Are Lobsters Ambidextrous? (34 page)

Can this marriage be saved?

Justin Palmer of Granby, Connecticut, realizes that he who is not part of the solution is part of the problem:

 

While walking home from school late one evening, wearing flexible leather moccasins, I took a shortcut through a grassy field when one of my shoes slid off. I turned around and in the dark patted about only to find what I thought was a new shoe—one of the lost single shoes that everyone comes across!

After considerable time, I abandoned my search, content with my new shoe and acknowledging the loss of the other. Later, under a street lamp, I realized it was the same shoe stuffed with grass and fitting improperly. My negligence, however, could have contributed to the wealth of lost single shoes around the world!

 

There, there, Justin! Confession is good for the soul. Justin then relates
another
time when he recovered his own lost single shoe, but he’s turning that story into a made-for-TV movie.

Justin was kind enough to pass along an entry from
Reader’s Digest’s
“Life in These United States,” which tells the story of a man who innocently drove his slightly tipsy secretary home after an office party. That night, he and his wife were driving to a restaurant, when he noticed a high-heeled shoe lurking out below the passenger seat. Afraid his wife would misinterpret its significance, he waited until she looked away and flung the shoe out of the car. When they got to the restaurant, his wife squirmed a bit and asked, “Honey, have you seen my other shoe?”

Our guess is that the odds that this story is true are about 100 to 1 against. Still, the story is proof that SSS has achieved urban legend status.

Speaking of legends, Angel Kuo of West Nyack, New York, points out that another book claims to have the answer to SSS:
Faeries
, by Brian Froud and Alan Lee:

 

The Irish have their own industrious faerie, the Leprechaun (lep-re-kawn) or one-shoe-maker. He is a solitary cobbler to be found merrily working on a single shoe (never a pair) beneath a dockleaf or under a hedge.

 

Angel theorizes that leprechauns have emigrated around the world, making single shoes and then tossing them off the sides of the road.

Too fanciful and New Agey for you? Then how about a sci
entific theory from our new hero, Simonetta A. Rodriguez, of Endicott, New York, who has emerged as the philosopher king of SSS. How does Simonetta explain our phenomenon? Entropy and the second law of thermodynamics, of course. These two scientific principles argue that the universe and the systems within it tend toward greater randomness and increasing disorder over time. Take the floor, Simonetta:

 

We normally encounter shoes in pairs only because human life-forms are constantly working to keep them ordered, in pairs. We do not leave the system of shoes to itself; instead, we rigorously enforce extremely artificial pair-bonding in the system. Since we are life-forms, and highly ordered life-forms at that (well, I do know people who are no more ordered than amoeba, but I want to ignore them for the sake of this discussion), we must constantly work like this to prevent disorder, which is the same thing as death for us. We do not even notice our ceaseless efforts to fight entropy. Well, we don’t notice most of them—I gave up on a lot of housework I used to do when I was young and dumb, because what’s the point? Why fight the universe?

Once some shoes get away from us, the universe does not care about our obsessions. Entropy takes over. The details do not matter: animals, traffic, weather—anything the shoes encounter serves to increase the entropy of the system. If an entire pair of shoes gets away from us,
the very first thing that must go is the pair-bond
, because it was maintained only by extreme and very unnatural efforts…

I would be most astonished if I saw a
pair
of shoes by the side of the road, and I never have.

 

Simonetta must have done
very
well on essay exams.

From this point forward, we now have theoretical, scientific underpinnings for any future foray into SSS studies.

FRUSTABLE 4:
Why do the English drive on the left and most other countries on the right?

We heard from Stanley Ralph Ross, of Beverly Hills, California, who once had the imposing task of writing the script for the Sound and Light Show at London Bridge in England and later
at Lake Havasu City, Arizona. The tremendous research available to him led to some interesting conclusions about this Frustable:

 

In the 1600s, London Bridge had many buildings erected on it: homes, stores, etc…. Although the width of the bridge was about forty-two feet, the incursion of the buildings made it only twelve feet wide at certain points. The Bridge was the only way one could travel from the city to the country and often had as many as 75,000 people cross it in 24 hours. At that time, there were
no traffic laws whatsoever
and people just pushed past each other.

In 1625, on a hot summer day, a horse drawing a wagon dropped dead of a heart attack in one of the areas only twelve feet wide. This caused the Mother Of All Traffic Jams, and nobody could get through in either direction. Upon hearing of this, the Lord Mayor of London, one John Conyers, decreed that all traffic going
into
the city be on the
upstream
side of the Thames (left) and all traffic going to the country be on the downstream side. And that was the first traffic rule, a totally arbitrary decision by Conyers.

 

Ross explains that Conyers’s fiat was soon extended to the city of London, then to the boroughs of Westminster and Chelsea, to all of England, and then exported overseas.

FRUSTABLE 8:
Why do women in the United States shave their armpits?

Several readers have taken us to task for not emphasizing the role of advertising in creating the “sudden desire” of women for shaving armpits around 1915. It is true that deodorants were aggressively marketed at this time (ladies’ razors were soon to follow) and that women’s magazines of the time, ever desirous of pleasing advertisers, chimed in with advice to shave.

But fashion came first. The Mack Sennett Bathing Beauties had an immediate impact on fashion, and many of the first ads for deodorants showed women in “his” bathing suits. Advertisers are responsible for spreading the practice, but probably not for creating it.

FRUSTABLE 9:
Why don’t you ever see really tall old people?

