Apple # 63: Spyware II and Penguins

SPYWARE II

Days later, I look back at the previous entry and think, "Oh, innocent fool." I was not, in fact, a day away from recovery. It turned out, my computer had so much spyware on it -- spyware that was not detected by any of the three programs I ran, including one I purchased -- that every time I got online, it continued to download more spyware and more adware like mad. It was as if my computer was shouting, "Hey you guys! Over here! This patsy's open!" One of the tech support guys at my internet service provider told me that every time I logged on for the past few days, enormous amounts data were being sent to my computer, more even than my computer knew how to handle.

I was told it would take at least $100 for professionals to "clean" away the spyware. My PC was old, fashioned for me by a friend back in 1999. I had already replaced the hard drive once, in 2001. Then the start button fell apart so that I was essentially hot-wiring it every time I started it. It had USB ports but no drivers. Etc. etc. So I purchased a new computer.

I come to you now from a brand, spanking new HP system. I am still paranoid about downloading bad stuff, so I have three anti-spyware programs running. I plan to "sweep" my system with all of them after I log off. Based on my experience with the nastiness, I highly suggest that you do the same. Spyware is pernicious. It's ineradicable. It's the kudzu of the Internet.

PENGUINS

I like penguins. Here are a few facts about them.


Photo from Guillaume Dargaud's Penguins FAQ blog

• here are many species of penguins. Some of the better-known ones include:
• Emperor
• King
• Adelie
• Rockhopper
• Gentoo
• Macaroni
• Fairy
• Galapagos

• On average, penguins swim at about 7 miles per hour, though some swim as slowly as 2 mph.

• It is most efficient for penguins to swim just below the surface. However, they have to come up for air. Most species compromise by "porpoising," leaping up out of the water and diving back down in a rhythmic fashion. Thus they can breathe without interrupting their forward motion.

• Emperor penguins lean back on their heels, essentially, to give their feet a break from standing on the cold ice.

• Their overlapping feathers provide waterproofing and trap air to provide about 80% of the thermal insulation that penguins need to survive. They also have a thick layer of fat under the skin.

• When penguins hold their flippers away from their bodies, they are exposing more body surface to the air and are thus cooling themselves off.

• Penguins, like many seabirds, excrete salt through glands around their bill. This is essentially how they sweat, and it is also how they are able to drink seawater with no ill effects.

• Penguins eat krill (something like shrimp), squid, and various fishes. Adelie penguins eat about 3.5 pounds of krill and small fish each day.

• Penguins have spiny tongues, which help them to grip the slippery fish they have caught in their bills.

• Penguins fast in several circumstances. They fast during breeding season, and some fast through the entire courtship and mating process as well. Penguins also fast while molting, or shedding their feathers. Because their feathers are often patchy during molting, they don't have the protection they need to go into the water, so they wait to feed until their feathers have grown back. Depending on the circumstances and species, an adult penguin may fast for as long as 120 days.

Sources
SeaWorld animal information database, chapter on Penguins
You can also hear a penguin call at Guillaume Darguad's blog

Apple #62: Spyware

SORRY, FOLKS

For the past few days, I've been battling a nasty case of spyware. I downloaded something that I thought would allow me to look at a map, but lo and behold, it was spyware, complete with a few viruses as well. It started installing links on my desktop, making everything run like molasses, it corrupted my Internet Explorer as well as my Firefox, it screwed up my internet connection, and generally made a huge mess. I've been trying to get it off my computer for three days now, and though not everything has been eradicated yet, I expect to be in the clear by the end of the day tomorrow.

These are the tools I used to take care of these problems. If you don't have these or something like them on your system, I highly recommend that you install these on your hard drive as soon as possible:

• Norton Anti-Virus
• Norton WinDoctor -- usually part of the Anti-Virus package. Helps rebuild problems with anything in Windows.
• Spybot -- freeware, gets rid of spyware that is probably running in secret on your hard drive even now, available here
• Ad-Aware -- ditto, gets stuff that Spybot misses and vice versa, available at www.majorgeeks.com

Two ways to tell whether you've got spyware:

1. Your system is running super-slow, especially when you're online
2. You get more pop-ups than usual.

The best way to find out for sure is through your Task Manager:

1. Type control+alt+delete to bring up the Task Manager. Click on the Processes tab. This shows all the "background" programs that are keeping your computer running.
2. Some programs, like svchost.exe, are the steady essential things. Some, like WinMgmt.exe or explorer.exe, are pretty obvious what they're for.
3. If anything shows up that you can't figure out what it does, log on (if you can), and type in the filename in Google. You'll see pretty quickly if the program is spyware.
4. If it is spyware, right click on the filename in Task Manager. Choose End Process Tree. This will make the spyware program stop running, and it will also turn off any associated functions that are part of its annoying behavior. Then you will be free to fix the problem without having to fight off endless pop-ups.

Several states as well as the US Congress and also the UK have passed or are in the process of passing laws that fine companies severely for sending out spyware. The fines are enormous -- in some cases, in the millions. I now understand why these huge fines are called for. Because it took me three days to deal with this problem! And it's not advertising, it's a crime against sanity!

The Apple Lady will have regained her composure in a day or two.

Apple #61: Cumberland Gap

CUMBERLAND GAP

During the trip I mentioned in the previous entry, we passed signs for the Cumberland Gap. There was some debate among us in the car about where this is, exactly, and what mountain range it cuts through.



(map from Cumberland Gap Wedding Chapel)

The Cumberland Gap indicated with the red star is actually a gap between mountains (a map showing the Gap's gap-itude is available here). As you can see, the Gap is in Tennessee, right near the northern border with Virginia and the northeast border with Kentucky.

