Why Do Pirates Love Parrots?

by David Feldman

  We spoke to a group of Banc One executives in Denver, Colorado, who told us that they initially opposed this provision of the ADA in 1990, and were supported by their powerful trade group, the American Bankers Association. But when Banc One consulted with the ATM manufacturers, the executives realized that it would be more trouble than it was worth to use different configurations for ATMs anyway, and possibly more expensive.

  Ironically, the Braille markings on walk-up and drive-up ATMs have come under fire from the visually impaired. Studies vary, but the consensus seems to be that approximately 15 percent of blind people are Braille-literate. Blind customers complain to banks when the ATM software changes, which necessitates learning a new set of keystrokes to complete the same transactions. As ATMs now allow customers to buy postage stamps, pay bills, look up their mortgage balance, and more, it increases the difficulty for blind people in performing even the simplest of transactions.

  For these reasons, banks are being pressured to provide “talking ATMs,” ones that not only offer the customer a menu of choices for each transaction, but vocalize the contents of each receipt that is printed. But there are problems, too, beyond the obvious expense in programming and equipment. If the ATM speaks out loud, then passersby could hear intimate financial details (a thief might be more than casually interested in the dollar amount of a withdrawal). If a headphone system is used, who supplies the headphone? If it’s the responsibility of the bank, then how will the headphone be offered when the bank is closed? And must the bank supply headphones to drive-up ATMs?

  Now you understand why Braille on drive-up ATMs might be an obsession to stand-up comics, but not the first concern of banks or the visually impaired.

  2. Do Blind People Dream? If So, Do They Dream in Color?

  They sure do dream, but most people who are blind at birth or become blind at an early age (up until the age of five or six) tend not to see anything in their dreams, although a small minority reports observing shadows or other abstract patterns. Most folks who were blinded at age seven or later experience visual images, sometimes just as vivid as fully sighted people, but often these images deteriorate over time. And yes, if they see images in dreams, they view them in color.

  One of the best recent studies, “The Dreams of Blind Men and Women,” conducted by psychologist Craig S. Hurovitz and three colleagues (and available online at http://psych.ucsc.edu/dreams/Articles/hurovitz_ 1999a.html) corroborates these generalities but also finds that blind folks who can see limited or no visual imagery not only hear in their dreams, but often experience sensations of touch, smell, and taste. As far as we know, however, blind people do not dream about drive-up ATMs.

  3. Why, Unlike Other Sports, Do Baseball Managers Wear the Same Uniform as the Players?

  As anyone who has watched The Office will attest, management isn’t always all it’s cracked up to be. Nowadays, the onfield leaders of sports teams try to market themselves as combinations of the best attributes of Albert Einstein, Machiavelli, Julius Caesar, and Mother Teresa in order to justify their huge paychecks. But in the early days of baseball, the game managed to survive without a manager at all.

  Before the twentieth century, teams had player-captains, but as the salaries in baseball increased, teams encouraged their aging stars to don the mantle of manager. Many of them spent years as player-managers, and wore the standard uniform for the most obvious of reasons—they still played the game. Player-managers and player-coaches were common well into the mid–twentieth century, but the tradition of managers wearing player uniforms has continued to this day, regardless of their physical shape (who could forget Tommy Lasorda waddling to the mound in his Dodgers uniform?). The last player-manager in the big leagues was none other than Pete Rose, the Cincinnati Reds’ troubled second baseman.

  No law prohibits managers from wearing Armani if they wish, and a couple of Major League Baseball managers have bolted from tradition. Connie Mack, Hall of Fame leader of the old Philadelphia Athletics, who still owns the record for most wins by a manager, wore a suit to work. Burt Shotton, an ex-player who managed the Brooklyn Dodgers in the late 1940s, wore a team jacket over his suit and tie, a look that was unique, if unlikely to pass muster with the fashionistas.

  We can’t think of any other sports where on-the-field management wears the same outfit as the players. We know of only one example where this tradition was violated even temporarily. In hockey’s 1928 Stanley Cup final game, Montréal Maroons player Nels Stewart fired a shot that hit New York Rangers goalie, Lorne Chabot, in the eye. Faced with no suitable replacement, 44-year-old Rangers coach Lester Patrick strapped on the goalie gear and played brilliantly—and the Rangers went on to win in overtime, 2–1.

  4. How Many Licks Does It Take to Get To the Center of a Tootsie Pop?

  Although we get flooded with this question, its genesis is not from a standup comedian but from a 1970 television commercial that launched a long-lasting campaign. We classify this conundrum as an Unimponderable for what seems like an obvious reason: All licks are not created equal—there can never be one answer to this question because there is too much variation in the way Tootsie Pops are consumed. All lickers are not created equal, and neither are the Pops themselves. Does the number of licks increase when the Tootsie Roll center is, as is often the case, off-center? To the best of our knowledge, there are no empirical studies. And how can you calibrate your research to account for the irrefutable tendency of lickers to suck on the Pop?

