Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, November 10, 1994                   TAG: 9412070002
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: JOEL ACHENBACH
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

BATS AREN'T AS STUPID AS THEY LOOK

A: Bats are odd. They fly in crazy, jittery patterns. You might say they act ``batty.'' They are rather unprepossessing. Ugly even. They have beady eyes, pointy ears, shrieky voices. Their wings are basically some kind of mutant fingers. They navigate by sound. And finally they have this creepy habit of sleeping upside down. Hardly any other creature on the planet does that, other than Bob Dole.

There are several major reasons they sleep this way:

1. It's easier to fly. Seriously, the bats use a gravity boost to take off. Some species of bat can't get airborne from a flat surface. By hanging upside down, they need merely let go, fall, pick up speed, start flapping, and become aerodynamic before they go splat on the floor of the cave.

2. If you lived in a cave you wouldn't want to sleep on the floor, either. There are predators in caves. Hang from the ceiling, no one messes with you.

3. Bats are weak. They have few muscles. This is because one of their main evolutionary gimmicks is flying, and that requires a special kind of physique, a flimsy skin-and-bones sort of arrangement. They can't afford to lug around a lot of muscles that serve only to help them roost sitting right-side-up.

Now, if you're like us, you're sure to be wondering how bats poopicate when they sleep upside down. This is precisely the type of icky subject that demands a phone call to the Smithsonian Institution. We reached Smithsonian zoologist Don Wilson, who studies bats, and he said the midnight bathroom run for bats is a bit problematic.

``It is a slight inconvenience,'' he said. But he said bats can tilt their bodies enough to poop.

``It doesn't ever really get on them. They get themselves out, bent away from it, so that it clears their body,'' Wilson says.

Another good reason not to sleep on the floor.

Q: Why didn't the public realize that FDR was confined to a wheelchair?

A: There was a time when the press was extremely reluctant to reveal anything about a president that might be embarrassing. This practice has been modified somewhat. Today the press is extremely reluctant to reveal anything about a president that might not be embarrassing.

(Amazingly, few Americans know that Bill Clinton won the Nobel Prize in chemistry.)

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was struck by the polio virus in 1921. His case was severe. The muscles in his legs were almost completely denervated. Roosevelt spent years trying to rehabilitate his body. He wore metal braces that could lock at the knee, and was thus able to stand. With crutches or canes he could even ``walk'' a short distance.

``What he actually learned to do was to simulate the walking movements; but he never could use his legs for walking,'' wrote Rudolph Marx in the 1960 book ``The Health of the Presidents.''

The public knew he had polio, but people believed he had conquered it. Roosevelt told the public he was a ``recovered cripple'' and that he was ``a bit lame,'' says Hugh Gallagher, author of ``FDR's Splendid Deception.''

Roosevelt wasn't just covering up an infirmity; he was a proud man. He simply did not acknowledge his own condition, perhaps not even to himself. Once, a woman at a banquet sitting next to the president said her own husband was also a victim of polio. Roosevelt turned away and never spoke to her again.

People knew him through his voice on the radio. The press corps loved him and never photographed or filmed him in a wheelchair. Everyone knew that any reference to FDR's condition would mean no more access.

Verne Newton, director of the FDR Presidential Library in Hyde Park, N.Y., says that at the 1936 Democratic convention, the president was attempting to walk from the podium when he fell grotesquely, flat on his face. The White House press photographers circled the president and shielded him from the other photographers at the convention.

FDR tooled around the White House in a kitchen chair mounted on wheels. It had no armrests but it did have an ash tray. When a magazine reporter asked FDR if he was confined to a wheelchair, FDR said ``As a matter of fact, I don't use a wheelchair at all, except a little chair on wheels to get about my room while dressing.'' (This was the prototype of the ``I didn't inhale'' answer.)

You'd think that the public would at least have had some inkling that the president couldn't walk. Surely rumors would have spread. But perhaps the desire for a powerful, confident, optimistic leader during the Depression and World War II was greater than any rumor. Roosevelt's image was manipulated from both directions. The people needed a vigorous, hale president; Roosevelt played the part.

Washington Post Writers Group