Why Do Pirates Love Parrots? (11 page)

M
ost bowlers are right-handers, and their tendency is to throw the ball with a natural hook, with the ball moving from right to left. Right-handers with hooks aim the ball just to the right of the headpin (the “one pin”) so it simultaneously hits the three-pin, too. If the ball hooks a little too much to the left, and the ball knocks the headpin straight on, a dreaded, impossible-to-convert split is often the fate.

But when the right-hander misses by a greater margin and the ball heads to the left of the one-pin, the bowler often lucks out with a strike, even though the target has been missed by a wider margin. Professional bowlers are sheepish when they’ve “achieved” a Brooklyn strike; if you want to irritate serious bowlers, have an opponent of theirs win a match by employing one. As one frustrated amateur admitted on an online bowling bulletin board:

How was Brooklyn chosen to designate this errant but lucky strike? Mort Luby, publisher of
Bowlers Journal International,
wrote
Imponderables:

Who would have enough of an “attitude” to make fun of Brooklyn in this way? Of course, it’s the New Yorkers who think they live on the right side of the town: Manhattanites. And if you need further evidence that Luby’s theory is correct, keep in mind that although the term “Brooklyn strike” also applies to left-handers who knock down ten pins by hitting the one-three pocket instead of the desired one-two, another term used to describe a lefty Brooklyn strike is a “Jersey strike,” traditionally New Yorkers’ other favorite location for barbs.

Submitted by Michelle Marsaglia of Salem, Oregon.

A
lthough these are two of the most frequently posed mysteries by readers, we’ve resisted answering them for a couple of reasons. When in doubt, we try not to use mysteries that can be answered only by other books. But since we can’t travel back in time, nor channel the long-deceased to answer this Imponderable, we are stuck with written sources.

Most of the books we have consulted leave us frustrated. There are literally scores of books about superstitions, and just about all of them address the fear of 13. Most of them contend that the fear of 13 stems from the Last Supper, where Judas was the thirteenth guest to sit at the table.

The other most common theory is that the superstition predates Christianity, and is based on an ancient Norse legend in which Baldur, the god of light, is killed by the evil Loki. In a story quite reminiscent of the Last Supper, twelve gods are dining in Valhalla when they are “crashed” by the evil Loki. Baldur is killed soon afterward, because of the plotting of Loki.

Most books about superstitions assume that Friday is particularly reviled because it was the day of the Crucifixion. In other variations, it is the day that Adam ate the apple.

But there are problems with all of these theories and we thought the arguments were too shaky to include in an
Imponderables
book. Then one day, while visiting one of our favorite bookstores—the Tattered Cover in Denver, Colorado—a book with the title of
13
caught our attention (and not just because it happened to sit next to
Do Elephants Jump?
—we would
never, ever
go to a bookstore just to check how a book of ours is selling). Written by Nathaniel Lachenmeyer,
13
is a fascinating cultural history of “the world’s most notorious superstition.” In the book, Lachenmeyer articulates our misgivings about prior explanations, and through meticulous research, offers informed opinions about the origins of triskaidekaphobia (the fear of 13).

Lachenmeyer swats away most of the conventional wisdom. Yes, there is a Norse legend of Baldur, but there were actually 13 gods, not twelve, when Loki appeared on the scene, so 14 should be the unlucky number. Yes, there were twelve “regular” seats for the gods at Valhalla, but there was a “high-seat” for the supreme Odin, and there is no mention of 13 (or fourteen, for that matter) in the legend itself. There isn’t even any evidence that this supposed ancient superstition predated Christianity. Lachenmeyer says that the first recorded source of the Baldur myth is in the
Prose Edda,
written in the fifteenth century, “two centuries
after
the conversion of Iceland to Christianity.”

And there are just as many holes in the Last Supper theory. Nowhere in the accounts of the betrayal of Christ is the number 13 mentioned, while twelve is mentioned several times. Lachenmeyer also argues that the twelve Apostles and Jesus had many meals together (so why weren’t the others unlucky?) and that it is

On the contrary, Lachenmeyer contends that 13 had positive connotations for Christians,

Lachenmeyer lists many examples of prominent Christian theologians, such as St. Augustine, invoking the number 13 positively.