  All of these obstacles have not prevented the curious from conducting scientific experiments to determine the “lickiocity” of Tootsie Pops. In at least two bastions of higher education, Purdue University and the University of Michigan, students have concocted machines to simulate the licking mannerisms of humans, and they actually came to similar results (364 and 411, respectively). The Purdue students enticed twenty human volunteers and found that they averaged 252 licks per Pop.

  Are there regional differences in Pop licking? Based on the data collected by the high school students at the Mississippi School for Math and Science, we’d have to assume so. Students attempted to test their hypothesis that boys would get to the Tootsie Roll center of the Pop faster than girls and quickly confirmed it: the mean for girls was a whopping 1,656 licks, versus 1,239 for boys. But the number was so much higher for these high school students than the college students. Is there a direct correlation between age and licking power? Higher education and consumption? Not clear! For it took junior high students at the Swarthmore School an average of a mere 144 licks to get to the center, demonstrating precocity, or perhaps, merely starvation.

  Judging by our mailbag, it isn’t surprising that Tootsie Roll Industries claims that it has received tens of thousands of results from children, with an average of 600 to 800 licks. The discussion on its Web site indicates that Tootsie Roll has given up: “Based on the wide range of results from these scientific studies, it is clear that the world may never know how many licks it really takes to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop.” And we can live without an answer. After all, we agree with Mr. Turtle, who in commercials was asked how many licks it took him to get to the center. He replied: “I never made it without biting.”

  5. How Does the Hair on Your Head and Chin Know To Grow Long, But the Hair on Your Eyebrows or Arms Stays Short?

  Although Andy Rooney and other folks with bushy eyebrows might not agree with the premise, we get the idea. Next to the Braille/drive-up ATM mystery, this is our second most frequently posed Unimponderable. Not a bad question, but the answer to the part we can answer is readily available, and the rest can never be answered.

  The hair we see on our head and body doesn’t know much; in fact, by the time we can see it, it is quite dead. Inside each hair follicle, new cells form and push out older cells (the hair that we see) during the follicle’s growth phase. But the follicle goes through a rest phase, as well, when the hair shaft breaks, and the new hair replaces it. The varying lengths of these rest
and growth phases determine the length of our hair. None of this is synchronized, or we would shed like a Golden Retriever.

  We are constantly losing hair, as our bath drains will attest—it is just that the growth phase for the hair on our head is longer than for other parts of the body. Why is that? Some biologists argue that the hair on top of our head was originally a survival mechanism to shield us from the sun. Most evolutionists argue that the main purpose of our manes is to attract the opposite sex (the folks at Clairol, Grecian Formula, and Rogaine subscribe to this theory), and that the beards and mustaches on men are signals—just in case women don’t notice the bulging muscles and remote control in hand—that the fairer sex is looking at striking specimens of male pulchritude.

  6. Why Do We Park on Driveways and Drive on Parkways?

  We believe this Unimponderable sprang from the fertile mind of comedian Steven Wright. To the best of our knowledge, he’s never answered it. Once again, we will milk his wordplay of any vestige of wit, and answer this one more time if you vow on a stack of Imponderables books never to ask again. To quote from the scholarly yet illuminating classic, David Feldman’s Who Put the Butter in Butterfly?:

  One of the main definitions of way is “a route or course that is or may be used to go from one place to another.” New York’s master builder Robert Moses dubbed his “route or course that was used to go from one place or another” parkway because it was lined with trees and lawns in an attempt to simulate the beauty of a park. The driveway, just as much as a highway, or a parkway, is a path for automobiles. The driveway is a path, a way between the street and a house or garage.

  Imagine a time when the government was trying desperately to encourage us to drive more often—this was the inspiration behind the dubbing of Moses’s “parkway.”

  7. Why Do They Use Sterilized Needles for Lethal Injections to Prisoners? Why Do They Use Rubbing Alcohol on Their Arms?

  Some variation of these two questions seems to be on just about every e-mail forwarded “Things That Make You Go Hmm” list. Like the Braille-ATM question, it probably started as a one-liner from a comedian, but it is so-often asked here at Imponderables Central that we’ll answer it seriously on the assumption that some folks do want to know the answer. Actually, there are a whole bunch of reasons why executions are handled meticulously:

  1. Practical Advantages: Even if the main purposes of an execution are deterrence and retribution, there are practical reasons for using sterilized needles. For one, needles come packaged sterilized to begin with. Imagine the public relations nightmare if the State injected prisoners with used or dirty needles. The purpose is to kill the prisoner, not torture him.

  Likewise, the rubbing alcohol doesn’t just disinfect the area to be pierced—it also raises the blood vessels closer to the surface of the skin, making it easier to find an entry point for the needle. Several executions have been delayed for up to an hour while technicians futilely tried to find a vein to inject. In a famous case, the execution of Randy Woolls in Texas in 1986, the condemned man actually helped technicians to find a usable vein.

  One other obvious practical advantage to these precautions—they help protect the technicians administering the drugs. Why should they be subjected to less than sterile conditions?

