Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, April 1, 1993 TAG: 9303310190
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Joel Achenbach
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
THE QUEEN BECAME A LIBERATED WOMAN
Q: Why does the Queen in the game of chess have so much power, while the King can only stumble around one square at a time?A: In chess the King is a wimp. He is always cringing and trembling and whimpering on the sidelines, saying, "Oh dear!" and "Get away from me, you dreadful Rook!"
The Queen, meanwhile, is racing around the board, lopping off heads, gnawing on noses, sinking her arms elbow deep in human entrails, chugging beers, belching - you know, doing GUY STUFF.
Chess is a medieval game - it goes back at least to the 7th century - and you'd think it would be the Queen who would be pampered and protected and sequestered in the corner.
Here's the deal: For a long time the Queen didn't even exist. In India, where the game probably was invented, the piece next to the King was a Minister. He had little power - he could only move one square at a time, and only diagonally.
The game evolved from century to century and from country to country. The Arabs called the Minister a "wise man." When the game reached Europe the wise man became the Queen, but she still had limited movement.
Indeed, there was something a bit puritanical - possibly sexist, dare we say - in the description of the Queen's powers in the early European rules, as reported by H.J.R. Murray in "A History of Chess": "The Queen goes one square aslant: She is to guard the King, is not to leave him, is to cover him from checks and mates when these are said to him, and to go farther afield and help him win when the game is well opened."
Obviously the Queen can leave the King's side but "is not to" do so. Is this strategy or social instruction?
The problem with the medieval game was that it was slow. To speed up the game, the powers of the Queen and the Bishop (an elephant in the India version) were expanded. Another rule change allowed a Pawn to turn into a Queen if it reached the other side of the board, but that caused a bit of a stir, because, as Murray reports, "by it becoming a Queen when the original Queen was still upon the board, the moral sense of some players was outraged."
Bigamy, transvestism, gays in the military, it's all right there. Shocking!
Q: Why is there an asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter rather than a planet?
A: Speaking of belts, why doesn't anyone worry about the Van Allen Radiation Belts anymore? During the 1960s every kid knew that if you flew up into the Van Allen Radiation Belts you'd either die screaming or undergo some kind of Fantastic Four-like experience and return home with the ability to turn your body into rubber and slip under locked doors and so forth. Space used to be more exciting.
Now then, we all know that the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter is made up of the remains of a destroyed planet. Like many things we all know, this is wrong. In fact, planets are made up of the remains of asteroid belts, if you will. That's how you make a planet: Get a lot of rocks (asteroids) and dust and comets and space junk and let it glob together and fuse and coalesce until you eventually have a large roundish object.
The reason this didn't happen in that large pocket of space between Mars and Jupiter is that Jupiter is too big. Jupiter is a hog. Jupiter's gravity attracted most of the rocks and dust that would otherwise have been available for planet-building in the area where the asteroid belt is now.
Which brings up the essential fact: There aren't that many asteroids. Put them all together and you'd have the equivalent of about 3 percent of the mass of the Earth's moon, according to Steven Ostro, a senior research scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. So you see, the asteroid belt doesn't add up to a hill of beans. Well, maybe one or two hills of beans.
Q: Why do cows have four stomachs? Why do they "chew the cud"?
A: We've been ruminating on this question for years. The whole concept of cud-chewing seems so gross, so backwards, it's hard to believe cows still do that.
The first thing we learned is that cows don't actually have four stomachs. They have just one, but it has four compartments. We will mention that these compartments are called the rumen, the reticulum, the omasum and the abomasum, because this will make our column seem classier.
What happens is, the cow swallows a bunch of grass without even chewing it, and it goes into the rumen, which is like a 50-gallon fermentation tank, full of microbes that can break down and soften the grass. Later the cow will hawk up a bolus of "cud" and chew it, breaking it down further.
Here's why such an unsavory process evolved: Grazing is a high-profile activity. Dangerous. You have to stand out in the open, in full view of predators. So cows and other ruminants developed the low-profile method of digestion. You can scarf down a full tank of grass in half an hour and then lie down in the shade, or among the underbrush, for a leisurely mastication of the aforesaid cud. Vile, but safe.
Washington Post Writers Group
Joel Achenbach writes for the Style section of The Washington Post. Richard Thompson, a regular contributor to the Washington Post, has illustrated "Why Things Are" since 1990.