At the border of Tennessee, the highway US25E becomes a tunnel that drives through the mountain pass.

• The Gap is a natural opening, carved out by wind, in the Appalachian Mountains.
• Large animals first used the Gap on their migrations westward, Native Americans followed the path that game had made, and settlers also used the Gap on their own journeys to the west.
• The Gap's heyday in the westward migration was between 1775 and 1810, when an estimated 200,000 to 300,00 people passed through it.

Due to the enormity of technical difficulties I am currently experiencing, which has made composing this brief entry the work of about four hours, I'm going to stop here for now. More later when I get this crap fixed.

Sources
Virginia Places, Dr. Thomas Walker
Cumberland Gap National Park

Apple #60: Kudzu

KUDZU

I just got back from a trip which involved driving through Kentucky. During this drive, I saw entire hillsides covered with a grayish mat of stuff. There was nothing living on these hills, just the gray, almost ashlike junk. Somebody else in the car said, "That's kudzu. It's killing everything in the South."

And then I saw that the gray stuff was vines, dead maybe from the winter, tangled and matted over everything, reaching up into trees until the trees had been choked to death, crawling along telephone wires until the wires were weighed down to the ground, just completely smothering everything. It looked similar to pictures I've seen of the devastation after a volcano: everything covered and destroyed by thick gray stuff.

• Kudzu is a perennial vine in the pea family.
• In the right climatic conditions (like that of the Southern US), it can grow as much as 20 meters in a season, or 30 centimeters per day.
• It is native to Japan and China. It was first introduced to the US in 1876 at a plant exhibition in Philadelphia. It was shown again at an exposition in New Orleans in 1883, after which people started planting it to provide additional shade for their porches or for decoration on trellises.
• In the early 20th century, people started using it for things beyond decoration, and here it started to get out of hand because the stuff took root in the ground. Mainly, people were using it as cheap supplemental feed for livestock that had over-grazed the land.
• The snake oil people got into it and started selling it as a "wonder plant" that could do all kinds of magical things. The Georgia railroad was handing out free kudzu plants, there was a Kudzu Club, kudzu became almost a cult.
• Then in the 1930's, the US government started planting it as a way to prevent soil erosion. This was maybe the source of the greatest damage of all. In an effort to stop erosion, which was part of the Great Depression at the time, the government handed out 84 million seedlings of kudzu. They gave farmers $20 per hectare of kudzu. By 1946, 1.2 million ha were planted with kudzu.
• Not too long after this, people started noticing that this plant was growing out of control. But it took a while before the wheels were set in motion to try to stop its progress. It wasn't until 1970 that the plant was designated as a common weed, and it was 1997 before the government called it a "noxious weed" in recognition of the damage it had caused.
• By the mid 1990s it had a "stranglehold" on an estimated 2.8 million ha and was spreading by 50,000 ha per year. So far, the only plants known to compete successfully with kudzu are other invasive species -- privet hedges and honeysuckle -- from China and Japan.

The good news is, people have found some ways to control kudzu:

• --Repeated mowing: this can weaken and ultimately control kudzu, but you need a pretty sturdy mower and blade to chop through the vines, which can be very thick and starchy.
• --Repeated grazing: this was one of kudzu's intial purposes in the US, and it does provide a good source of nutrition, and livestock like it. But you have to fence the area, give the livestock a big enough space to walk around in it, and you have to rotate the livestock to other types of feed.
• --Burning: I'm sure a lot of people would like nothing better than to light a torch to it, but it really only works if you burn in late winter or early spring. This limits erosion, and it also helps to expose the germinating seeds. And you also need to couple burning with an herbicide for it to be most effective.
• --Herbicide: This is the most common and most expensive option. Lots of different herbicides have been made, and most can be used in combination with grazing or burning. But some you have to be careful about getting it in a water supply, and most you also have to follow up with spot treatments for several years afterwards.
• --Persistence: The main recommendation I see over and over is to be persistent. As fast as this vine grows, and as ubiquitous as it has become, that is how persistent people have to be in fighting it back. And it's not just the vine that's responsible for the damage; it was also the ways people overused the vine that allowed it to get to where it is today. So we also have to change the ways we live and deal with it now.

Sources
Richard Blaustein, "Kudzu's invasion into Southern United States life and culture," from The Great Reshuffling: Human Dimensions of Invasive Species, The World Conservation Union, 2001
"Controlling Kudzu in CRP Stands," University of Georgia Warnell School of Forest Resources and College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences
"Kudzu in Alabama: History, Uses and Control," ANR-65, Alabama Cooperative Extension Service, 1999

Apple #59: Barry Manilow

BARRY MANILOW

I just learned today that Barry Manilow was behind a ton of songs for commercials back in the day. As the composer or the voice of so many songs that filled my childhood years, he is therefore the one forming many of my impressions about the way the world works. Asking yourself why the world is the way it is today? Maybe the answer is Barry Manilow.

Oh, by the way, his real name is Barry Allen Pincus.

• Like a Good Neighbor (State Farm Insurance)
• Stuck on Me (Band-Aid brand)
• Bathroom Bowl Blues (Green Bowlene)
• Stridex (Stridex acne fighting products)
• Dodge (Dodge vehicles)
• You Deserve a Break Today (McDonald's -- sung, but not composed)
• The Most Original Soft Drink Ever (Dr. Pepper -- sung, composed by Randy Newman)

Also, he didn't actually write "I Write the Songs." That was actually written by Bruce Johnston, who later became one of the Beach Boys. The first person to record "I Write the Songs" was teen idol David Cassidy.

