Why Do Pirates Love Parrots? (32 page)

W
e’ve got mail. Lots and lots of mail. Most of it comes in the form of e-mail, and most of the e-mail comes in the form of questions. But we also receive our share of comments about what we’ve written, most of which are complimentary. Nothing is more boring than reading a letters section full of bouquets, so we’ve reserved this space for readers who would prefer to give us a thorn sandwich instead of a long-stemmed rose.

We don’t have space to publish all the worthy corrections and disagreements, ranging from spotting typos to arguing the aesthetic merits of high-heeled shoes. But please keep sending in your objections to anything that you find lacking—they not only lead to corrections in future printings, but keep our egos from swelling. Let’s proceed to your mail, and hope we can cling to a vestige of self-respect!

There’s good news and bad news about the response to our last book,
Do Elephants Jump?
The good news is that for the most part you agreed with our explanations and arguments. Yay! Oh, but then there’s the annoying bad news. We’ve mentioned that we always make at least one incredibly dumb mistake in every book. Sharp-eyed readers proved, however, that at times we can exceed this quota. Heck, we couldn’t even get past an aside in the introduction to the letters section of
Elephants
without making a mistake. Here is what we wrote:

Are we unlucky or what? The last sentence would have worked perfectly fine for eighty-six years. But of course our gratuitous joke about the Red Sox just happened to be published in November 2004. Very quickly after publication, we heard from Hal Roberts of Bellingham, Washington:

Readership in the Boston area seems to be just fine, Hal, but we can gain some satisfaction in printing the correction from a Seattle Mariners fan.

We got into trouble with another aside. In a chapter on “Why Do We See Stars When We Bump Our Head?” we committed perhaps our most egregious mistake ever. We wrote:
“As Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller so eloquently phrased it in their song, ‘On Broadway,’ ‘At night the stars put on a show for free.’”
Shortly after the hardbound edition was published, Jo Ann Lawlor of San Jose, California, wrote:

Agggh. Here’s a case where we made a mistake because we love the music so much, we didn’t fact-check properly. Jo Ann is right, of course. “On Broadway” is the masterpiece popularized by the Drifters and written by Leiber and Stoller. “Up on the Roof” was also a big hit for the Drifters and was covered by Laura Nyro, James Taylor, and many others, but it was written by two other geniuses from the Brill Building: Carole King and Gerry Goffin. Luckily, Jo Ann was quick enough to alert us to this mistake so that we could change it in the paperback edition of
Elephants.

And Lawlor nailed us on another inaccuracy, a first as far as we can remember in
Imponderables
history: we didn’t understand the meaning of a word. We were discussing why loons have a problem getting airborne from either land or the water. We wrote that the common loon
“cannot alight vertically from a standstill on the water.”
Lawlor comments wryly:

We cannot tell a lie. We thought that “alight” did mean “taking off.” Call it temporary insanity. Call it permanent insanity. Or just call it dumb.

Regular readers of our Inbox section will be surprised that we’ve made it this far without any mention of boots or shoes. Worry not. Although fewer people are writing about why ranchers hang boots on fence posts, we did receive about fifteen letters on the subject. To recap, here are the theories in hand: to shield the post from rotting during rain; to discourage coyotes and other predators; to keep foul-smelling boots out of the house; to display pride; to mark where repair work on a fence is required; to amuse themselves; to signal that someone is home; to point toward a rancher’s home (in case of heavy snowfall); to keep horses from impaling themselves on posts; to point toward the nearest graveyard; to shield posts from adverse reactions to the sun; to do something with single shoes lying on the road; and to offer the boots to a less fortunate cowboy. To our vast body of wisdom, we add the theory of Joanne M. Schrader of Hannibal, Missouri:

Has there been any news on the single shoe front? Have you any doubts? We’ve been trying to solve why you so often find exactly one shoe on the side of the road since
Why Don’t Clocks Run Clockwise?
The time for theories is over! We need empirical research, which is why we were excited when, on a Friday evening, we received an e-mail from Anita Trout, a librarian at the University of Wyoming:

We responded excitedly:

Then on Monday, the devastating news:

Nothing says celebration more than picking up slippers, evidently. Foiled again in our attempts to get to the bottom of the single shoe Imponderable!

That’s the problem with single-shoe research: First hand evidence is always so elusive. That’s one reason why we’re always interested in hearing from perpetrators. Or would-be perps, anyway. We received a long e-mail from Ashley Odell of Manchester, Connecticut. She regaled us with stories about her family summer vacations, driving to points north in an old, beat-up Econoline van, complete with three bench rows in the back and precious few windows that would open. Ashley has six older siblings and they all piled into the Econoline along with the parental units and the maternal grandmother. And as kids on long drives tend to do, they would agitate the parents, until Dad, the designated driver, told Mom to mediate by infiltrating the back section. Theoretically, this settled the problem, but it also rewarded one of the random kids by allowing them the front passenger seat:

Ever since these trips in early childhood, Ashley has had her eyes peeled. She went on a long trip from Connecticut to Minnesota, and then all the way down to Fort Worth, Texas, and noted:

A cross-cultural study is needed. If your theory is correct, then left shoes should be found on the side of the road in England. But if folks stick their feet out of the left window in the United States, by the established laws of Newtonian Single Shoe Theory, wouldn’t most of these shoes end up on the left side of the road? This seems like a relatively easy thesis to prove. We still believe that more shoes are deliberately thrown out of windows than are “innocently” lost to sleeping, out-the-window leg-stickers.

Speaking of gross things in and out of cars, it’s been a few books since we’ve had a scary report about cockroaches in automobiles. In
How Does Aspirin Find a Headache?,
we answered why we don’t usually see cockroaches even in crumb-filled cars, and indicated that both cold and a lack of liquids drives the vermin to happier hunting grounds. Here’s a distasteful exception that proves the rule and confirms a stereotype or two. Take it away, Vinnie O’Connor from Oceanside, New York:

Other animals have a more ambiguous relationship with liquids. We discussed why cats don’t like to swim in the book of the same title. We argued that house cats were quite agile in the water, but shunned gratuitous swimming because their fastidiousness nature led them to figure a swim just wasn’t worth all the cleaning off afterward. In other words, they are lazy. Those were fighting words to David Ardnt, Jr. of Fort Hood, Texas: