Why Do Pirates Love Parrots?

by David Feldman

  On second thought, maybe it’s best to serve Snapple.

  Submitted by Susan Thomas of New York, New York.

  What’s Medicinal About a Medicine Ball? And What Do They Stuff in Medicine Balls To Make Them So Heavy?

  Until recently, medicine balls had a hopelessly old-school image. They were associated with punch-drunk boxers and obsolete physical therapy. Now they are trendy again among physical trainers. Instead of the old brown leather medicine balls, equipment makers are promoting balls in psychedelic colors that Jimi Hendrix would approve.

  Trainers are hailing medicine balls as just the medicine for improving strength, flexibility, and reflex time in their athletes. Unlike most weight training apparatus, medicine balls encourage a full range of motion. While bodybuilders are often concerned with maximizing the size of muscles, trainers use medicine balls to promote functional training, resulting not only in better performance in sports, but in superior health, as multiple muscle groups are engaged with every use of the medicine ball. Every time you lift, throw, or catch a medicine ball, you have to stabilize the torso. Strengthening the core of back, abdomen, and hips seems to be the Holy Grail of fitness trainers these days, not only to promote strength, but to prevent back injuries that eventually plague most people as they age.

  We corresponded with Cheryl L. Hyde, president and CEO of White Dolphin, Inc. and Academy Fitness, who loves not only the benefits of medicine balls, but their convenience and flexibility:

  Medicine balls and their “offspring” are very effective tools for increasing fitness levels. They can be used to increase strength, coordination, endurance, and even flexibility, depending on what you do with them.

  Newer is not always better and that is true of the medicine ball, which is useful in so many fitness and exercise settings. They take up less room and cost less than some types of equipment that are used for the same type of result. For instance, compare squats with a medicine ball versus squats with a bar and free weights or a squat rack. Now add a toss in the air as you stand up out of the squat and catch as you lower down and you get deltoid, triceps, biceps, trapezius, as well as some lats, pecs, forearm, and hand muscles included with the glutes, quads, and hamstrings. In addition, the core muscles get a workout due to the stabilization of the upper body. That is almost a total body workout. Pretty cool, huh?

  We’re not sure “cool” is the word we would have used, but we get the point. Hyde adds that unlike free weights and machines, medicine balls allow realistic motions and unrestricted movement. Trainees, for example, can attempt explosive and ballistic movements with the medicine ball.

  HISTORY OF THE MEDICINE BALL

  We weren’t able to pinpoint the exact date when the term “medicine ball” was coined. As far back as 1000 B.C., Persian wrestlers trained with animal bladders stuffed with sand (we kid you not—as we discussed in Why Do Dogs Have Wet Noses?, early footballs were made from inflated cow bladders). The father of medicine, the ancient Greek Hippocrates, stuffed animal skins with sand and promoted the benefits of throwing and catching the “ball” (some think the Hippocrates connection is how the word “medicine” became attached to the ball). Not too long after, the Romans played games with balls called paganica, which were oblong medicine balls stuffed with feathers.

  The credit for the invention of the modern medicine ball is given to a colorful figure, William “Iron Duke” Muldoon, a New York City police officer who was such an accomplished wrestler that he quit the force in 1875 to become the first person ever to be a full-time professional wrestler. Muldoon not only traveled with carnivals, taking on all comers, but eventually participated in the first wrestler versus boxer contest, ending his match with the most famous boxer of his time, bare-knuckles champion John L. Sullivan, when Muldoon quickly body slammed the hapless Sullivan.

  Among his many other activities, Muldoon eventually became a boxing trainer, and developed several apparatus that live on to this day—the heavy bag and the medicine ball, made of heavy leather and stuffed with sand. Cheryl Hyde would probably not approve of Muldoon’s techniques. He not only had boxers throw and catch the medicine ball, but Muldoon dropped it on the boxers’ abdomens, mimicking the explosive thrust of a punch.