  2. Political Reasons: Opponents of capital punishment seize on any opportunity to criticize lethal injection (as well as other methods of legal executions), and the most obvious argument is that capital punishment is cruel and unusual. One of the reasons why lethal injection is now used in thirty-seven of the fifty states in the United States is that it is perceived as less cruel than hanging, firing squads, electrocution, or the gas chamber. The less humane the actual execution appears, the less support lethal injection will garner from citizens.

  Opposition doesn’t come only in the courts. The American Medical Association’s Code of Ethics prohibits doctors from aiding in executions. With a few exceptions, physicians don’t administer the lethal injection itself, although in some states a doctor is in attendance to at least monitor the proceedings. Most of the technicians who administer lethal injections are not experts in anesthesia, and as a result there have been many accidents in which the condemned prisoners suffered unexpected adverse reactions to the drugs (in most cases, three different drugs are administered). If only for political reasons, the state governments and capital punishment supporters don’t want witnesses, especially the press, to describe the execution as torture.

  3. Legal Reasons: Procedures for executions are mandated by each state, and the ones that we’ve seen include provisions for everything from the prisoner’s last meal to the specifics of the administration of the lethal drugs. For example, the California procedures mandate that an IV line be attached to two usable veins (in case one line malfunctions), prescribe the exact amount of sodium pentothal, pancuronium bromide, and potassium chloride to be injected, insist that the line is flushed with normal saline solution in between the first and second injection, and require that a physician be present to declare the time of death.

  4. Just in Case: And what if there was a stay of execution after the process of lethal injection has started? It actually happened in 1983 to James Autry, a Texas convict. Thirty-one minutes before his scheduled execution, with needles already inserted and saline solution running through his veins, the Supreme Court issued a stay (Autry was eventually executed the following year).

  5. Psychological Reasons: Our comrade in Q&A-dom, Cecil Adams, wrote about this question in his “Straight Dope” column. After citing some arguments similar to the ones we mention above, he put forth his personal theory (which we liked):

  Which brings us to what I think is the real reason for swabbing the arm—it allows the executioners to think of themselves as professionals doing a job rather than killers. Interviews with members of execution teams reveal that they place great stock in following proper procedures. We may be certain that if the prisoner were to choke on a chicken bone during his last meal, the authorities would spare no effort to save his life an hour prior to ending it.

  Another reason to put stock in the psychological theory is that in many states, there are several “executioners,” none of whom know which one administered the fatal dose, just as members of a firing squad weren’t sure which of them actually killed the condemned prisoner.

  8. Why Did Kamikaze Pilots Wear Helmets?

  This Unimponderable, from the folks who brought you parkways and driveways and Braille-laden ATM machines, is on most Internet “Things That Make You Go Hmm” lists. Again, we have no idea who first uttered this question, but whoever it is, he or she should be getting royalties, for it is has captured the imagination of ponderers everywhere.

  Some folks treat the question as a joke (“Was the helmet to cover up morning hair?”) while others sincerely want to know the answer. Some plausible reasons that kamikazes might have worn helmets while flying their suicide missions:

  1. In case of antiaircraft fire, the helmet might have provided some protection.

  2. The helmet protected pilots from jostling in the plane, especially hitting their heads against the sides of the cockpit or the canopy of the plane.

  3. Radio communication gear was inserted in the helmet. The electronics needed protection against being damaged during a ragged flight.

  4. The helmet was there for warmth. It got cold in those cockpits!

  5. The helmet was part of the uniform of a Japanese pilot. There were no special uniforms for kamikazes.

  6. Many kamikaze missions were abandoned. The pilots might as well have remained as safe as possible if they didn’t succeed in their mission.

  All of these explanations are reasonable, but there’s one tiny wrinkle in the equation: Kamikazes didn’t wear helmets. They wore the same leather flight caps (and goggles) that were standard-issue equipment for other pilots. If you enter “kamikaze pilots” in Google Image Search, you’ll see scores of images of kamikazes, most in full uniform with leather caps, and n
one with hard helmets. While doing research on this Unimponderable, we found a fascinating Web site, Kamikaze Images (http://wgordon.web.wesleyan.edu/kamikaze/index.htm), a project created by William D. Gordon for his master’s degree at Wesleyan University. The site is full of images of kamikazes, and interviews with Japanese and Americans about the subject.

  When contacted, Gordon was more than familiar with this Unimponderable, and tired of it, too (“Personally, I hope your book’s explanation stops this joke.”). Gordon thinks that the premise assumes that kamikaze pilots really wanted to live instead of carrying out their suicide mission. But Gordon says that based on his research, that is not the case. Kamikazes did not take on their task lightly, and were trained and prepared for their missions for many months.

  Gordon confirms that the leather cap and goggles were “the same as any other pilot’s in the Navy or Army.” Many times kamikaze pilots wore a hachimaki (headband) with some saying written on it, “but I do not think this was that common for other pilots.”

  We asked how often kamikaze missions were abandoned, and what the primary reasons were. He responded: