Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, March 19, 1992 TAG: 9203190052
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: EXTRA1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Joel Achenbach
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
A: You know, the one from Liquid-Plumr and Drano commercials. The one with the hair and grease and crud and scuzz slowly accreting in a thick blob of putrescence. What's it for? Isn't there a more sensible design?
We started our research by simply asking folks around WHY THINGS ARE JOEL ACHENBACH the office. Here's what they said:
"It's there to catch hair and stuff."
"It collects dropped forks, knucklebones, whatever."
"It has to do with getting the hair balls to move out faster."
Wrong-o-rama! We got the real answer from an actual plumber, Mike Vito of Washington.
"It's a trap to keep sewer gas from coming back up into the atmosphere."
The U-shaped portion of the pipe is literally called a trap. It has water in it. The sewer gas, which isn't under pressure, can't penetrate that water barrier. Toilets have built-in traps, and showers and tubs often have them in the wall. The down side of the traps is that, yes, they trap crud. It makes you wonder: Are these traps actually a conspiracy of the Drano lobby and the Plumbing Industrial Complex?
"If you did away with the trap and put up with the smell for a while, I think you'd rather have the stoppages," Vito asserted.
One other thought: Do the water traps keep rats from crawling up out of the sewer?
No. Rats can swim. But you shouldn't worry. Because rats don't live in sewers, as a rule. We got this from Richard Kramer, spokesman for the National Pest Control Association in Dunn Loring, Va. He said he's never heard of a sewer rat turning into a toilet rat or sink rat or bathtub rat. Rats might live in storm sewers, but those aren't linked to your plumbing.
\ Q: Why is the Super Bowl usually a lousy game?
A: Of the 26 Super Bowls, only six have been decided by less than a touchdown. You could count the really great games on one hand. Why is the Super Bowl so often a Super Bore? Some possible answers:
1. The Super Bowl is not really much different from most football games; we merely want it to be better because of all the hype. "How many good football games are there during the course of a season?" asks Seymour Siwoff, president of the Elias Sports Bureau.
The problem is, a back-of-the-envelope calculation shows the average margin of victory in the Super Bowl, since it started in 1967, has been nearly 16 points. Just for a rough comparison, we looked at the first two weeks of the 1991 regular season. Of 28 games, 11 were decided by less than a touchdown and the average victory margin was 8 points.
2. Choking. "I think the Super Bowl represents the NFL's choking price," theorizes Jerry Magee, longtime sportswriter for the San Diego Union-Tribune. "When teams get behind in the Super Bowl they tend to panic. We saw that in the game between the Redskins and the Bills [won by Washington 37-24]. The Bills clearly panicked."
3. The bell curve of talent. It's lonely out on the margin. The list of great teams in any year is usually only one or two names long, and it's unusual for two superior teams to arise in separate conferences and make it to a Super Bowl showdown. Instead, you usually have a clear favorite, a dominating team. And guess what: It wins. Upsets, Joe Namath and the Jets notwithstanding, have been a Super Bowl rarity.
4. Chance. Numbers distribute themselves in quirky patterns that contain no larger significance. The next 26 Super Bowls may be unusually close. And if not, the commercials are still awesome. Washington Post Writers Group
by CNB