Do Elephants Jump? (26 page)

We were a little surprised when a woman posed this Imponderable, but Judith Dahlman came prepared with a rationalization:

We talked to many restaurateurs and bartenders about this Imponderable, and found many that admitted to using urinals as dumping grounds for contaminated ice. Toilets, sinks, alleys, and the street were all favorite burial grounds for unwanted ice. Dumping ice mixed with broken glass anywhere in a public bathroom doesn’t seem smart; most bars and restaurants try to melt the ice with hot water in a sink or service bin and then throw the glass in the garbage. But ice is more often rendered unusable by spilled drinks or small pieces of food — both can easily be flushed away.

But we suspected more was at work. Most urinals are not large enough to hold the volume of ice held in bins behind bars. We’ve also seen ice put in urinals in rest rooms in gas stations without air conditioning, especially in the desert. Said bathrooms have a tendency to, let us be kind, not be fragrance free. We side with Gunnar Baldwin, senior national accounts manager of urinal manufacturer TOTO, USA, who wrote us:

Sometimes you can’t get a good answer without a commercial plug!

Some folks argue that ice provides a pleasing target for men. Men can’t resist target practice. Some men try to melt as much ice as possible, or to create mini-ice sculptures. Holland’s Schiphol Airport installed urinals with small “targets,” life-sized sculptures of flies (these can be seen at http://www.urinal.net/schiphol/), that according to a
Wall Street Journal
article, reduced spillage as much as 80 percent.

But even when men manage to hit the target, urinals will smell unless there is a steady stream of water to remove urine. Automatic-flush urinals are probably the best answer, but many establishments are saddled with old plumbing. The salt, sulfur, and other minerals contained in urine both harden in the trap and constrict the available “throat” of the trap of the urinal. This plumbing equivalent of “hardening of the arteries” can cause problems even on those rare occasions when men actually do flush voluntarily, creating dreaded backsplash.

But the slight inconvenience to customers or the long-term plumbing problems are unlikely to be what motivates the dumping of ice in urinals. As one bartender put it: “It’s the smell, Dave. It’s the smell.”

It’s probably not a coincidence that the two readers who posed this Imponderable come from cold-weather climates. It turns out that car batteries seem to like the same temperatures we do when we’re in our shirtsleeves, as Celwyn Hopkins, executive secretary of the Independent Battery Manufacturers Association, explains:

Hopkins adds, ominously: “There have been a lot of arguments on this subject and I usually don’t win.” Not exactly what we want to hear from a knowledgeable source!

A concrete floor in a garage is no colder than a wooden one, but it feels colder, mostly because concrete’s greater density conducts cold (and heat) more efficiently. The naysayers concede that batteries don’t thrive in cold weather, but argue that the differences in conductivity between concrete and wood floors or shelving are not sufficient to explain what they consider to be a long-held myth about batteries. Most agree with Gale Kimbrough, the technical services manager of Interstate Batteries, that although the premise of this Imponderable is no longer true, it does have a historical basis:

Modern auto batteries are now encased by polypropylene, which insulates the battery much more effectively than rubber. Even so, Kimbrough points out that even at the ideal 80 degrees, “some lead acid batteries discharge 4 to 8 percent per month, and can lose even more in very hot weather. In fact, some garages have been known to put batteries in hot climates on concrete floors during the summer, just to keep the batteries cooler and retain their charge better.”

Most food softens when moistened, but chewing gums stiffens. What’s the deal?

Calling chewing gum a “food” is a stretch. Until about sixty years ago, most gum base was made from the sap of a Central American sapodilla tree — that sap was chicle (of Chiclets fame). In essence, folks were chomping on rubber.

By the 1950s, most major gum manufacturers replaced chicle with an artificial gum base made from a synthetic plastic-rubbery substance that chemically resembles the chicle it replaced. Although there are other ingredients in gum (sugar or artificial sweeteners, natural flavorings, glycerin to preserve moistness, etc.), it is the gum base that gives gum its characteristic elasticity and softness.

Chicle and the artificial gum base that was designed to mimic chicle share one important characteristic — they soften and harden over a small range of temperature. When moist gum cools, it hardens. When moist gum is warmed, it softens. When you stick a thermometer in your mouth, it registers 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit on your thermometer (give or take a degree or two or a hospital visit or two). When you chew gum, your near-100-degree saliva moistens the gum, and that rigid stick quickly softens.