Sources
Classicbands.com, Barry Manilow
BarryNet, his music, commercial jingles
Superseventies.com, I Write the Songs

Apple #58: Stork Bites

STORK BITES or, the red patches on the back of a lot of people's necks

The other day, somebody bent down to get something off the floor for me, and I noticed she had one of those birthmarks that a lot of people have -- a red or sometimes pink, longish, irregular patch at the nape of the neck that looks kind of like a rash. Usually you can't see it because it's hidden by hair, but with some people, it's pretty apparent.

I heard, once upon a time from some crazy people in a hair salon, that this was not a birthmark but actually a sign that many toxins had built up under your scalp. So I finally decided to find out if this is true.

• The red patches are known as "stork bites," suggesting that this is where the mythical stork held you in its beak as it carried you to be born. They are also called "salmon patches."
• They are birthmarks, a particular type unto themselves. They are caused by poorly formed blood or lymph vessels. The patches are where the dilated capillaries are visible under the skin.
• Stork bites are extremely common. Different sources give different rates of occurrence, but they appear in anywhere from 1 in 5 to 1 in 2 newborns.
• They become more visible when the baby cries or when its temperature changes. If you apply pressure to it, the coloring fades, but when you remove pressure, the coloring comes back.
• Babies can also have these patches on their faces (quaintly, sometimes called "angel kisses"). The patches in these places typically fade as the baby gets older. As for stork bites, however, they do not go away in 50% of the people who have them.
• I was wondering if maybe the trauma of birth made these marks appear, but apparently, nobody knows what causes them.

As a general observation, I've found this to be true of a lot of medical knowledge. They can tell you a lot about where and when something weird occurs in the human body, and sometimes even how it all works. But most of the time, they have no idea why it happens. Somebody really ought to get on the why part.

Sources
University of Maryland Medical Center, Medical Encyclopedia, Stork Bites entry and Birthmarks - red entry
Dr. Joseph F. Smith Medical library encyclopedia, Birthmarks entry
Healthwise Knowledge Base & Reuters Headlines Topic: Birthmarks

Apple #57: The Pixies

THE PIXIES

For those who don't know, the Pixies was a four-person band in the late 1980s and early 1990s which is often credited with laying the foundations for what we now call "indie rock." They mixed punk and pop and surf rock with a sprinkling of Spanish and came up with inventive, catchy, and crazy songs. As many music reviewers have put it, it's hard to imagine Nirvana without them. Nirvana the band, that is.


Doolittle (album cover photo from Pixies Music)

• Lead singer Black Francis was "inspired by Iggy Pop" to change his name from Charles Thompson.
• While he was still Charles Thompson, he was an anthropology major at the University of Massachusetts. He went to Puerto Rico to study Spanish, and after six months there, he decided to go back to the US, drop out of college, and form a band.
• Guitarist Joey Santiago was his college roommate. Santiago named the band by flipping through the dictionary.
• They advertised for a bassist and found Kim Deal. She and sister Kelley were in a garage band called The Breeders long before Kim ever joined the Pixies.
• On Kim's recommendation, they recruited drummer David Lovering, and that was the Pixies.
• As they recorded and toured together, tensions between Francis and Deal grew, especially when it came to songwriting.
• Their albums, in chronological order:
• Surfer Rosa
• Come on Pilgrim (an EP, released with Surfer Rosa)
• Doolittle
• Bossanova (no songs by Kim Deal)
• Trompe le Monde
• Death to The Pixies (post break-up)
• Best of the The Pixies (ditto)

• They became known for being quirky and a little nuts. On their second American tour in 1989, the band often played their entire set list in alphabetical order.
• All the touring and the sudden burst of fans wore them out and they took a break for a while.
• After Doolittle, Kim formed her other band, the Breeders, with her sister Kelley and two other women from other bands.
• Trompe Le Monde, the band's last album, was reportedly inspired by Ozzy Osbourne, who was using a nearby studio at the time.
• Following this album's release, the band opened for U2 on its Zoo Tour.
• Black Francis started working on solo stuff, and then he was interviewed as saying the band was breaking up. The next day, he faxed everyone else in the band the text of his interview, and that was it for the Pixies.
• They did get back together for a tour recently, and they've written a couple new songs, but it looks like that might be as far as the reunion goes.

I don't know what I expected to find when I started this, but I thought I'd see something that would explain where those crazy-great songs came from. These people are not insane like David Lee Roth, they're not messed up like The Replacements. It looks like they're pretty much normal people who made fantastic songs.

Addendum

People have asked me, "What about the heroin? Isn't Kim on heroin?" As far as I can tell, based on interviews and public documents (it's hard to know for sure what people do in their private lives) the answer is no, that is not her, that's her sister, Kelley.

Kelley was sentenced to mandatory rehabilitation for heroin use. This was after the Breeders' big hit album, Last Splash, and its subsequent tour. She did her time in rehab and came out clean, and this was why the next album, Title TK, was delayed for so long. Unfortunately, based on what I saw at a Breeders show after that album was released, it looked like Kelley didn't really have it together yet.

Kim gets ticked when people get her and Kelley mixed up. I'm not going to reproduce what she said in an interview about this because it includes many swear words, but the short version is, "I hate that!"

She also said, "If something ever goes wrong with Kelley again, everything stops until we fix it."

So, getting back to the original point, heroin was not a factor in the weirdness of the Pixies. The weirdest thing I know about Kim is that she uses black shoe polish to dye her hair black. She says that regular hair dye doesn't get it black enough to suit her. So it looks like the thrilling weirdness of their songs just comes straight from the personalities they were born with.