  Medicine balls soon caught on with a wider audience than boxers. YMCAs and schools prized the relative cheapness and portability of medicine balls. They were particularly popular on transatlantic ships during World War I, among both military and cruise ships. Perhaps nothing popularized them more than a presidential product placement. Shortly after his election, while aboard a ship returning from South America, president Herbert Hoover observed a game of “bull-in-the-ring,” in which one player in the middle of a circle of competitors attempted to intercept a pass of the medicine ball.

  Inspired by the game he saw and, perhaps, by his burgeoning waistline, Hoover rustled up members of his cabinet, Supreme Court justices, and other high officials, and invented the game of “Hoover-ball” in 1928. Teams of two or four competed every morning but Sundays, starting at 7:00 A.M. and stopping promptly at 7:30 A.M., regardless of the score. One player “served,” throwing the six-pound medicine ball over a net on a tennis-sized court. The receivers had to catch the ball on the fly and return it immediately. The first team to allow the ball to drop inside the court lost a point.

  Hoover credited his daily game for keeping his weight, which had ballooned up to 210 pounds at the beginning of his term, to a trim 185 during his administration. Hoover-ball became popular among even hoi polloi in the United States, but Americans seemed to tire of the game as they did of the President, who was not reelected. Still, the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library Association sponsors a Hoover-ball championship every year in West Branch, Iowa.

  OLD STUFFING

  The engineering problem with medicine balls has always been how to stuff them to provide minimum fuss and maximum weight. In the good old days of inflatable bladders, the “balls” were probably filled with whatever was handy, most likely dirt or sand. A manufacturer of medicine balls, Healthtrek, claims that Hippocrates filled his bladders with sand. Sand continued to be popular filler for medicine balls, from the days of William Muldoon to the present. Other popular fillers included rags and kapok, the soft and fluffy fiber from the kapok tree, which is still a popular fill for upholstered furniture.

  NEW STUFFING

  Medicine balls come in a bewildering array of choices. Cheryl Hyde says that she likes gel-filled balls made by Thera-Band: “They are small—the eight-pound ball fits in the palm of my hand, and I don’t have big hands.” Others are the size of basketballs. Some have handles, most do not. A few still sport a leather exterior, while others have inches of rubber on the outside, and are hard enough to break a jaw or a rib if dropped at an inopportune time (or place).

  Sand (along with dry air) still survives as a fill for some medicine balls, particularly ones not designed to bounce, but the state of the art today seems to be gel. Once medicine balls became a commercial product, especially for the health and fitness markets, an image of proper hygiene was essential, and customers became pickier about the composition of the fill. MediBall claims to have been the first gel-filled medicine ball—their smallest ball, five inches in diameter, weighs two pounds, and their fifteen-pound ball is nine inches.

  No one asked us, but: What do Pampers and MediBalls have in common? According to MediBall,

  The balls are filled with an aqueous gel composed of potassium polyacrylate and water. It is non-toxic and non-hazardous, the same material is used as an absorbent in baby diapers. Should not hurt you unless you eat too many of them.

  Hey! Leave the jokes to us.

  Submitted by Taryn Losch of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Thanks also to Reena Mudhar of Germantown, Maryland.

  What Is the White, Usually Oval Patch Found on the Bottom of McDonald’s Hamburger Buns?

  At first, our friends at McDonald’s were a little reluctant to answer this question, as their buns are baked locally by ind
ependent suppliers. So we moped silently and ran to the trusty American Institute of Baking. Kirk O’Donnell, who is the only person we’ve ever encountered whose expertise includes strategic training, plant management, and hamburger buns, graciously replied:

  Hamburger buns often have a small white patch on the bottom due to the way they are processed. The dough is very soft, and when it is conveyed into the pans, it tends to entrap some air between the pan and the dough. The white patch is simply the area where some air has kept part of the dough from being in contact with the hot pan in the oven.

