Do Elephants Jump? (2 page)

Now we know how exterminators feel.

Almost twenty years ago, we took it as our mission to help eradicate annoying pests from our world. But despite our nine previous books, Imponderables still spring from dark corners like cockroaches in a crumb-filled kitchen.

Imponderables are the little mysteries of life that drive us nuts until we find the solution — mysteries that other reference books won’t tackle. Just as exterminators’ wallets are fattened by the indomitable spirit of vermin and the phobias of big humans about little creatures, so we are lucky to have found a career stamping out pests one at a time. We may snuff out one Imponderable, but for every mystery vanquished, it seems as if another appears. In 1986, we figure out why some pistachios are dyed red. In 2004, we discover why orange juice tastes so awful after you brush your teeth.

Since our first book, the biggest change at Imponderables Central is the increasing reliance on the Internet. We now receive many more Imponderables submissions by e-mail than snail mail, and of course the World Wide Web is available for research. An exterminator might utilize space-age chemicals but still has to get on his hands and knees to spray the crack under the floorboard. Likewise, we find that we can’t rely on the expertise of random Web Sites. We use the Web, but mostly as a place to find the same caliber of experts that we’ve always relied upon to answer even the most elusive Imponderable.

To celebrate our tenth Imponderables
^®
book, and because it’s been several years since the last volume, we’re devoting more space to answering your Imponderables (every single one of our Imponderables in this book came from a reader, and the first person to ask each of the published questions wins a free, autographed copy) and to your letters, even if most of them are taking us to task for perceived malpractice. And, responding to countless requests, we have included a master index to all ten Imponderables
^®
books and
Who Put the Butter in Butterfly?

Since the last book, there have been two developments we think you’d like to know about. One is that Malarky
^®
, a game based on the Imponderables
^®
books, is available across North America. And www.imponderables.com is now the cyberspace outpost of all things Imponderable. It includes news and information about what’s happening at Imponderables Central, a blog written by Dave Feldman, and absolutely no banners or pop-up ads.

One thing hasn’t changed since the first book,
Imponderables
. Your involvement is crucial to the fun. The last few pages of the book will let you know how to get in touch with us. But just remember: We vanquish Imponderability, not creepy six-legged things. Imponderables: Let’s get ready to rumble!

The classic western features a lone hero entering a new town and facing a villain who threatens the peacefulness of a dusty burg. The Lone Ranger, on the other hand, came with a rather important backup, Tonto. Leaving aside questions of political correctness or racism, calling the masked man the
Lone
Ranger is a little like calling Simon and Garfunkel a Paul Simon solo act.

Before we get to the “Lone” part of the equation, our hero actually was a ranger, in fact, a Texas Ranger.
The Lone Ranger
started as a radio show, first broadcast out of Detroit in 1933, created by George Trendle, and written by Fran Striker. The first episode established that circa 1850, the Lone Ranger was one of six Texas Rangers who were trying to tame the vicious Cavendish Gang. Unfortunately, the bad guys ambushed the Rangers, and all of the Lone Ranger’s comrades were killed. The Lone Ranger himself was left for dead. Among the vanquished was the Lone Ranger’s older brother, Dan.

So for a few moments, long enough to give him his name, the Lone Ranger really was by himself. He was the
lone
surviving Ranger, even if he happened to be unconscious at the time. Tonto stumbled upon the fallen hero and, while nursing him back to health, noticed that the Ranger was wearing a necklace that Tonto had given him as a child. Many moons before, the Lone Ranger (who in subsequent retellings of the story we learn was named John Reid) saved Tonto’s life! Tonto had bestowed the necklace on his blood brother as a gift.

When Reid regained his bearings, the two vowed to wreak revenge upon the Cavendish Gang and to continue “making the West a decent place to live.” Reid and Tonto dug six graves at the ambush site to make everyone believe that Reid had perished with the others, and to hide his identity, the Lone Ranger donned a black mask, made from the vest his brother was wearing at the massacre. Like Jimmy Olsen with Superman, Tonto was the only human privy to the Lone Ranger’s secret.

Not that the Lone Ranger didn’t solicit help from others. It isn’t easy being a Ranger, let alone a lone one, without a horse. As was his wont, Reid stumbled onto good luck. He and Tonto saved a brave stallion from being gored by a buffalo, and nursed him back to health (the first episode of
The Lone Ranger
featured almost as much medical aid as fighting). Although they released the horse when it regained its health, the stallion followed them and, of course, that horse was Silver, soon to be another faithful companion to L.R.

And would a lonely lone Ranger really have his own, personal munitions supplier? John Reid did. The Lone Ranger and Tonto met a man who the Cavendish Gang tried to frame for the Texas Ranger murders. Sure of his innocence, the Lone Ranger put him in the silver mine that he and his slain brother owned, and turned it into a “silver bullet” factory.

