words and music by Les Pockriss and Paul J. Vance

  As the effect of the female sway upon men dates back long before the paean above (which was a big hit for a group called the Playmates in 1959), we’d always assumed that women swayed with intention and premeditation. So we were surprised when this Imponderable was submitted by a female. As anyone who watches America’s Next Top Model can attest, swaying can be taught. But as we have learned, it can also be a naturally occurring phenomenon.

  Scientists have pondered the female hip sway, and all the experts we consulted agree that there are anatomical and biomechanical reasons why women’s hips sway more than men when they are walking. For one, women’s pelvises tilt more when their legs are moving. According to John F. Hertner, professor of biology at the University of Nebraska at Kearney, the tilting is caused by three factors:

  1. The female pelvis is relatively wide; in comparison, the male’s is taller and narrower.

  2. In women, the socket of the pelvis, which accepts the femur (upper leg bone), faces a bit more toward the front than the male pelvis.

  3. The outward flare of the iliac crest, the upper, protruding bone in the pelvis, is greater in women than men.

  Tom Purvis, a registered physical therapist and cofounder of the Resistance Training Specialist program, feels that these differences play out in practice. In Purvis’s opinion, there is a purely biomechanical explanation for women’s hip sway. According to Purvis, it is always more efficient and stable to support movements in the direct line of our center of gravity. If all that were necessary to walk efficiently was the even distribution of weight, it would make more sense for us to walk like tightrope walkers, placing on
e foot directly in front of the other.

  But in practice, we don’t walk this way, because two little things (or in some cases big things) get in our way—our hips. If you walk like a tightrope walker, you have to lift each foot up and move it around your body to get to the “rope”—it is time-consuming and awkward. But even if you look foolish “walking the line,” your hips won’t sway.

  You could also choose to walk with your legs farther apart, directly beneath each hip. The result? Your entire body weight would shift from foot to foot, causing your whole body to sway from side to side. It’s a cute way to locomote—penguins have been attracting other penguins by moving like this since waddling began. But for some strange reason, humans don’t see waddling as being as sexy as swaying.

  Most humans compromise by walking with the legs less far apart, and moving their centers of gravity, the hips, laterally over each foot when walking. Purvis concludes that women sway more than men because they have larger, wider hips, their feet are farther apart, and their center of gravity is lower to the ground. In order for women to walk, women’s hips must move farther to the side over each foot. If Purvis’s theory is true, then women with slimmer hips should tend not to sway as much and these biological verities explain why.

  But not only biology determines destiny. Some women we’ve talked to attribute their intermittent swaying to one piece of technology—the high-heeled shoe. The higher the heel, the more the pelvis is thrust forward. Most women will sway more when wearing high heels, if only to try to remain vertical.

  But not all swaying is unintentional. Throughout the animal kingdom, males and females tend to attract each other by accentuating the features that most distinguish their sex. As wider hips are a female trait, then it would make evolutionary sense for women to accentuate these sexual markers to attract potential mates, just as males might wear tight T-shirts to emphasize their muscles (and too often, their beer bellies, as well). Sex symbols, from Mae West to Marilyn Monroe to Jennifer Lopez have sashayed in front of drooling suitors. Of course, women are not immune to the lures of hip-swaying. In exaggerated form, the early Elvis (“The Pelvis”) Presley outraged parents as he tantalized girls with his gyrations.

  With the possible exception of dancers, no professional group is more associated with hip swaying than models. Willie Ninja, who works with models from OHM, IMG, and Metropolitan Modeling Agencies, specializes in developing models’ runway walks. He talked to us about the vagaries of his unusual coaching career.

  Ninja reports that women vary widely in the amount of natural sway. Some of the variation can be attributed to anatomy (torso length and bone structure, for example), but he emphasizes the importance of personality and cultural forces. Some women with natural movement will suppress the sway, attempting to deflect attention, while others will shake their moneymakers to ensure notice. He notes that some cultures, such as Latin and African, encourage and expect women’s hips to sway noticeably, and models from these backgrounds generally do move their hips more. He has also noticed that women in rural areas tend to sway more than those in urban areas, the city dwellers presumably stifling their movements in order to deflect attention from aggressive males.

  Ninja also believes that women’s hip movements have not been immune to greater cultural forces, such as the feminist movement of the 1960s. As it became less acceptable for women to use their “feminine wiles,” Ninja argues that women, at first consciously, and then later unconsciously, repressed the more blatant hip swaying of earlier times. Little girls then imitated their mothers, and the result is a generation of swayless women.

  Nature has provided women with wider pelvic girdles than men, undoubtedly in order to facilitate childbirth. As in most cases of human dimorphism, the more prominent female attribute has been sexualized. In the sixteenth century, fashionable European women bought “hip cushions,” worn underneath their skirts to double the size of their hips, or at least the appearance of their hips. And while we now seem to favor a thin waist, surely part of the appeal of the thin waistline is its ability to accentuate the wider pelvis and breast.

  Although most women disdain corsets and girdles nowadays, Victorian women took their breaths when they could get them—when in public, they were often tethered into restraints that, if worn by animals, would attract the attention of PETA today. During times when more androgynous looks for females were in vogue (the flapper era in the 1920s, the Twiggy era in the 1960s), not only did women wear looser, less shape-defining clothes, but actresses and models seemed to deemphasize hip gyrations. It’s hard to imagine Mae West slinking into a room wearing flappers, just as it would seem incongruous to see Twiggy, with her tomboy walk, wearing the kind of corseted outfits that Mae West or Pamela Anderson sport in their roles.

  Even though women’s anatomies might naturally promote more hip sway, it’s hard not to believe that most swaying isn’t attributable to cultural, personal, and intentional forces.

  Submitted by Rachel Rhee of West Bloomfield, Michigan.

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  UNIMPONDERABLES: What Are Your Ten Most Frequently Asked Irritating Questions (FAIQ)?

  Did you ever have a teacher who proclaimed that it is more important to ask good questions than provide good answers? We did. Unfortunately for us, he changed his position when we didn’t do so well on our test answers.

  So we’ll understand it if you think us ungrateful wretches when we shout: Please, for our own sanity, please stop posing faux -Imponderables. After a hard day’s night answering reader questions, we wake up at the crack of noon, craving new Imponderables. But too often we are faced with what we coined (in Why Do Dogs Have Wet Noses? ) “Unimponderables,” or “Frequently Asked Irritating Questions.” In Dogs, we did answer a bunch of the questions that we did not consider real Imponderables, in what turned out to be futile attempt to stanch the flow. In Pirates, we will try again.

  It’s only fair for us to repeat the criteria we use to select the mysteries to answer in our books:

  1. They must present genuine mysteries, something the average person might have thought about but that most people would not know the answer to.

  2. The mysteries should deal with everyday life rather than esoteric, philosophical, or metaphysical questions.

  3. They are “why” questions rather than who/what/where/when trivia questions that could be “Googled” in a flash.

  4. Seminormal people might be interested in the questions and answers.

  5. They are mysteries that aren’t easy to find the answers to, especially from books. Therefore, they are questions that haven’t been frequently written about.

  How much simpler our lives would be if we could simply outlaw standup comedy! In Why Do Dogs Have Wet Noses?, we railed against Steven Wright, George Carlin, and Gallagher, who all pose “Why” questions and run off the stage, bathed in applause and laughter, before they have to answer any of them. We forgot to add Andy Rooney, who on 60 Minutes can stand our hair on edge when he starts a sentence with: “Ever wonder why…?” Before the Internet, at least the comedians’ Unimponderables were confined to their fans—but now the fans spread these irritating questions around by forwarding massive lists of them to innocent victims.

  Can we stop this scourge? Probably not. But in the spirit of goodwill, fellowship, and irritability, we offer our brief answers to our most frequently asked Unimponderables.

  1. Why Do Drive-Up ATMs Have Braille Markings?

  About five years ago, this dislodged “Why Do We Park on Driveways and Drive on Parkways?” as our most frequently asked irritating question, which was fine with us—at least this old warhorse involves more than wordplay.

  Yes, it’s true. If you look carefully at a drive-up ATM, you’ll notice the same Braille markings as on the ones inside. Why do banks bother? The simple answer is: They have to. The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, revised in 2002, mandates that “Instructions and all information for use shall be made accessible to and independently usable by persons
with vision impairments.”

  You might argue that any blind person who drives up to an ATM has more serious problems than vision impairment. But there are times when blind people do end up at drive-up ATMs. Obviously, the most common circumstance is when the blind person is driven by a friend, a relative, or a cab driver. Depending on the closeness of the relationship, the visually impaired person might not feel comfortable sharing a PIN number or the balance of an account with that other person. In some localities, especially on weekends in small towns, drive-up ATMs often become walk-up ATMs (not just by the visually impaired). The spirit of the ADA is that folks with disabilities, ranging from mobility to vision issues, should be able to accomplish as many tasks as possible independent of others.