  Eventually, McDonald’s did get back to us and confirmed O’Donnell’s explanation.

  We ran this Imponderable by Fraya Berg, food editor at Parents magazine. She mentioned that sometimes white patches on baked products can be caused by extra flour from the mold or cutter used to keep dough from sticking. Berg mentioned that in the Parents test kitchen, “We use a brush to get rid of excess flour when rolling cookies as we did tonight”—all to avoid the dreaded white patch.

  Submitted by “Gooshie,” via the Internet.

  Why Do Some Places, Such as Newfoundland, Australia, India, and Parts of the Arab World, Have Half-Time Zones? Why Do Some Large Countries Have Only One Time Zone?

  As we write this, it is 6:40 P.M. in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and three hours earlier, 3:40 P.M., in Reno, Nevada, about 3,800 kilometers west. While we’re toiling away, the folks in Shanghai, China, are just waking up. It is 7:40 A.M. in Shanghai on the East Coast of China, but it also 7:40 A.M. in the city of Uramqi, located 3,800 kilometers to the west of Shanghai. The folks in Sydney, in eastern Australia, are already at work—it’s 10:40A.M., but Perth residents in the West are still commuting at 8:40 A.M. How about the folks in central Australia? For those in north-central Australia, such as residents of Darwin, it’s 9:10 A.M. (Australian Central Standard Time). South of them, in Adelaide, it’s 10:10 A.M. (Australian Central Daylight Savings Time).

  If you are catching our drift, you might have already come to the conclusion that time zones are not uniformly applied throughout the world. When such large countries as China and India have only one time zone each, and places like Australia, India, Iran, and Newfoundland feature half-time zones, then something besides scientific considerations has affected the way folks tell time.

  The notion of uniform timekeeping throughout the world is a surprisingly recent phenomenon—until the late nineteenth century, towns would set their own standards. If there was a big clock in the central square, an official would try to calibrate noon to when the sun was directly overhead, and hope to be reasonably accurate.

  No one seemed to be highly perturbed by this haphazard arrangement until railroads demanded a more precise way of scheduling routes, especially in the United States and Canada. It was a mite difficult to print train schedules when a ten-minute trip could send passengers to their destination earlier than they had left! Ruth Shirey, of the National Council for Geographic Education, wrote Imponderables:

  Before railroads allowed us to travel fast enough that time zones were standardized so that trains could be scheduled, communities all over the world went by local sun time. In many parts of the world, people still use local time.

  The inventor of our time zone system was a railroad engineer, Canadian Sandford Fleming. His notion was elegant in its simplicity: If the earth takes twenty-four hours to rotate, and there are 360 degrees of longitude, why not create twenty-four time zones of 15 degrees of longitude each? Sure, the zones in the extreme north and south would be infinitesimal, but only a few scientists, polar bears, and penguins might complain.

  In 1884, President Chester Arthur convened a Prime Meridian Conference in Washington D.C. to standardize the concept Fleming had developed just six years before. And although not quite unanimous (San Domingo voted against, and Brazil and France abstained), twenty-two other nations voted for naming Greenwich, England as the location of the Prime Meridian.

  But there has never been total compliance with Fleming’s scheme. China should have five time zones but it has one (in the western part of China, the sun is often overhead at 3:00 P.M.). India is the second largest country to have only one time zone (in Fleming’s scheme, it should have two), and that one is a half-time zone.

  According to Shirey, by far the most common reason for half-time zones (or “offset time zones”) is to shift key cities closer to their actual sun time. For example, all of Newfoundland is one-half hour ahead of Atlantic Standard Time, the zone used by the other Maritime provinces in Canada. Newfoundland lies on the eastern edge of its geographically correct time zone, so it chose an offset time zone to better reflect its actual sun time. Newfoundland’s offset time zone is so popular that when the government tried to change to Atlantic Standard Time to conform to Labrador and the other Maritime Provinces, the public outcry prevented it from happening.

