Imponderables

by David Feldman

  For the adult, the happy ending is a temporary return to the innocence of childhood—the tears stem from the recognition that one must return to the tougher “real” world. The child, without comprehension of the permanence of death, sees the happy ending as confirmation of the limitless possibilities of life.

  The tendency to cry at happy endings is not restricted to stories. In real life, it is common for relatives of a critically ill patient to cry not before or during a delicate surgery, but after the operation is successful. The happy ending enables the loved one to feel safe in unleashing all of the sadness and anxiety that had been repressed.

  Psychologists even dispute the idea that the tears shed atrites of passage such as weddings, graduations, and bar mitzvahs are tears of joy. Precisely because these ceremonies symbolize transitions in young people's lives, rituals stir up repressed anxieties in loved ones about the past (“Why wasn't my wedding as joyous?”), insecurities about the present (“Why haven't I found my true love like the bride and groom have?”), and fear about the future (“How will I survive when my children leave the nest?”).

  In our emotional world, we are needy, selfish, and demanding. We cry for ourselves at happy endings, not for others, but this does not mean we are incapable of feeling joy in others' happiness. Crying at the happy ending reveals our idealistic side, the part of us that yearns for the simplicity and love we once thought possible and the part of us that mourns its unattainability.

  Why do White Castle hamburger patties have five holes in them?

  In the competitive world of fast-food hamburgers, White Castle is the odd man out. It does everything “wrong” and yet it thrives. Here are just a few of the ways in which White Castle differs from the bigger players on the block.

  While McDonald's, Burger King, and Wendy's derive much of their income from franchising, all of the White Castles are owned by the parent corporation.

  While the big three have tried to spread as quickly and widely as possible through franchising, White Castle has been content to consolidate its operation in the Midwest, Kentucky, New Jersey, and New York. The first White Castle was built in 1921 in Wichita, Kansas, and the company is now based in Columbus, Ohio. Although White Castle predated McDonald's, there are more than ten times as many golden arches.

  While other fast-food emporiums have diversified their menus, offering breakfasts, gourmet sandwiches, and salad bars, White Castle has stuck with its staples. Yes, it offers a couple of other token sandwiches, but White Castle was even resistant to offering french fries and onion chips. Even now, hamburger sales constitute a full 60 percent of its gross, a much higher figure than any other major hamburger chain.

  While other fast-food chains emphasize the large size of their patties, mostly in an effort to lure more adults, White Castle sticks with its tiny burgers. When White Castle opened in the twenties, a Whitie cost five cents. Today, a burger costs around thirty cents. What you get for that thirty cents is a patty that is two inches wide and two inches long and not at all thick.

  Long before Wendy's, White Castle offered a square hamburger (and a square bun). The patties were not square for the marketing reasons that motivated Wendy's (see separate Imponderable) but for much more mundane reasons. White Castle's grills were designed to hold 30 hamburger patties. A square patty allows the burgers to cook with literally no unused grill space, enabling the cook to increase turnover. Bob Goldberg, a spokesperson for White Castle, estimates that one store can produce 2500-3000 hamburgers in an hour, in the unlikely case it would be called upon to do so.

  White Castle burgers taste different than those of any of the other major chains and have a totally different texture. There is no delicate way of stating it: White Castle burgers reek of onions and have a soggy consistency. Far from an insult, these are the major reasons White Castle aficionados love them. Devotees call the little burgers “sliders,” undoubtedly because one needn't chew a Whitie to ingest it; the bun and patty are soggy enough to slide down the digestive tract. The onion taste is unmistakable. Before the hamburger patties are to be cooked, a little water is placed on the grill, followed by onions. The beef is then placed over the onions and the buns over the beef. The buns are permeated by the rising, pungent steam of water, onion juice, and beef fat. Another reason why the buns turn out so soggy is that White Castle, which makes its own buns, deliberately makes them much lighter than other fast-food companies, so they can absorb the moisture more readily.

  But of all the differences between White Castle and its competitors, none is as strange as one feature of every White Castle hamburger patty: It has five little holes. These holes were introduced in 1946, and as usual with White Castle, they serve a totally utilitarian function. The holes allow the steam and grease from the grill to escape up the holes to the upper bun, which cooks atop each patty. This release of steam and grease eliminates the need to flip over the meat in order to cook it evenly!

  The holes help provide sliders with their texture. The rising grease helps give the upper bun the layer of gray film so beloved by customers, and the rising steam helps make the upper bun melt in your hand, as well as your mouth. The holes are not punched, but extruded by a specially designed instrument called a beef horn, which uses five steel rods to extrude the meat as the patties are formed.

  White Castle has always been a family-owned operation, and like many private companies, the Ingram clan has been cautious in its policies. But the smallness and tight-knittedness of White Castle has also given it a strong sense of its identity. White Castle has not been ashamed of its customers, who are traditionally less affluent than the upscale types the McDonald's commercials are aimed at. Many White Castles are located in inner city areas in midwestern cities that have supposedly seen better days, and many are open 24 hours and attract blue-collar workers on their way to or from graveyard shifts.