Sources
The Pixies' Biography on Yahoo Music (republished from Stephen Thomas Erlewine, All Music Guide)
Rolling Stone bio of The Pixies and discography
Satan Stole My Teddybear blog of music reviews, page on the Pixies
J. Eric Smith interview with Kim Deal, 1997
NME's Review of All Tomorrow's Parties, on an unofficial Breeders website, noaloha.com

Apple #56: The Alphabet Song

THE ALPHABET SONG

Here's the burning question: where did the alphabet song come from?

I thought maybe Sesame Street, but it's way older than that.

• First copyrighted by C. Bradlee from Boston in 1834.
• Originally titled "The Schoolmaster."
• Uses the same melody as a French song called Ah! Vous dirais-je, Maman, ("Ah, I would say to you, Mama").
• Many people attribute this melody to Mozart, but it was actually first written down by a man named M. Bouin, in 1761. Music history suggests that this song existed in the culture even before that.
• Mozart did compose several variations on this song in the 1780's. Haydn used the melody, too, in the second movement of his "Surprise" symphony. It also appeared in several popular songs in the late 1700's and 1800's.
• This melody is also the same as "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star."
• Which is also the same melody as "Baa Baa Black Sheep."

All these years and I never noticed those songs were the same.

Sources
The Straight Dope, "Who wrote the melody to the alphabet song?"
Answers.com entry on the Alphabet Song (references Wikipedia)
Sheetmusicplus.com, Mozart variations

Apple #55: V.C. Andrews

V.C. ANDREWS

Somebody told me today that V.C. Andrews, the woman who wrote THE gothic-horror novels about super-sick-messed-up families, died years ago. And all the novels that have been coming out under her name for the past however many years have actually been written by her family. Could this be true?

Yes. It is true. And apparently it has been old news for some time.

And was her own family the model for the lurid nastiness in her novels?

• She was born in 1923 as Virginia Cleo Andrews, in Portsmouth, Virginia.

• She was the youngest of three children. Her father was a retired navy officer who ran a tool-and-die business, and her mother was a telephone operator.

• When she was in high school, she fell down the stairs of her school and suffered severe spinal injuries. Some say her doctor was an idiot and denied that she was in pain. Others say that doctors tried experimental surgery and failed. Either way, she underwent several surgeries, but they never really worked and she had to use either a wheelchair or crutches, and she battled with arthritis for the rest of her life.

• After her father died in the 1960s, Virginia supported the rest of her family as a commercial artist, professional portrait painter, and fashion illustrator.

• In 1972, at 48 years old, she started writing novels, but none were published. One short story she wrote did get published; it was called "I Slept With My Uncle on My Wedding Night."

• In the late 1970's, she submitted a novel called The Obsessed. At the request of her publisher to spice it up, she added "unspeakable things my mother didn't want me to write about." In 1979, it was published as Flowers In The Attic.

• She discovered after it hit the shelves that the publishers had decided to change the name on the cover from "Virginia Andrews" to "V.C. Andrews." They thought men wouldn't be likely to buy a horror novel written by a woman.

• Other books that followed included Petals on the Wind, If There Be Thorns, My Sweet Audrina, Seeds of Yesterday, Heaven, and Dark Angel in 1986.

• She died in 1986 after having been diagnosed with breast cancer. At the time of her death, she had over 24 million books in print and her estate was worth more than $8 million.

• Five years before she died, she told the Washington Post that she had made synopses for 63 other stories. After her death, two novels that she had actually written were published, and then the family announced, in a letter printed in the novels, that they were "working closely with a carefully selected writer" to turn the synopses into full-fledged novels.

• It has since been disclosed that this ghost writer is a horror novelist named Andrew Neiderman.

• A rough count of books that have been published under V.C. Andrews' name since her death, through March 2005, totals 49.

All the sources I checked say that except for the debilitating fall she suffered, her childhood was a happy one. She was interviewed as saying she writes about fears that people develop as children, fears of being helpless, trapped, or out of control. One source of inspiration for her novels may have come from the fact that after she was relegated to a wheelchair, her protective mother tried to keep her indoors so that she would not be injured further.

Sources
The Complete V.C. Andrews Biography
Angelfire's V.C. Andrews Biography
Barnes & Noble's Meet the Writers: V.C. Andrews
Essortment.com, The Unforgettable V.C. Andrews

Apple #54: Soap Operas

I've been sick for the past few days, and I've been gorging myself on soap operas. Greenlee on All My Children is one of my new favorite characters, but they really need to do something about her hair. Those highlights are nasty.


If you recognize this shot, you're probably hearing the old All My Children theme song playing in your head right now.
(Photo from David R. Jackson's site about soap opera songs)


So my question was, why are they called "soap operas" anyway?"

• Soap: When they were first broadcast on the radio and later on TV, these programs were sponsored by laundry soap companies. Based on what I've seen lately, Procter & Gamble is still the biggest advertiser.

• Opera: The stories are characterized by larger-than-life plots with excessive melodrama, the same as actual operas.

• They've also been called "chewing gum for the eyes," "mindless entertainment," "a shameful addiction," "my stories," and "social realism."

• They're written for women at home (housewives) who may be faithful watchers, but who also may be interrupted by household chores. Thus, in the midst of their dramatic dialogue, the characters will catch you up on what's happened lately.

• One source claims that soap operas are the most popular form of television programming in the world.

• They first appeared on the radio in the 1930's and made the switch to TV in the late 1940's and early 1950's.