  The offset time zone in central Australia has a different story. Thomas H. Rich, a curator at the Museum of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia, took an interest in this Imponderable, and unearthed proceedings from the South Australian Parliament in 1898, that showcased the debate in Adelaide about whether to reject the Fleming system that it had adopted in 1894. The reason for the opposition in Adelaide had nothing to do with the sun and much to do with dollars:

  commercial men who received cable advices from Great Britain were put to great disadvantage under the present system as compared with business men in the other colonies…commercial cablegrams are generally delivered in the morning, and in consequence of the present arbitrary law by which the Adelaide time is made one hour later than that of Melbourne and Sydney, South Australian merchants are placed at a great disadvantage, their competitors having one hour to act on the cablegrams before the local commercial men are in receipt of theirs…

  The original reason for the offset is long past, but reversals of offset time zones are rare—all politics is local.

  Meanwhile, anomalies exist all over the globe. Nepal, just to the west of Bangladesh, has a fifteen minute offset. Russia’s entire country is one hour off, sort of—it is on permanent daylight savings time. But our favorite brouhaha is the controversy about Daylight Savings Time in the United States. Until 2005, Indiana had a byzantine structure, in which most of the counties in the Eastern time zone refused to switch over to DST, but there were renegades who did, along with a few “traitors” from the Central time zone as well. Indiana’s localities gave schedule makers a nightmare.

  Arizona is the last of the original forty-eight states not to endorse Daylight Savings Time, but even here, there is a holdout. The Navajo Nation in Arizona observes Daylight Savings Time, but the Hopi Nation, which lives within the Navajo Reservation, does not. If we can conclude anything about this topic, it is that although astronomy might have inspired our attempts at measurement, in practice politics, business considerations, and human psychology dictates how we tell time.

  Submitted by a caller to the Larry Mantle Show, KPCC-FM in Pasadena, California. Thanks also to Jim Sears of Belton, Missouri; Anthony Bialy of Kenmore, New York; Joe Koch of Ellington, Connecticut; Nicole Nims of Culver City, California; Peter Darga of Sterling Heights, Michigan; Claxton Graham of Mt. Holly, North Carolina; and John Buchanan of Hamilton Square, New Jersey.

  How Did the Candy Snickers Get Its Name?

  Snickers, introduced in 1930, was named after a horse, albeit a well-connected one. Snickers was the favorite horse of a family named Mars, who just happened to own a certain candy company.

  Submitted by Heidi Zimmerman of San Diego, California. Thanks also to Justin Tedaldi of North Massapequa, New York; Alexa Steed of Colorado Springs, Colorado; and David Weinberger of Los Angeles, California.

  Why Do Motorcyclists, Especially Those Riding Harley-Davidsons, Rev Their Engines While Waiting at Stoplights?

  We were excited when we received this Imponderable from one of our most prolific correspondents. We’ve always wondered about this, too, so we used the power of the Internet to con
nect with hundreds of motorcyclists directly at the forums of Motorcycle-USA.com, GSResources.com (for owners of Suzuki’s GS Series), and HarleyZone.com, for Harley-Davidson owners and fans.

  The responses were all over the map and revealed a lot not only about motorcycles, but about the crosscurrents among motorcycle enthusiasts—here is a subculture with many subcultures within it. In most cases, we are not quoting our sources by name, often for obvious reasons.

  TECHNICAL REASONS FOR REVVING

  The first obvious question is: Are there any mechanical or technical reasons for revving a motorcycle when it has come to a complete stop? Yes, say many of the respondents, and argue that this is the only reason why they do so.

  If my carbureted engine isn’t warmed up completely, sometimes I need to rev to prevent stalling at the first stop sign.

  I do it to get my RPMs up in anticipation of a green light.

  The rev set originated because the bikes would come in one of two flavors. There were the street racer set (which generally rode British motorcycles) and the Harley-Davidson crowd.