Now I Know (6 page)

Red hair is genetic. Those with it have two recessive genes that cause a mutation of a gene called the “melanocortin 1 receptor,” or MC1R for short. The MC1R gene determines, in part, what type of melanin our bodies produce, and melanin, ultimately, gives us our hair, skin, and eye color. In the case of redheads, the MC1R mutation causes a lower production of eumelanin, the type of melanin that causes darker features, and an increased amount of pheomelanin, which, well, doesn’t. The MC1R mutation also probably leads to freckles and increased sensitivity to ultraviolet light.

It may also have something to do with one’s ability to tolerate pain.

Anecdotally, many stories tell of redheads disproportionately avoiding painful medical and dental procedures, and of doctors and dentists giving redheads more anesthesia than darker-haired people. In 2009, the
Journal of the American Dental Association
published a paper investigating whether redheads avoided the dentist disproportionately. Twice as many redheads—compared to people with black or brown hair—admitted doing so due to fear of pain and ineffective Novocain.

In 2005, a team of researchers from the University of Louisville took the investigation further, hoping to see if the fear had a basis in reason. The team exposed a test group to “thermal pain”—pain induced by excessive cold or heat—and published their findings in the medical journal
Anesthesiology
. They concluded that redheads were indeed more sensitive to such pain, and had a natural resistance to subcutaneous lidocaine, an anesthetic.

The
Anesthesiology
article wasn’t an outlier. In 2010, the
Scandinavian Journal of Pain
published a paper with similar findings; in that case, twenty redheads, all female, required more capsaicin—a topical anesthesia—in order to get the same effect as the twenty blonds/dark-haired women in the study. In general, the scientific community believes that people with the MC1R mutation that causes red hair require 20 percent more anesthesia than typical, in order to achieve the same effect. And because a lot of practitioners don’t realize this, redheads unfortunately experience more pain at the hands of dentists and doctors than they would otherwise. As one doctor told
The
New York Times
, the cure is simple: Redheads should tell their doctors about this little quirk of genetics.

North Korea is, in many ways, living in the Dark Ages. Things Westerners take for granted, such as on-demand electricity, are notably lacking. Private car ownership is almost entirely unheard of—as of 1990 there were only about a quarter of a million cars in the country as a whole, and most of them, by a large margin, were owned by the military. Only about 1,000 miles of paved roads exist, and the purchase of fuel is extremely restricted. So there are not a lot of cars on the roads—and even in places with relatively heavy traffic, the lack of infrastructure means no traffic lights.

But no traffic lights would mean more traffic accidents, and that would be a very bad thing. The solution? Young women trained to direct traffic and stationed atop umbrella-adorned platforms in the middle of intersections.

Each Pyongyong traffic controller wears a navy blue suit with a white pilot hat and sturdy black shoes, the last of which makes sense given that these women spend their working days on their feet, rotating and pivoting for hours at a time. The traffic controllers—all female—are trained to be robotic and purposeful with their movements. Each action is crisp and exact, and the traffic controller only rotates counter-clockwise, directing traffic with nothing more than a baton and a whistle. (You may have to see it to believe it, and you can find videos of these robotic ladies on YouTube.)

Think this is another example of the insanity that is North Korea? You’re probably right—but it gets stranger. These female traffic controllers have been around since the 1970s but the platforms that shield them from the sun or rain are relatively new. North Korea’s state-run media agency, the Korean Central News Agency, reported on the addition of these platforms in 1998. The report has the markings of the dictatorial nation’s obsession with propaganda over truth, noting that “[t]he traffic controllers are moved by the warm affection shown for them by General Secretary Kim Jong Il who saw to it that the platforms with umbrellas are being set up this time after raincoats, rain boots, sunglasses, gloves and cosmetics as well as seasonal uniforms were provided to them.”

Travel to South Korea and purchase a regular, vanilla, oscillating fan. Plug it in and let it cool the room you are in. An hour or two later, max, you will most likely have to turn it back on. Chances are, the fan will have turned off automatically. Why? Because, as recently as 2006, the Korea Consumer Protection Board (KCPB) believed that falling asleep with a fan running can lead to death.

On July 18, 2006, the KCPB issued a consumer advisory that asserted the following:

“Fan death,” as it is called, is a commonly believed myth in South Korea. It is so common, in fact, that some South Koreans who moved to the United States to attend college admitted to believing the myth until well after they arrived in the States. And the Korean Wikipedia entry for fan death does not call it a myth but rather “controversial.”

