The Wise Book of Whys (20 page)

Why The Toilet is Called a “John”

The term is thought to derive from Sir John Harrington or, at the least, to have been popularized due to Harrington. (There are a few references of the toilet being called "Cousin John", as well as many references to it being called "Jake" and other such generic names, before Harrington was born; but it is generally agreed that why we now call it "John" is because of Harrington and not from the old "Cousin John").

Sir John Harrington lived in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Harrington was one of the 102 god-children of Queen Elizabeth I, known as the "Saucy Godson," for his proclivity to write somewhat risqué poetry and other such things, which often got him banished from England only to be allowed to return again sometime later.

Along with writing several notable works, Harrington also devised one of Britain's first flushing toilets, which he called the "Ajax
.” This name derived from the term "Jakes," which was a slang term for what we now call a toilet.

Shortly thereafter, Harrington wrote one of his more famous and popular works titled
,
A New Discourse upon a Stale Subject: The Metamorphosis of Ajax
. This, on the surface, was about his new invention, but more to the point was a political allegory on the "stercus" (excrement) that was poisoning the state.

The book
got him banished from the court for a time due to its allusions to the Earl of Leicester. However, the actual flushing toilet device itself was real and was installed in his home, and around 1596 one was made for the queen. The device worked by pulling a cord that would allow water to rush in from the "water closet," which would flush away the waste.

Although Harrington wasn't by any means the first to invent a flushing toilet (there are references to flushing toilets going all the way back to around 2600 BC), his invention was an innovation in Britain at the time and it was commonly thought there that he was the inventor of the flushing toilet, which is why even today it is sometimes called a "John
."

Why “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” is Sung During the Seventh Inning Stretch of Major League Baseball Games

You might be surprised to learn that this staple of Major League Baseball games is actually something of a modern practice, first starting as a regular part of the seventh inning stretch with the White Sox  in the late 1970s, thanks to Hall of Fame broadcaster Harry Carabina, better known as Harry Caray.

Before this, the song had occasionally been sung by fans at various baseball games (both amateur and in the Major Leagues), but never as a regular thing nor at any designated time. The first known instance of this was at a Los Angeles high school game in 1934
. It was also played before one of the games in the 1934 World Series when Pepper Martin and the St. Louis Cardinals Band played it.

Harry Caray started
singing the song during the seventh inning stretch in 1971, with fans within earshot of his booth occasionally joining in.

There are conflicting accounts from those involved (including a story that changed over time from then owner, Bill Veeck) a
s to how this event transitioned to a White Sox tradition. In one account, after Caray refused to sing over the stadium PA system, Veeck tricked Caray by switching on Caray’s microphone while he was singing. Probably, the more likely tale is another first-hand account that it was all planned out ahead of time. But that’s not nearly as entertaining, so one can see why the colorful Bill Veeck might embellish the story a little.

Whatever the case, in 1976, Caray started sing
ing the song over the stadium PA system and it became a local tradition.

When Caray switched to calling games for the Cubs in 1982, he brought this tradition with him
. Thanks to the fact that WGN broadcasted the Cubs games nationally, the masses quickly learned of Harry Caray’s seventh inning tradition. Shortly thereafter, variations on this tradition were adopted at other stadiums, with the song in question varying from team to team. In the end, all teams went ahead and went with
Take Me Out to the Ballgame
.

Despite the fact that singing
Take Me Out to the Ballgame
during the seventh inning stretch is a modern practice, the song itself, about a girl named Katie Case who wants her boyfriend to take her to a baseball game, has been around since 1908 when it was written by famed song writer Jack Norworth (who wrote over 2,500 songs in his lifetime, including a couple dozen that sold more than a million copies each). The music was composed by Albert Von Tilzer.

Funny enough, both of these gentlemen had never actually been to a professional baseball game when they created the song
. Norworth claimed the first Major League Baseball game he ever went to wasn’t until June 27, 1940, a Dodgers / Cubs game.

So what inspired this non-baseball fan to write a baseball song? While riding a train to Manhattan, Norworth said he saw a sign that said “Baseball Today – Polo Grounds” and simply decided to write a song about going to a baseball game, so
he scribbled it down during his ride.

Once the song was complete, Norworth’s wife, singer-actress Nora Bayes, was the first to sing it publicly
. It quickly became a hit at various vaudeville acts and then beyond, becoming one of the most popular songs of 1908.

Why Milk is White

Milk consists of about 87% water and 13% solids, such as fat and various proteins. Chief among these proteins is something called casein, four types of which make up about 80% of the proteins in milk. The casein protein molecules are typically suspended somewhat uniformly throughout the milk and are spherical, about a micrometer across. The reason they are somewhat uniformly suspended in the liquid is because kappa-casein molecules have a negative electrical charge, so they repel each other.