Eventually, during the run of the radio show, which lasted from 1933 to 1954, the duo vanquished the Cavendish Gang, but the Lone Ranger and Tonto knew when they found a good gig. They decided to keep the Lone Ranger’s true identity secret, to keep those silver bullets flowing, and best of all, to bounce into television in 1949 for a nine-year run on ABC and decades more in syndication.

The Lone Ranger was also featured in movie serials, feature movies, and comic books, and the hero’s origins mutated slightly or weren’t mentioned at all. But the radio show actually reran the premiere episode periodically, so listeners in the 1930s probably weren’t as baffled about why a law enforcer with a faithful companion, a full-time munitions supplier, and a horse was called “Lone.”

There’s no ceremony when proud parents beam as their warbler’s bill graduates into beakdom. In fact, there’s no difference at all between a bill and a beak. They are one and the same.

The relative size of birds’ bills varies enormously from species to species, and bills are much more instrumental to a bird than our proboscis, to which it is sometimes compared by the avian ignorant. The beak of a bird is a bony organ that surrounds the mouth and is essential to birds’ ability to eat food in the wild — depending upon the bird, the bill can serve as a chef’s knife, fork, food processor, or serving plate. For example, the hard, conical bill of a sparrow is designed to crush seeds, while hawks’ bills are hooked to facilitate tearing the flesh of their prey, and hummingbirds have long, thin bills to probe delicate flowers for nectar.

Sometimes scientists can be killjoys. For some reason, ornithologists prefer to use the term
bill.
Why anyone would prefer the bland
bill
to the cool
beak,
we can’t figure out, but a look at the scientific literature will confirm what Allison Wells, communications director of the prestigious Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology told us:

Indeed, veterinarians treat a serious disease called psittacine beak and feather disease. In the less scientific bird press, you’ll see references to “beaks,” especially when discussing birds with large bills, such as flamingos, pelicans, or parrots.

Just like we tend to apply “beak” to humans with large schnozzes, so do birds with large mandibles receive the more colorful appellation. But to say the least, confusion reigns. We remember from this old limerick by Dixon Lanier Merritt as starting with these words:

Look up “The Pelican” on the Internet and you’ll see the limerick with
bill
at least as often as
beak,
while the rest of the limerick is identical.

Call us grumpy, but we think laying out a hundred bucks to listen to a caterwauling tenor screech while chandeliers tumble, or watching a radical reinterpretation of
Romeo and Juliet
as a metaphor for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is plenty illegitimate. But we are etymologically incorrect; the use of the word
legit
dates back to the end of the nineteenth century, when it was used as a noun to describe stage actors who performed in dramatic plays. It soon became a term to describe just about any serious dramatic enterprise involving live actors.

And to this day, “legitimate” is used to describe actors who toil in vehicles that are considered superior in status to whatever alternatives are seen as less prestigious. As Bill Benedict of the Theatre Historical Society of America points out, one of the definitions of
legit
in
The Language of American Popular Entertainment
is:

Back in the late nineteenth century when the notion of “legit” was conceived, live public performances were more popular than they are today, when television, movies, the Internet, DVDs, and spectator sports provide so much competition for the stage. Even several decades into the twentieth century, other types of amusements, such as minstrel shows, vaudeville, burlesque (with and without strippers), magic shows, and musical revues often gathered bigger crowds than legitimate theater.

“Illegitimate” actors had a shady reputation, as most were itinerant barnstormers who swept in and out of small or medium-sized towns as third-rate carnivals do today. Their entertainments tended to be crude, with plenty of pantomime, caricature, low comedy, and vulgarity, so as to play to audiences of different educational levels, ethnicities, and even languages.

Cleverly, promoters of “legitimate” theater appealed to elite audiences, who could afford the relatively expensive tickets and understand the erudite language. Theater critics emerged well into the nineteenth century in the United States, trailing behind the British, who already featured theater reviewers in newspapers. The more affluent the base of the newspapers, the more critics would tend to separate the “mere” entertainments from the aesthetic peaks of serious theater.

These cultural cross currents are still in play today. Theater critics in New York bemoan the “dumbing down” of Broadway shows, Disney converting animated movies into theater pieces, and savvy producers casting “big name” television or movie stars in plays for their marquee value. And the stars are willing to take a drastic reduction pay in order to have the status of legitimate theater bestowed upon them; they appear on talk shows and proclaim, “My roots are in theater.” We’ve yet to see a leading man coo to an interviewer: “My roots are in sitcoms.”

Not everyone takes these distinctions between “legit” and “illegit” so seriously. When Blue Man Group, with its roots in avant-garde theater, brought its troupe to the Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas, Chris Wink, cofounder of the Blue Man Group, proclaimed: “Now that Vegas has expanded its cultural palette and embraced Broadway-style legitimate theater, it feels like a good time to introduce some illegitimate theater.”