But “fan death,” of course, is patently false. A leading expert on hypothermia, Gordon Giesbrecht of the University of Manitoba, went to the Korean press to debunk this assertion: “It’s hard to imagine, because to die of hypothermia, [one’s body temperature] would have to get down to 28 [degrees Celsius], drop by 10 degrees overnight. We’ve got people lying in snow banks overnight here in Winnipeg and they survive … Someone is not going to die from hypothermia because their body temperature drops two or three degrees overnight; it would have to drop eight to 10 degrees.”

Yet the myth—which has unknown origins and no scientific basis—continues to be widely accepted in South Korea to this day.

For over a century, baseball games have taken an elongated pause after the away team’s half of the seventh inning, in a tradition long known as the “seventh inning stretch.” Many Major League Baseball teams have traditions specific to their stadiums for this break. The New York Mets sing “Lazy Mary” and throw T-shirts into the stands. The Cincinnati Reds sing “Twist and Shout” and the Toronto Blue Jays lead fans in stretching exercises. But one tradition spans all thirty ballparks: a sing-along of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.”

In the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth, popular American music was dominated by a group of composers and lyricists who worked primarily with sheet music publishers located on West 28th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues in Manhattan. That street, known as Tin Pan Alley, featured household names such as George and Ira Gershwin as well as Irving Berlin, and produced “God Bless America,” “Sweet Georgia Brown,” and other songs that have withstood the test of time. “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” was one of them, written in 1908 by two men named Jack Norworth and Albert Von Tilzer. The song they penned told of a young woman named Katie Casey who, as we learn in the first stanza, “was baseball mad” and attended every game she could afford. Her love of the game was so deep that “on a Saturday her young beau // called to see if she’d like go // to see a show, but Miss Kate said ‘No,’ ” because she wanted to go to a ballgame instead. The chorus is Katie Casey’s request that her gentleman caller take her to see a baseball game.

But Misters Norworth and Von Tilzer didn’t share Miss Kate’s love of the game. Although Katie Casey never missed a game, Norworth and Von Tilzer missed them all. Prior to writing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” neither of them had ever attended a baseball game.

Norworth, the lyricist, was (clearly) not inspired by the crowd nor the peanuts and Cracker Jacks. While he was riding the New York City subway one day, a sign reading “Baseball Today—Polo Grounds” caught his eye, and inspiration took hold. Von Tilzer set it to music, and a few decades later—no one is certain how, or when—the song became the in-game staple. Yet the pair weren’t fans of the game to which they gave such a gift. Von Tilzer wouldn’t attend his first Major League game until the 1920s and Norworth attended his first one in 1940.

Whether either of the pair was a fan of peanuts and/or Cracker Jacks is, to this day, unknown.

Peanuts
, the iconic comic strip, debuted on October 2, 1950. In the first strip—four frames—Charlie Brown walks past two other children, Shermy and Patty (the latter being a character distinct from Peppermint Patty, who didn’t join the cast until the mid 1960s), as the two gossip behind his back. A few days later, the strip’s creator, Charles Schulz, introduced Snoopy to the world, and over the next decade, Lucy, Linus, Schroeder, and many others joined the cast of characters. The vast majority of them were well liked for the nearly fifty-year run of the strip.

The exception? Charlotte Braun, who debuted on November 30, 1954, and was intended to be the female counterpart to Charlie Brown. (This becomes obviously true if you say both characters’ names aloud.) Before the next spring, Braun made her final appearance in
Peanuts
. In one sense, she was killed by a woman named Elizabeth Swain.

Swain wasn’t a character in
Peanuts
, though. She was a fan—one, who, like many other
Peanuts
fans, did not take well to Braun. The character was abrasive, loud, and didn’t have many friends in the fan community. As Henry L. Katz, a curator of popular graphic art at the Library of Congress would tell
ABC News
, the character was “a little too serious” and “didn’t have the warmth or the humor of the other characters.” In short, nobody liked Charlotte Braun.

Fans wrote letters to Schulz, objecting to the inclusion of Braun, and in one case Schulz wrote back. Elizabeth Swain—then in her early twenties—received a letter from the noted cartoonist dated January 5, 1955. Schulz wrote:

At the bottom, Schulz doodled a picture of Charlotte Braun, grimacing, with an axe buried in her head.

Swain, who would go on to become a research librarian, passed away in 2000, a few months after Schulz. She donated the letter to the Library of Congress (which, coincidentally, she worked for early in her career).

As for Charlotte Braun, she didn’t “die” on that day in January. She lasted a few more weeks. She appeared for the last time in the
Peanuts
strip on February 1, 1955, and Lucy inherited her brash, loud-voiced style.