White objects in nature appear such when there is some level of light diffusion going on and no part of the visible spectrum gets reflected off the object any more than any other part of that area of the light spectrum
. So as you might guess, these casein proteins and some of the fats in the milk scatter and deflect light somewhat uniformly throughout the visual spectrum. This results in milk being fairly opaque and appearing white to our eyes. Without the fats though, casein itself tends to scatter the blue wavelength slightly more than red. So with something such as fat free skimmed milk, you'll sometimes see a very slight blue-ish tinge to the otherwise white milk because of this.

Milk also contains riboflavin, which can give the milk a slightly green-ish tinge, if the concentration is large enough, such as can also be seen sometimes in certain types of skimmed milk or whey products (the riboflavin is in the whey portion of the milk).

Another hue you'll occasionally see in milk is a slight yellow color. When you see this, it is due to small amounts of carotene that are present in the milk. You will see this particularly in milk from Guernsey and Jersey cattle.

Why Lobsters Turn Red When Cooked

Typically, the exoskeleton of most crustaceans has a blue-green to grayish color, and sometimes they appear a brown or olive green, with just a hint of red (with a few exceptions like the blue and yellow lobsters and crabs). The exoskeletons of such creatures are made up of several pigments, one of which is a carotenoid called astaxanthin, that provide its reddish coloring (astaxanthin is the same carotene that gives salmon its color).

At normal temperatures and when alive (in other words, when we're not dumping them in boiling water or grilling the poor guys), the astaxanthin pigments are hidden because they are covered with other protein chains that give their shells the bluish-gray or brownish-green color we see.

Exposure to heat destroys this protein coating, while the carotenoid pigment, astaxanthin still remains stable. So when you cook a crab or lobster or its other tasty crustacean friends, the heat breaks down all the pigments except for astaxanthin, thus, causing the bright red color we see in cooked lobsters, crabs, and crayfish or the reddish-orange color of cooked shrimp.

Now you might be wondering, "What about the very rare, 1 in 2 million blue lobster? Does it turn red
when cooked?" YES! Even the more rare 1 in 30 million yellow lobster turns red. Only the albino crab and lobster do not turn red when cooked, for the obvious reason that they have no pigmentation and therefore, remain the same color even when cooked: white.

Why Your Stomach Growls When You’re Hungry

Generally speaking “stomach growling”, or as the Greeks named it and doctors call it today "borborygmi" (which is an onomatopoeia), is the noise created during rhythmic muscle contractions in your stomach and intestines.

Your digestive system is basically one big long tube that goes from your mouth to your butt, with a lot of interesting biologi
cal machinery in-between. The body gets food through this long tube via waves of muscle contractions, called "peristalsis," that run a few inches at a time down your digestive tract. These waves of muscle contractions also serve to mix and churn foods, liquids, and digestive juices together. The resulting cocktail is called "chime."

These waves of contractions are really not too dissimilar t
o how your heart-beat works in that they create fluctuation of electrical potential in the smooth muscle cells, which causes the muscle to contract in a rhythmic fashion in this case, called the "Basic Electrical Rhythm" or BER.

This rhythm is about three
times per minute in the stomach, and twelve times per minute in the small intestines. The sound you hear when your stomach and intestines make noise is the result of these muscular contractions mixing and moving the chyme along, as well as pushing any resultant air through your system.

So why does your stomach seem to growl more when you are hungry
? When your stomach and intestines are empty, it triggers a reflexive generation of waves along your stomach and intestine muscles that trigger contractions, even though there isn't really much of anything in your stomach that needs moved along. These are meant to clear out all of your stomach contents, including the mucus, any remaining food, bacteria, etc. It's your body’s way of doing a little house cleaning, making sure no food or other matter is accumulating anywhere along your stomach or intestines. It's typically this that you hear when you're hungry.

You might be asking yourself, "Well if my stomach is doing these contractions even when I'm full, moving food along, why don't I hear them all the time?"  To answer that, think of the stomach as hot water bottle
. When it is full and you slosh the contents around, there is little to no noise, depending on how full the bottle is. The less you have in it, the more noise the sloshing makes. This is pretty much exactly what is going on with the stomach, only the muscles lining the walls of your stomach and intestines are doing the sloshing as they push the contents of your stomach and intestines towards your derriere.

So how does one avoid stomach growling when, say, you are in a quiet classroom taking a test in school or a quiet open office space
? The first trick is, when you feel a growl coming on, to take something like a pencil and quite literally push it hard into your stomach area around the point you feel the contraction starting (eraser end first of course). If you push it hard enough, it will literally compress a part of your stomach, giving it much less space to slosh or even stopping it from being able to slosh at all temporarily.

The second trick is
to inhale as much as possible, filling your lungs to their max as soon as you feel a stomach growl coming on. Now hold your breath until you feel the growl sensation pass. This effectively does the same thing as the previous method, but it works from the inside with your expanded lungs pushing down on your stomach and compressing it so that it can't slosh things about as much.