• Guiding Light was first broadcast in 1937. With the exception of a few years' hiatus in the 1940's, the story has aired every weekday since, making it arguably the longest story ever told. [Update: CBS is canceling Guiding Light. The last episode will air on September 18, 2009.]
  

• Radio soaps used organs for background music, and to emphasize dramatic events. Organs were cheaper than orchestras. TV soaps also used organs up until the 1970's.

• TV soaps are characterized by other low-budget production methods, such as recording the shows on videotape rather than on film.

• Soaps rely on a lot of "backlighting" for dramatic visual effects. This highlights the actors' hair and gives them a special kind of glow and also casts interesting shadows across the face. All TV shows used to use backlighting, but most have abandoned it because of the unnatural effects it creates -- except for the soaps, of course.

As the World Turns' Martha Byrne, all lit up with the backlighting.
(CBS photo from AllExperts)

• Soaps also use a lot of brown in their sets -- dark brown wood (or what looks like wood), brown leather, dark wallpaper, and gold accents. This is to make the places your favorite characters go look very expensive, which is supposed to mean that your favorite characters are very wealthy. Which of course they are.

• Soaps don't have to air in the daytime to be considered soap operas. Some night-time shows have enough cliff-hangers, multiple marriages, and evil twins of their own to be called soaps. You'd be surprised at some of the candidates that make this list:

1. Dallas, Dynasty
2. Knots Landing
3. St. Elsewhere
4. Hill Street Blues
5. Beverly Hills 90210
6. Melrose Place
7. E.R.
8. The West Wing.

Gotta go -- All My Children is on right now!

Sources
Image from Wikipedia's entry on All My Children
Merris Griffiths, "Why are soap operas so popular?" Media and Communications Studies, University of Wales, Aberystwyth, November 15, 1995
Laborlawtalk's encyclopedia entry on soap operas

Apple #53: Brown vs. White Eggs

Recently I've started buying organic, cage-free eggs. The eggs in these boxes are always brown, while the eggs in the regular boxes are always white. I thought I'd read someplace that the color of the shell has nothing to do with the supposed "health" benefits of the eggs, but that people only think that brown eggs are healthier. However, I've also noticed that the organic, cage-free eggs which happen to be brown have a thicker shell as well. So are the brown eggs maybe produced by healthier chickens, and are they therefore better?

• In general, the color of an egg has nothing to do with its taste or nutritional levels.

• The eggshell color comes from a pigment that is part of the overall genetic make-up of the hen that lays the egg. While you can't necessarily predict the color of the eggshell by the color of the feathers, there is an connection in the color of the earlobes. Hens with white earlobes lay white eggs. Hens red earlobes lay brown eggs. Who knew hens had earlobes?

The smaller white patch above the big round white patch is the earlobe.
(Photo from My Pet Chicken)

• In general, consumers in the Northeast of the US prefer brown eggs, so most hens there are Rhode Island Reds, which produce brown eggs. Consumers in other parts of the country prefer white eggs, so most hens used elsewhere are White Leghorns, which produce white eggs.

• Brown eggs generally are more expensive because the Rhode Island Reds are bigger birds and eat more, which means it is more expensive to maintain them.

• Chicken eggs are not just white or brown. They can also be blue or green or speckled, depending on the breed of hen.

• Organic eggs do not impart greater nutritional benefits, but they are produced by hens who are fed grains that have not been treated with commercial pesticides or fertilizers. The idea is that hens given organically grown feed aren't ingesting lots of man-made chemicals, which then could be passed on to you.

• Free-range eggs are produced by hens that are not kept in cages but live on an open floor, and not necessarily outside. These eggs are produced on a seasonal basis. Again, free-range eggs do not have any immediate nutritional benefits.

• The overall size and weight of an egg is an indicator of the health, breed, and maturity of the hen that laid it. Healthier, larger, and older hens produce larger eggs. Poor nutrition, stress, heat, and overcrowding can make hens produce smaller eggs.

• Similarly, the thickness of the egg's shell is determined by the age of the hen and the hen's nutrition. The healthier the hen, the thicker the shell. At the same time, older hens produce larger eggs. Larger eggs have a thinner shell, just because there's more area to cover. If a larger egg has a thinner shell, that may have more to do with the age of the hen rather than its health.

• So if the eggshell is thicker, it's not because it's a brown egg. It's most likely because the hen is healthier, or older, or living under better conditions.

Some egg tips:

• The shell of an egg allows air to permeate it, so the chick inside can grow. The same is true of the eggs in your refrigerator. The longer you've kept the eggs, the more air will be inside them. You can check the amount of air in the egg by holding it up to the light (it won't work for brown-shelled eggs because they're too dark). A grade A egg is sold with an air pocket 3/16 of an inch deep. If an egg is very old, it will float in water while still uncracked because it has so much air in it.

• There's a natural coating called a "bloom" over the egg, which keeps bacteria from getting in through the tiny holes in the shell. When eggs are washed -- which they all are at the packing house -- that bloom gets washed off. The packers then apply a thin coating of oil to replace the bloom. If you wash your eggs before you use them, you get rid of the oil coating and leave the egg again vulnerable to bacteria. So don't wash your eggs.

• Generally, eggs are still good up to four weeks after they've been packed. Most egg cartons will display the packing date, as a number from 1 to 365. Most cartons also display an accurate expiration date.

• You may find, in a rare occurrence, a blood spot on a yolk. Blood spots do not indicate fertilization. They do not happen often, but they are caused by the rupture of a blood vessel on the surface of the yolk when the egg is formed. Most eggs with blood spots are removed during inspection, but some do slip through. A blood spot will not affect the flavor or quality of the egg. In fact, it is an indicator of freshness, since the blood spot is diluted as an egg ages. You can remove the blood spot with the tip of a knife.