Another problem with tracing the ancient roots of triskaidekaphobia is that there is no written record of a fear of 13 before the second half of the seventeenth century, in England, when the notion developed that it was unsafe if 13 people sat at a table (often expressed as the fear that one of the 13 would die within a year). Lachenmeyer attributes the fright to the Great Plague of 1665, and the genuine panic caused by London losing nearly 15 percent of its citizens to the epidemic.

The European fear of 13 sitting at a table crested in the nineteenth century, when triskaidekaphobia mutated into a general fear of 13, but it was slow to migrate to the United States, which had positive associations with the number 13, because of the original 13 states. The 13-gun salute was the norm at patriotic gatherings in the United States, eventually yielding to the 21-gun salute (the origins of which we discussed in
Why Do Clocks Run Clockwise?
), but only after Vermont was added to the Union as the fourteenth state.

Considering the separate superstitions about Friday and 13, it’s surprising that there is no recorded evidence of any special fear of Friday the thirteenth until the twentieth century. Lachenmeyer traces the fear of Friday in the United States to the New Testament and the Crucifixion, although he notes that Friday was also the traditional day for executions in the United States.

But what spawned the growth of the new fear? There is no smoking gun answer. Newspapers started taking note when Good Friday landed on the thirteenth in the early twentieth century, an indication that the superstition was gaining currency by the first decade of the last millennium.

But one huge event occurred in 1907. Thomas W. Lawson published a novel,
Friday, the Thirteenth.
As Lachenmeyer writes:

And Lawson’s success did not end with a print bestseller. In 1916, a feature length silent movie version of
Friday, the Thirteenth
was released, furthering the superstition’s grip. Sixty-four years later, Jason Voorhees carries on the tradition of trying to scare the dickens out of us with the first of the
Friday the Thirteenth
movies, even as the grip of the superstition withered.

So we buy the notion that a combination of the Last Supper, Good Friday, and Thomas Lawson is responsible for triskaidekaphobia, but it’s important to remember a point that Lachenmeyer makes in
13,
perhaps the main reason we were reluctant to tackle this Imponderable until we read his book. Most of the books about superstitions were cavalier about ascribing the fear of 13 to one particular cause, and discussed the superstition as if it had not been mutated by different times and cultures:

Exactly. You have to be methodical and analytical to untangle the messiness of irrational thinking.

Submitted by Mark Carroll of Nashville, Tennessee. Thanks also to Scott Comstock of Leavenworth, Kansas; Rose Marie Mielke of parts unknown; Patrick M. Premo of Allegany, New York; Pat Ryan of Churchville, New York; Destiny Montague of Peachtree, Georgia; Steve Brunton of Orlando, Florida; Wayne Goode of Madison, Alabama; Robert Bredt, via the Internet; and Lance Tock of Brooklyn Park, Minnesota.

I
n
Why Do Clocks Run Clockwise?
, we recalled the legend of Captain Hanson Gregory, who “invented” the doughnut—and the doughnut hole—when he impaled a solid fried cake on the spokes of the steering wheel of his ship. If Homer Simpson were a reader of ours, we know that his Imponderable would be: “What happened to that perfectly good doughnut hole that got punched out! And can I eat it?”

Bagels might not be as sweet as doughnuts, and reader Nora Corrigan may be no Homer Simpson, but as a bagel lover, she wonders why you can go into a Dunkin’ Donuts or Krispy Kreme store and buy doughnut holes, but bagel holes seem to be nowhere in sight. The answer lies in the different ways bagels and doughnuts are produced.

Doughnuts are cut from a continuous sheet of dough. Two rings—one that forms the outline and the other that creates the center holes—are cut into that sheet before the dough is fried. Bagels start as slightly irregular strings—a hot dog–like shape—and are wrapped around a mandrel, a metal bar that helps form the distinctive bagel shape. Although many bagels are still handmade, bagel-making machines have been used since the early twentieth century, and they merely automate the same method.

So if the bagel hole is not stamped out but surrounded by dough, does that mean bagel holes are difficult or impossible to produce? According to the American Institute of Baking’s “Dr. Dough” Tom Lehmann,

Who wants to be a millionaire?

Submitted by Nora Corrigan of Reston, Virginia.