When we drink water, it’s usually cold. But even room-temperature water is cold enough to give our gum rigor mortis. Drink some hot water and the gum will magically soften up again.

This is not a chemical reaction. The gum doesn’t care whether the cold liquid is Coca-Cola, water, ice, or malt liquor. And this is true of all rubber — pour some cold water on a rubber eraser and it will harden, too. In fact, as fans of Heloise know well, applying ice is the classic home remedy for removing dried gum from clothing — once you’ve hardened the gum, it is much easier to remove.

For the sake of research, we tested various water temperatures on a stick of Wrigley’s Doublemint gum, and we found we could achieve stasis. When we opened the hot water faucet and the water was warm but not hot, we could drink it without the gum softening or hardening — the Golden Mean.

You mean you didn’t know that the dot was to cover up the nerve canal of an elephant? Doesn’t anyone receive a proper liberal arts education anymore?

The earliest billiard tables and balls, created during the Renaissance in England, were made out of wood. Sometime during the seventeenth century, ivory balls were introduced. The British were already importing tons of ivory from Africa every year, and billiards players found the new ivory balls much more pleasing in weight, appearance, and sound (the lovely clicking noise when two balls collided).

But there was a serious problem with making a ball out of an elephant’s tusk. Elephants have nerve canals running through the middle of their teeth, just like we do. To achieve an even, “honest” roll, the craftsmen who carved the balls so that the nerve canal ran straight through the center, creating dark imperfections at opposite ends of each ball. The ball crafters would usually plug the ball with something to assure even weighting. In the early days of billiards, ebony was often used to plug the canals, so that the holes appeared to be black dots.

By the early seventeenth century, ivory balls were more popular than wooden ones in England, and became the only balls used in serious competitions. But there were problems associated with these ebony-stuffed ivory balls. In his article in
Amateur Billiard Player
magazine, Peter Ainsworth explains:

As they gained more experience in fashioning ivory balls, craftsmen realized that the ivory taken from near the base of the tusk was difficult to work with, as the nerve hole was wider than those nearer the tip. To assure equal weighting, some ball makers would demand only the center of the tusk in order to line up the nerve canal through the ball’s center. In an e-mail to
Imponderables,
Peter Clare, whose family owns Thurston, one of the oldest and most respected manufacturers of billiard equipment, noted that top-quality ivory balls of this era had “very small evidence” of the nerve, sometimes insignificant enough to be covered by black dye rather than a solid material.

But the price of this expertise came high, and not just in terms of money. One tusk could yield material for only two or three balls. Elephants were being slaughtered to provide four or six billiard balls! According to Titan Sports, an English billiard-supply company, in the peak years of production, 12,000 elephants were slaughtered annually just to supply Britain with billiard balls.

In the late nineteenth century, plastic balls rolled to the rescue to supplant ivory. The first plastic balls were made out of celluloid, and later plastic resins, which, except for inferior acetate balls, are what most pool and billiard balls are composed of today.

So if modern pool balls are plastic, with no nerve holes in sight, why are there dots on balls today? Actually, not all cue balls do sport dots — not even the majority. But dots still appear on many balls, for a very practical reason. John Lewis, director of leagues and programs at the Billiards Congress of America, the governing body of pocket billiards (“pool”) in the United States, explains:

In other words, the all-white cue ball is the best possible “billboard” for an advertisement for the manufacturer, just as the white space on the ace of spades provides the requisite white space for a plug for the card maker.

The most popular carom billiard games (featuring tables without pockets), such as English billiards and three-cushion billiards, are played with only three balls: one red, and one cue ball for each of the two players. A player is not allowed to shoot the opponent’s cue ball, so it is important that each player be able to easily identify whose cue ball is whose. Usually, one cue ball is pure white; the other has a dot, a colored circle, or a logo to distinguish it from the other. More often than not, there are two dots on billiard cue balls, so that the mark is distinguishable if one dot is flush against the table.

Anyone who has seen
The Graduate
or listened to Frank Zappa can attest to the poor public relations that the plastics industry has endured. But the pool and billiards industry is mighty pleased with its adoption of plastic balls, which are cheaper and easier to manufacture. Players are happy with their perfect roundness and true roll. And elephants are downright ecstatic about them.