Sources
Ask Yahoo, "What's the difference between white eggs and brown eggs?" May 23, 2000
Ohio State University Extension, Smart Stuff with Twig Walkingstick: Brown Egg, White Egg, January 11, 2004
PoultrySolutions.com, Knowledge: eggs
Raley's and Bel-Air Health Notes: Eggs
Hormel Foods: Egg shopping guide
Incredible Edible Egg: Basic Egg Facts

Apple #52: Giant Squid

GIANT SQUID

The story goes that there are enormous squid who live in deep, deep waters. They've never been seen in their habitat, or they've been glimpsed long ago. So I'm wondering, are there really such things as giant squid, or is this some kind of urban legend gone ocean?

Answer: they exist. Below, a museum curator examines a female giant squid that washed up onshore in Tasmania, Australia in 2002.


Photo from "Giant Squid Washes Ashore in Tasmania," National Geographic News, July 26, 2002, printed in NGN with permission from the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery

• People have seen them. Every once in a great while, since the 1800's, somebody spots one. People on steamer ships, on fishing boats, and on military vessels see giant things floating in the water, and when they look closer, they realize the thing in the water has a great big long head and many arms or tentacles: a great big squid. Sounds like something made up, I know, but even a regular squid looks like a made-up thing.

This photo was taken in November 2005 by Japanese researchers who saw an actual giant squid and tempted it with bait, as shown in this photo.
(Photo by Kubodera and Mori, posted at Science News for Kids)

(The photo I originally had up here was taken down, and I discovered this some months after I originally posted this entry. In looking for a replacement photo, I learned of these news giant squid developments!)

• People have witnessed giant squid locked in combat with other things. One time people watched from a lighthouse while an enormous squid wrapped its long arms around a young whale and then tried to drag the whale under and drown it. This struggle went on for four and a half hours.
  

• A Norwegian tanker was also attacked by a squid. Three times, the squid wrapped its arms around the hull. The squid never got a good grip and slid off and fell into the ship's propellers.

• Twice, people have seen a squid floating in the water alongside their ships. One man noted that the squid was as long as his trawler, which was one hundred seventy-five feet long.

• One man, on his 110-foot boat which was attacked by a squid, said that he looked out the porthole and saw the squid's tentacle. It was thicker than his leg.

• Dead squid have been found in the bellies of sperm whales, which themselves are huge. More squid have washed up on beaches. One that washed up in Australia in 2002 weighed 250 kilograms and measured 60 feet long.

• Scientists think that these giant squid can survive only in very deep water, where the temperature is cold enough to keep the oxygen levels steady in their blood. (but if this is true, how were all those squid who have been seen at the surface able to survive?)

• The squid is carnivorous and believed to feed on some of the world's largest creatures -- whales -- though it is likely the squid also eats other ocean animals too.

• It has a beak-like mouth strong enough to cut through steel cable. Its eyes can be as large as 18 inches across.

• The suckers on the giant squid's tentacles are used to hang onto prey. They are estimated to measure only about 2 to 5 cm in diameter, or at their largest, about as wide as two or three of your fingers together.

• Apparently, giant squid also have ears. After several squid washed up onshore in Spain, following several offshore seismic surveys conducted in the area, scientists reported that the dead squid had suffered numerous internal injuries and that their ears were also badly damaged. From the description in the article about the incident, it sounds like basically their ears ruptured, possibly due to suffocation.

• It has been difficult to learn much more about them because the dead squid which have been found decompose very quickly, so that often only a partial squid actually remains.

• It moves the way all squid do, by siphoning water through its body in a rhythmic jet. The motion of the water through the squid's body also refreshes the gills with oxygen; in other words, the way the squid moves is also the way it breathes.

Sources
Fishing for Giant Squid, Science News for Kids, November 2, 2005
Smithsonian Institution, Architeuthis Dux (classification name for giant squid)
"Giant Squid Washes Up on Beach," CNN, July 22, 2002
"Seismic surveys may kill squid," NewScientist.com, September 22, 2004
Sea Base Alpha: Giant Squid
The UnMuseum, Giant Squid

Apple #51: Robins Redux

ROBINS, part II

Since we just had our first official day of Spring the other day, I thought it might be appropriate to re-visit the robins.


The information in this Apple comes from
Roland Wauer's book, The American Robin

• Robins are one of the few birds that migrate both day and night. They return to the north at the beginning of Spring to start the breeding process.

• The majority usually return to an area close to where they were born. Given that most robins live just over a year, most only do this once.

• With a few known exceptions, robins are monogamous. That exclusivity lasts only through the nesting season, however.
  

• Males select the breeding territory, but most often it is the female who is successful in defending it against other robin challengers. She is also the one who chooses the specific nesting location.

• Robin nests have been found in all sorts of places, including the pocket of a coat left hanging on a tree, on the arm of an active oil well pump, and on a locomotive that traveled back and forth between Sioux City, Iowa and Chicago.

• Robins have been known to attack even snakes who get too close to the nest. Brown, garter, and ribbon snakes have been killed by protective robins.

• The female does most of the nest-building, though the male sometimes carries materials. Nests are made of grass and straw on the bottom, a layer of mud, and then softer grasses and moist mud where the eggs will rest. It usually takes about 4 to 6 days for her to build the nest.

• The female lays usually 3 or 4 eggs, then incubates them for about 2 weeks after the last egg is laid. The male robin stays near the nest and will respond immediately if the female sounds the alarm.