  White Castle may seem like a nostalgic anachronism, the symbol of a bygone era. Don't bet on it. White Castle is doing very well, thank you. Its per-store gross in 1984 was $1.3 million, first in the fast-food industry (just edging out McDonald's). Part of the Ingram family's conservative policy includes treating its employees well (at least by the philistine standards of the fast-food industry). While McDonald's, Wendy's, and Burger King have to contend with constant turnover of personnel, White Castle has phenomenal worker loyalty, partly because employees participate in a profit-sharing program.

  White Castle doesn't think there are too many Imponderables about the hamburger business. It took a soggy, smelly burger that MBA types would probably deem unmarketable and created a mini-empire. Every decision it makes seems to have a practical, utilitarian purpose. If punching holes in its hamburger is going to increase its grill turnover, then holes in the hamburgers it will have.

  Why aren't there seat belts in buses?

  Buses, like all vehicles over ten thousand pounds, are not required by law to have seat belts. But why don't they? Although it is true that larger vehicles are better able to withstand crashes, the main reason most transit systems don't even try to install seat belts is that in all such experiments, passengers simply refuse to wear them.

  Experiments with seat belts in school buses have been disastrous. Not only do children refuse to wear seat belts, but as an exasperated official of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration told Imponderables: “In the hands of a teenager, a seat belt buckle is a lethal weapon.”

  After the first edition of Imponderables, we received a letter from Carol Fast, founder of the National Coalition for Seatbelts on School Buses. She pointed out that seat belts are now mandatory in over 150 U.S. school districts, one state (New York), and at least one big city (Denver), and that health care and consumer groups overwhelmingly support mandatory seat belts in school buses.

  Fast also made the telling point that the main resistance to seat belts in school buses is an economic one. The school bus industry doesn't want seat belts because installing them will make their vehicles more expensive; the
true scandal would be if this is the main reason why most school systems reject them.

  The evidence of the efficacy of seat belts in preventing serious injury in buses is still inconclusive. Ms. Fast sent several studies that argued strongly for their use, but her organization suffered a setback when the National Transportation Safety Board, in March 1987, issued a finding that did not recommend requiring lap restraints on school buses. Among the NTSB conclusions: Twice as many students die each year getting on or off school buses than riding them; seat belts are unlikely to prevent deaths caused by head-on collisions (the cause of most on-the-road bus fatalities); money allocated for seat belts would be better spent on training bus drivers and providing better maintenance of the vehicles.

  Why aren't there seat belts in taxicabs?

  Actually, there usually are seat belts in taxis. If you dare reach under the seat cushion, you might find a seat belt among the debris. Taxis, like all automobiles, are required by federal law to be equipped with seat belts when they leave the factory. But most taxi commissions do not prohibit removal of seat belts.

  Passengers hurriedly piling into back seats for short hauls find buckles more of a nuisance than a necessity. Even in localities that require seat belts in taxis, most cab drivers find that the path of least resistance is to hide seat belts behind the seat cushion—there is no law that seat belts must be easy to find. Many states have recently enacted laws requiring the use of seat belts by all occupants of cars, but taxis are usually excluded from such legislation and taxi jump seats always have been specifically exempted from needing seat belts.

  Only when passengers demand and use seat belts will you find them in every taxi in the United States.

  Why don't cats like to swim?

  Many people think that cats are afraid of water. They're not. Occasionally, one can see a cat pounce spontaneously into the water.

  Marlin Perkins fans can attest to the fact that many of cats' larger relatives, such as tigers and jaguars, love to swim. Jaguars are even known to dive into rivers and streams and attack alligators.

  Abandoned house cats will dive into water to do a little fishing. So why isn't your cat likely to stick a paw into your backyard pool? For the same reasons your cat always drives you nuts: He has a cleanliness fetish, and he's lazy. Your cat, unlike your dog, refuses to have a good time and pay the piper. He won't get wet because he figures that it isn't worth the effort needed to dry and clean himself with his tongue to enjoy something as superficial as a marine frolic.

  Unless you starve him and stock your pool with live herring, your cat is likely to remain landlocked.

  Why does root beer taste flatter than colas?

  The amount of carbonation in a soft drink is a crucial determinant in its taste, and individual beverage makers tend to be secretive about the exact amount of “gas” in their drinks. Still, there is remarkably little difference between different brands within the same genre of soft drinks.

  Root beer tastes flatter than colas because it is flatter than colas. Carbonation of drinks is measured in gas volumes, the amount of gas a liquid will absorb at 68 degrees at atmospheric pressure. Most root beers measure about three gas volumes, meaning that the gas will occupy three times the amount of space in the bottle than the liquid will.

  Here is the list of soft drink types, in descending order of effervescence, with their approximate gas volumes:

  Type

  Gas Volumes

  ginger ale

  4

  lemon-lime

  3.7-4

  cola

  3.5

  root beer

  3

  fruit flavors

  1.5-2

  Without realizing it, many consumers might prefer fruit sodas primarily because of their relatively small carbonation levels.

