Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, November 18, 1993 TAG: 9311170019
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Joel Achenbach
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
A: We called Werner "Colonel Klink" Klemperer for a quote, but all he said was: HOOO-gaaan!
According to "Early American Specs," by Dr. L.D. Bronson (1974) monocles were big in Central Europe from 1807 to 1910, but have been sighted even into the present day.
Before there were monocles, there were other similarly ludicrous devices of limited utility, such as one called a "quizzer." A quizzer was a reading glass held in front of the eye. You can imagine that 18th-century people liked to employ their quizzers with great drama, exclaiming "What the Dickens!" - except of course Dickens was not even born then.
"The American Encyclopedia and Dictionary of Ophthalmology" states that monocles have been prescribed in the past for people with one eye, or with a vision defect in only one eye. But mostly they're for show. Monocles apparently began as a prop in a stage play, Bronson reports, and were then adopted by aristocrats as "an effective indication of station."
Bronson writes, "When one considers the rarity of one defective eye when the mate is normal, it follows that the use of this device must be an affectation rather than purposeful."
Our own preference is to wear a monocle and an eye patch. Very intimidating.
Q: Why are there still pennies?
A: Whenever we drop a penny on the ground, there's an anguished moment of indecision. We wonder: Is it worth picking up? By "worth" we don't mean its value in commerce, but rather whether the failure to pick it up will be costly in terms of other people's perceptions. A penny is garbage, it's a slug at this point, but if you don't pick it up you'll be seen as a snob, an elitist, a monocle-wearer. Solution: Pretend we didn't notice we dropped it.
There have been movements in recent years to ban the penny. But the Rounding Act of 1989, which would have made merchants round off prices to the nearest nickel, never got anywhere (we want to say "never made it off the dime").
The public still likes pennies. A survey in 1988 showed that 63 percent of Americans wanted to keep them. It didn't say why. Americans seem to be conservative about coinage and currency. You remember the Susan B. Anthony dollar fiasco. Americans like change (jingle) and don't want their change to change.
Another argument against banning pennies is that it would cause inflation. You think merchants will round their prices down?
On other hand, making pennies is expensive. The Mint makes billions of them a year, at a cost of about six-tenths of a cent per penny. The Mint has to keep making them because people take them out of circulation, dumping them in jars and bowls.
One last thing: The zinc industry has hollered about every suggestion to do away with pennies, because the little Lincolns are 97.5 percent zinc. The American Zinc Association, by the way, tells us that it's a myth that swallowing a penny will cause instant death. "Zinc is actually a very benign metal. You actually have to have a certain amount of zinc a day to be healthy," says AZA spokesman John Lutley, though he could not tell us precisely how many pennies a day we should be swallowing.
Q: Why do people eat mushrooms even though they're a fungus?
A: You never feel a craving for fungi, have you ever noticed that? Mushrooms are not what you'd call a "mouth-watering" food. On what grounds do we eat these things? Shouldn't they be considered gross and unpalatable?
"We eat lots of fungi. We eat the yeast that we use to brew beer," points out Mark Wach, director of agricultural products for Penwest Foods in Englewood, Colo. He says there are as many types of fungi as there are types of plants (fungi aren't plants because they have no chlorophyll, and feed off decaying matter).
"They're as diverse as any plant or animal would be," says this fungus apologist. Look at plants, he says: "You wouldn't eat poison oak or ivy but you love lettuce."
Chefs say mushrooms are great at soaking up flavors from sauces and other foods. One reason they're thought of that way - as inert masses within recipes - is that the standard button mushrooms sold in stores are not fully developed. Most of the mushroom's flavor comes from the spores and the gills, but you rarely find 'shrooms that are old enough to have them. One reason is that spores can carry diseases that hamper a commercial crop. But we'd guess the main reason is that fussy Americans don't like the look of those gills.\ The Mailbag:
A.W.D. of Spanaway, Wash., writes, "After figuring that the total combination of numbers that you can obtain in a nine-slot configuration is 1,000,000,000, I wondered how can a Social Security number - each exclusive in its own right - be issued to each person living in the United States. The number of people living in the U.S., and also those deceased, has to be more than 1 billion, right?"
Dear A.W.: Although the Social Security program started in 1936, for years it didn't cover vast sectors of the work force. Farm laborers and domestic workers were not covered until 1951, self-employed farmers and ministers until 1955, lawyers and dentists until 1956 and doctors until 1965. So well into the middle of this century millions of Americans never got a Social Security number.
So far about 350 million numbers have been issued. The Social Security Administration tells us that we won't run out of numbers until the year 2100. Our strong suspicion is that numbers are not what the Social Security Administration is afraid they'll run out of. Washington Post Writers Group
by CNB