• After the babies hatch, they grow very quickly. They are fed regurgitated food only for the first four days. By the fifth day, they can eat pieces of earthworm, and soon after that, they can eat whole worms or insects.

• During the 2 weeks a brood is in the nest, they will eat just over 3 pounds of food. By the last day in the nest, one of the young robins will eat as much as 14 feet of eartworms. To accommodate this demand, both parents are involved in feeding for up to 21 hours a day.

• If the young birds leave the nest too soon, the parents will continue feeding them on the ground, if they can. Sometimes other species of songbirds will feed fledgling robins on the ground.

• Once the young birds are out of the nest and moving about, they stay close to the ground at first. This is when the male takes over, showing them how to find worms while watching out for predators. After only a few days of this, the young birds can feed themselves and are fully-fledged. By this time, the second brood has been laid in the nest and is ready to hatch.

Source
Once again, I have used my recently-purchased copy of Roland H. Wauer's The American Robin (Corrie Herring Hooks Series), University of Texas Press, 1999.

Apple #50: Tuberculosis

I'm reading one of Dostoevsky's novels, The Idiot, and one of the characters in the book is running around with tuberculosis. It struck me that a lot of novels from his day had characters with tuberculosis, which makes me think the disease must have pretty common. Which is probably the case if everybody who had it went around coughing up blood everywhere. But I'm curious: what made the disease go away, just about, and when did that happen?

• Tuberculosis is a kind of bacteria. It can attack any part of the body, but usually it goes for the lungs.

Microscopic view of the tuberculosis bacteria.
(Photo from La Corporacion para Investigationes Biologicas in Colombia)

• The disease is airborne, and it can be transmitted when people who are infected cough or sneeze.

• People can be infected with a latent form of tuberculosis, which means they have no symptoms, but they can still spread the bacteria.

(1930s poster from the National Library of Medicine)

• Tuberculosis has been active for thousands of years. Spinal column fragments of some Egyptian mummies show signs of decay associated with tuberculosis.

• In classical Greece, they called the disease "phthisis," which translated to "consumption." Most people called the disease "consumption" in the 18th and 19th centuries.

• Medical understanding of the disease progressed slowly. Over the course of centuries, people began to realize things about it such as that it killed nearly everyone it infected, it was highly contagious, to the point where the belongings of a person who had died from the disease should be burned, and that it seemed that "wonderfully minute living creatures" must be behind its transmission.

• In the late 1800's, an English doctor suggested that TB could be cured. One patient he knew went to the Himalayas and was cured. So he built the first sanitorium for TB patients. This started a lot of people building and going to sanitoria and healing waters and all kinds of places, seeking a cure for TB.

• The main benefit of the sanitoria was to separate the infected from the healthy population. Sanitoria-goers were also helped by better nutrition, rest, and a cleaner environment.

• Also in the late 1800's, an Italian doctor discovered that collapsing a lung had a beneficial effect on the disease. This started a raft of procedures called the pneumothorax, which was a surgical method to reduce lung volume. (This procedure appears in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain. It sounded so ridiculous to me, I wondered if he made it up.)

• Finally, in 1943, an antibiotic was developed by a man named Selman Waksman. The antibiotic was first administered to a human in 1944. The disease stopped its progression, the bacteria disappeared from the patient's sputum, and the man recovered fully.

• In years following, the antibiotic was administered widely, and more antibiotics were developed. Strains of bacteria resistant to the antibiotic soon appeared, but the use of combination therapies was effective against those strains.

• In industrialized countries, the incidence of TB dropped steadily.
  

• In developing countries, however, the story is very different. Of the 8 million people infected with TB each year, 95% of them are from countries where economic conditions are poor: Africa, parts of Asia, Latin America, and China.

• In the mid-1980's, the incidence of TB in industrialized countries stopped declining. Since then, the rate of infection in these countries has actually increased. Reasons for the increase include
  
1. immigration from countries where TB is more common
   
2. HIV -- people with HIV have weak immune systems that are susceptible to infection from more diseases, including TB
   
3. a decline in the active treatment and prevention of the disease, based on the assumption that it is no longer a problem
   
4. strains of bacteria resistant even to multi-drug treatment. Today, most people infected with TB are given four antibiotics to take simultaneously.

• For a while, people thought that singer Amy Winehouse had tuberculosis, since she looked super-skinny and absolutely horrible. But that's what heroin and crack addiction will do for you, along with a really bad chest infection.

• In general, much of the research in tuberculosis seems to be focused on examining the bacteria at the genetic level, in part to understand how the bacteria functions and spreads, how and why it has developed drug resistance, and what drugs might be developed to attack the bacteria at the genetic level.

• Currently, the key to preventing the spread of the disease is early detection and treatment. For people such as health care workers in areas of high risk, personal respirators are recommended.

Sources
Centers for Disease Control, National Center for HIV, STD, and TB Prevention, "Questions and Answers about TB"
New Jersey Medical School, National Tuberculosis Center, Brief History of Tuberculosis
Goshen College, Biology 206, History of Tuberculosis
Johns Hopkins Center for Tuberculosis Research, University of Illinois at Chicago Institute for Tuberculosis Research, Stanford Center for Tuberculosis Research

Apple #49: Hair, Cinderblocks, and Hot Fudge

Since the last few entries have been quite long, I thought I'd do a few short ones.

HAIR

• Hair goes through three stages: it grows, detaches itself from the follicle, and rests before it falls out. This complete process can take anywhere from two to seven years.

• The average rate of hair growth is six inches per year.