  If you dislike flat root beer, one suggestion will work wonders. Never pour a room temperature soft drink into a glass with ice—the radical temperature change traumatizes the poor gas—you will lose approximately half of all the carbonation. If you pour refrigerated soda into a chilled glass, you will lose only about 10 percent of the gas. Once the gas survives the initial burst of impact into your glass, it doesn't lose carbonation very quickly.

  Although several friends have commented that some of the caffeine-free and sugar-free soft drinks seem less bubbly than their sugared and caffeinated counterparts, Imponderables was assured by all sources that this simply was not the case. None of the ingredients in drinks really affects the CO2 content, since the gas is an additive and not a byproduct of flavorings.

  Once in a while I hear bells going off in movie theaters. Am I going crazy?

  Perhaps you are, but hearing bells in movie theaters is unlikely to be a symptom of impending mental illness. You are hearing warning bells that are going off to alert the projectionist that a reel change is imminent. Usually, the bell sounds two to two and a half minutes before the reel change is necessary.

  You are less likely to hear these bells in newer theaters. Some theaters now use giant platters with continuous loops rather than smaller reels that must be manually changed. Some new projectors have simply eliminated the warning bells. Still other projectors are computer-driven, with controls that automatically trigger reel changes.

  Whether or not your particular theater projection room has warning bells, in order to achieve a smooth transition during reel changes the projectionist probably relies much more on changeover cues that are contained in all standard release prints. Perhaps you have noticed these changeover cues, which consist of one black dot placed in the upper right-hand corner of the screen for four consecutive frames of the print. The first cue appears exactly twenty-two frames from the end of the reel.

  Occasionally, the changeover cue is necessary when the background of the screen is dark, making the cue nearly impossible to see. In this case, the black dot is usually surrounded by a thin white border.

  The cue to actually start the second (idle) projector motor is the identical dot, placed in the same upper right-hand corner location, also for four consecutive frames. It is placed 12 feet and 6 frames, or about 8 seconds, from the end of the reel.

  Two professional projectionists told Imponderables that after a few experiences with one movie, the changeovers become instinctive and that they don't even rely on the changeover cues at all. Both added that the warning bells shouldn't be audible to patrons and that if they were, the most likely explanation is that the projectionist has simply failed to close the door to the projection room.

  Why do some shampoos direct the user to apply them once? Why do some shampoos direct the user to repeat the application? Why do some shampoos direct the user to leave the shampoo on the hair for several minutes before rinsing?

  Hair is dead. A good shampoo can make your hair more manageable, but it can't make your hair less dead. Any advertisement that claims a shampoo can nourish or revitalize your hair is, in effect, promising to feed and raise the dead.

  The reason we need to wash hair is to eliminate dirt and grease. Every strand of hair is contained in a pore, the hair follicle, which extends well below the scalp. Every hair follicle also has a sebaceous gland, which manufactures an oil, sebum, to moisten the hair follicle, which in turn lubricates the hair and the skin on the surface of the scalp. Although oil is portrayed as the nasty villain on shampoo commercials, sebum prevents your skin and hair from having the dry and brittle consistency that plagues many elderly people. But sebum also collects bacteria and dirt.

  The main purpose of shampoo is to eliminate excess oil and dirt that collect on the surface of the scalp. When shampoo hits the grease, it emulsifies the oil, turning fat globules into small droplets so that the oil and accompanying dirt will rinse out easily. No shampoo is capable of penetrating below the scalp. Shampoos merely collect and get rid of the material on the scalp and hair.

  It is obviously in the interest of shampoo manufacturers to encourage buyers to shampoo every day, using two applications. A few decade
s ago, most people washed their hair every week or so, and a considerable number used their bath soap to do it. They didn't have many problems because excess oils don't accumulate that fast in most scalps. Although some companies recommend applying their product twice each time, the same shampoo will work admirably with only one application, for most people, if used on a daily or every-other-day basis.

  Imponderables contacted several shampoo manufacturers. Each was quite willing to admit that there was nothing special about its shampoo that dictated applying it once or twice during the cleaning process and that the cleanliness of the hair was far more important than the properties of its shampoo in determining whether a second application was necessary. One company, a maker of “mild” shampoo, told Imponderables that it has repositioned its Neutrogena from an everyday product (with directions to apply the shampoo only once) to a non-everyday product (“rinse and repeat”). Notice that Neutrogena did not change the formula of its shampoo, but merely repositioned its marketing. Obviously, many will still use Neutrogena on a daily basis, but will now, as instructed, apply it twice rather than once. Neutrogena will probably sell more shampoo as a result. One shampoo, Ivory, from Procter & Gamble, specifies to repeat the application “if necessary.” It isn't clear how someone in a misty shower is supposed to figure out if a second application is necessary, but Procter & Gamble cannot be accused of false labeling.