Dr. Daphne Hare, of Buffalo, New York, was kind enough to send us a story summarizing an Ohio study of men who died of natural causes. The conclusions were startling, indicating that each additional inch in height corresponded to a reduction of 1.2 years in life expectancy. A 5′4″ man can expect to live almost ten years longer than a six-footer.

According to the
Buffalo News
, an earlier study showed “an average age of death of 82 for men less than 5 feet, 8 inches tall and 73 for those more than 6 feet tall.” Is this why H. Ross Perot is always smiling?

Frustables First Posed in
When Do Fish Sleep?
and First Answered in
Why Do Dogs Have Wet Noses?

FRUSTABLE 3:
How, when, and why did the banana peel become the universal slipping agent in vaudeville and movies?

In
Do Penguins Have Knees?
, we mentioned that a law student told us about old tort cases involving banana peel slipping, and that Oliver Wendell Holmes actually rendered an opinion on said topic. One enterprising reader, Robert W. Donovan, of Wenham, Massachusetts, went to his attic and dug through old law books to find the cases, and he was successful.

Holmes, when he was the chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, rendered a decision in the case of
Goddard v. Boston & Maine R.R. Co
. in 1901. Mr. Goddard slipped on a banana peel lying on a railway platform just as he exited the train. Holmes ruled that Goddard could not collect, because the peel “may have been dropped within a minute by one of the persons who was leaving the train.”

But not all banana-peel slippers are skinned by the court. Ten years later, in
Anjou
v.
Boston Elevated Railway Co
., the pratfaller won, as Donovan explains:

 

The distinction turned on the color of the banana peel. In
Anjou
[the plaintiff, not the pear], the plaintiff slipped on a brown banana peel that had presumably been on the ground for quite awhile. The court ruled that the railway was negligent in failing to keep its station free of ever dangerous banana peels. In
Goddard
, the banana peel was a fresh yellow color, indicating that it had been thrown on the ground shortly before Mr. Goddard had slipped on it.

In this case, the court reasoned that although the railroad owed a duty to its passengers to keep its stations clean, it was not reasonable to expect it to assign a maintenance worker to follow around every passenger who may be inclined to eat a banana and carelessly discard its peel…

 

We will assume that Anjou was not diabolical enough to carry around a mottled banana peel with her—those were more innocent times.

But our most exciting discovery came from film buff Irv Hyatt, who was gracious enough to send us a videotape of the man who might hold the key to the whole banana peel mystery—legendary film producer Hal Roach (who produced Laurel and Hardy, Harold Lloyd, and the “Our Gang” comedies, among many others). When he was presented with his honorary Oscar in 1983, the ninety-two-year-old producer spoke of how the banana peel became the universal slipping agent in movies.

Roach recounted that when he first started working in Hollywood, in 1912, he was paid one dollar a day, plus carfare and lunch. The lunch consisted of two sandwiches and a banana. Every day, after lunch, the prop man would pick up the discarded banana peels and put them away, lest anyone trip over them.

In the famous Mack Sennett comedy shorts of the era, comics took pratfalls on cakes of soaps or puddles of oil. But Hal Roach had a brainstorm. Why not use banana peels? They were available, plentiful, recognizable on-screen, and best of all, absolutely free for Roach.

Producer and screenwriter Jeffrey J. Silverstein, of Brook
lyn, New York, sent us a letter arguing that, from a comedic standpoint, it is strategically essential for the audience to be aware of the identity of the slipping agent before the “slipee” discovers it. Silverstein, having read our chapter about the selection of colors in traffic lights, feels that the fact that yellow is the most visible color from a distance didn’t hurt its acceptance among directors:

 

Plus, the banana has the additional advantage of giving a natural “accidental” setup. The person eating it doesn’t deliberately trip the “slipee”—it is unintentional and therefore funnier.

 

FRUSTABLE 8:
Why do kids tend to like meat well done (and then prefer it rarer and rarer as they get older)?

All of the theories we discussed in
Why Do Dogs Have Wet Noses?
and
Do Penguins Have Knees?
were psychological or physiological in nature. But we received a fascinating letter from James D. Kilchenman of Toledo, Ohio, who has spent decades in the restaurant and catering businesses. He believes that the most important influences in preferences for meat doneness are socioeconomic and cultural. The higher the socioeconomic status of a group, the rarer they want their meat. In Kilchenman’s catering experience, middle-class white groups invariably order prime rib medium-rare. Working-class black groups tend to order the roast medium-well or sometimes well done. But Kilchenman thinks that class is much more decisive than race: Affluent blacks tend to order meat rarer than less affluent whites.

How can we explain the socioeconomic taste disparity? Kilchenman attributes the difference to exposure to different types of meat. The better the cut of meat, the more essential it is to have it cooked rare. As Kilchenman puts it, no one walks into Wendy’s and demands a rare burger. Less affluent people are used to cooking cheaper cuts of meat, cuts that often need to be cooked longer to become tender.

Kilchenman argues that like poor adults, most children have limited exposure to the best cuts of meat. When Mom and Pop take Junior to the restaurant, chances are Junior isn’t going to
order filet mignon for dinner. He’ll usually have a hamburger. Kilchenman notes that whenever he has seen children ordering meat rare, they were always from affluent families.

Just as drinkers start with Singapore Slings and end up drinking martinis, or start as children with Kool-Aid and move to sweet white wine and later to dry red wine, so do children start with burnt hot dogs. But with exposure to the “finer things in life,” they will end up consuming rare filets as they watch their cholesterol levels rise.

Frustables First Posed in
Why Do Dogs Have Wet Noses?
and First Answered in
Do Penguins Have Knees?