Do Penguins Have Knees? (3 page)
Read Do Penguins Have Knees? Online
Authors: David Feldman
You may think you’ve lived a happy life without knowing the answer to why you don’t feel a mosquito while it’s biting you. Or why the address labels on subscription magazines are usually placed upside-down. Or why the bags on oxygen masks in airplanes don’t inflate.
But you’re not really happy. Face it. In our everyday life, we’re confronted with thousands of mysteries that we cannot solve. So we repress our anxiety (could you imagine a life haunted by the recurring dread of not knowing what function our earlobes serve?). And as those of us who’ve seen Dr. Joyce Brothers on television know, repression isn’t good for you.
So our quest is to eradicate all of these nagging Imponderables. Luckily, we have the best possible collaborators—our readers.
Most of the Imponderables posed in this book were submitted by readers of our first four volumes. In our Frustables section, readers wrestle with the ten most frustrating Imponderables that we weren’t able to solve. And in the letters section, readers suggest how our previous efforts may have been ever so slightly less than perfect.
As a token of our appreciation for your help, we offer a free copy of our next book to the first person who sends in an Imponderable or the best solution to a Frustable we use, along with an acknowledgment.
The last page of the book tells you how you can join in our campaign to stamp out Imponderability. We can’t guarantee you lifelong happiness if you read
Do Penguins Have Knees?
, but we can assure you you’ll know why there are peanuts in plain M&Ms.
Why
Don’t You Feel or See a Mosquito Bite Until After It Begins to Itch?
We would like to think that the reason we don’t feel the mosquito biting us is that Mother Nature is merciful. If we were aware that the mosquito was in the process of sinking its mouth into our flesh, we might panic, especially because a simple mosquito bite takes a lot longer than we suspected.
A female mosquito doesn’t believe in a casual “slam bam, thank you, ma’am.” On the contrary, mosquitoes will usually rest on all six legs on human skin for at least a minute or so before starting to bite. Mosquitoes are so light and their biting technique so skillful that most humans cannot feel them, even though the insect may be resting on their skin for five minutes or more.
When the mosquito decides to finally make her move and press her lancets into a nice, juicy capillary, the insertion takes about a minute. She lubricates her mouthparts with her own saliva and proceeds to suck the blood for up to three minutes until her stomach is literally about to burst. She withdraws her lancets in a few seconds and flies off to deposit her eggs, assuring the world that the mosquito will not soon make the endangered species list.
A few sensitive souls feel a mosquito’s bite immediately. But most of us are aware of itching (or in some cases, pain) only after the mosquito is long gone not because of the bite or the loss of blood but because of the saliva left behind. The mosquito’s saliva acts not only as a lubricant in the biting process but as an anesthetic to the bitee. For most people, the saliva is a blessing, since it allows us to be oblivious to the fact that our blood is being sucked by a loathsome insect. Unfortunately, the saliva contains anticoagulant components that cause allergic reactions in many people. This allergic reaction, not the bite itself, is what causes the little lumps and itchy sensations that make us wonder why mosquitoes exist in this otherwise often wonderful world.
Submitted by Alesia Richards of Erie, Pennsylvania
.
Why
Doesn’t Milk in the Refrigerator Ever Taste As Cold As the Water or Soda in the Refrigerator?
Actually, milk
does
get as cold as water or soda. If you are having a particularly boring Saturday night, you might want to stick a thermometer into the liquids to prove this.
Milk at the same temperature as water or soda just doesn’t taste as cold to us because milk contains fat solids. We perceive solids as less cold than liquids. Taste experts refer to this phenomenon as “mouth feel.”
If the milk/water/soda test wasn’t exciting enough for you, run a test in your freezer compartment that will demonstrate the same principle. Put a pint of premium high-butterfat ice cream in the freezer along with a pint of low-fat or nonfat frozen yogurt. Consume them. We’ll bet you two to one that the yogurt will taste colder than the ice cream. For the sake of research, we recently performed this experiment with due rigor, and because we wanted to go out of our way to assure the accuracy of the experiment, we conducted the test on many different flavors of ice cream and yogurt. Oh, the sacrifices we make for our readers!
Submitted by Pat O’Conner of Forest Hills, New York
.
Why
Are Address Labels on Subscription Magazines Usually Placed Upside-Down?
Our usually reliable sources at the United States Postal Service struck out on this Imponderable, but we were rescued by our friends at Neodata Services. Neodata, the largest fulfillment house in the United States, which we profiled in
Why Do Dogs Have Wet Noses?
, is the company that processes all those subscription forms you send to Boulder, Colorado.
By luck, we rang up Neodata’s Biff Bilstein when he was in a meeting with sales executives Mark Earley and Rob Farson. The three share over seventy-five years of experience in the magazine business. “So,” we implored, “why are address labels placed upside-down?”