• You lose anywhere from 100 to 300 hairs from your scalp each day.

CINDERBLOCK
Some Daily Apple readers asked me to find out if there is a relationship between cinders and cinderblock. Answer: yes.

• A cinderblock is made of cement plus coal or wood cinders.

• The cinders are a type of aggregate in the concrete. In general, aggregates can be things like sand or gravel. They help keep the concrete from breaking when you put stress on it.

• Once upon a time, blocks were made using clinkers, or hunks of coal that wouldn't burn in the furnace. Clinker blocks were produced close to power plants, which used coal and thus turned out lots of clinkers. However, these blocks crumbled easily and were abandoned in favor of cinder blocks.

• Cinderblock is relatively lightweight, easy to handle, you can pound nails into it, you can paint it and improve its water resistance, but above all, it's cheap. This is why you see it a lot in schools, prisons, basements, and government buildings.

HOT FUDGE
Is hot fudge really fudge? Answer: the two are pretty much the same thing.

• Hot fudge sauce is generally made from sugar + cocoa (chocolate), milk of some kind, and butter or oil. You put this all in a saucepan, heat it up, stir it until it gets all melty, and pour it over ice cream.

• Fudge is pretty much the same ingredients. Some recipes call for eggs. Some add other stuff like marshmallows or vanilla or peanut butter. But otherwise it's the same ingredients as hot fudge. You even melt it the same way. The difference is, as soon as it melts, you next pour it into a pan right away and bake it. When it's done, refrigerate it and cut it into cubes.

This would suggest you could perhaps melt some pieces of fudge and put them over ice cream. But somehow, I don't think that would work the same way.
Sources
myhairlossadvisor.com, "What is Normal Hair Loss?"
Dictionary.com, "cinderblock"
Wikipedia, "Cinder block," "Concrete," "Cement," "Aggregate," "Clinker"
US General Services Administration, Historic Preservation Technical Procedures, "Concrete Block: Characteristics, Uses and Problems" (cached)
Various recipes for hot fudge and fudge at cooks.com
My copy of Betty Crocker's New Cookbook: Everything You Need to Know to Cook, Macmillan, 1996.

Apple #48: Bananas

I got into a discussion today about how bananas ripen. In my experience, the peel of an unripe banana is very thick and the fruit is skinny. In a more ripe banana, especially ones that are going brown, the peel is very thin and the fruit is much thicker. Thus it was my theory that somehow, the white stuff on the inside of the peel becomes part of the banana. Whether this is true, and exactly how this happens was a mystery. So I decided to try to find out (see the comments for a reader's answer).

Along the way, I learned some other interesting things about bananas.


Bananas
(Photo from Wikimedia)

• The banana plant (not a tree) is really a type of herb. It is in the same family with orchids, lilies, and palms.

• When the blossoms become bananas, these are called "fingers." The bananas grow in rows, or clusters, called "hands."

• There are usually about 15-30 fingers on one hand. One banana stem can grow about 7-10 hands, or anywhere from 100 to 300 bananas.

• Bananas are 74% water, 23% carbohydrates, 1% protein, and 0.5% fat.

• Vinegar and wine can be made from fermented ripe bananas.

• In Hawaii, under the most optimal conditions, banana harvests have been reported as high as 75,000 pounds per acre. In 1992, Hawaii produced 12.0 million pounds of bananas.

The Ripening Process

• Most fruits, including bananas, ripen in essentially the same way. The key to ripening is the release of a gas called ethylene.

• Ethylene is released when something traumatic happens to the fruit -- like when it's picked, or the skin is pierced, or when a fungus or bacteria attacks it.

• When the ethylene is released, this "turns on" a bunch of enzymes in the fruit. These enzymes do all kinds of things, including helping to change starch into sugar.

• All kinds of stuff happens, actually, once the enzymes go to work. Chlorophyll gets broken down. Sometimes new pigments are released so that the fruit changes color. Acids are broken down so that the flavor changes from sour to neutral. Pectin is broken down, which "unglues" the cells, making the fruit softer (when too much pectin breaks down, the fruit becomes pithy).

Bananas through the stages of ripening
(Photo from A Piece of Heaven)

Back to the Bananas

• Bananas are picked green. They're shipped in their unripe condition in refrigerated trucks. Refrigeration stops the ripening process. This means the bananas won't go bad before they get to the store, and they'll resist bruising during the journey.

• Once the bananas reach the distributor, they're put into a warehouse and gassed with ethylene. The refrigeration stops the ripening process, but this external ethylene tells the enzymes in the bananas to go ahead and do their thing.

• Once you have the bananas home, you can also keep them longer by putting them in the refrigerator. The peel will darken, but the ripening process will be slowed.

• If you want bananas to ripen faster, but them in a brown paper bag. This keeps the ethylene they produce right next to the bananas and accelerates all that enzyme activity.

• Bananas produce enough ethylene on their own, you can use them to ripen other fruits. If you put a banana in a paper bag and add to it, say, an unripe pear, the ethylene that the banana releases will also tell the pear to get to ripening.

Ethylene and Other Fruits and Flowers

• Because of ethylene, that old phrase about one bad apple spoiling the whole barrel is actually kind of true. One apple that is wormy or has got some kind of fungus on it is producing ethylene like mad. Hence, the rest of the apples in the barrel will ripen like crazy, too. Apples are one of the highest producers of ethylene of all fruits.

• Oh, and you might want to keep your bananas and apples away from cut flowers. Cut flowers are very sensitive to ethylene, which is known as both the ripening hormone and the death hormone.

So actually, the peel does not become part of the banana, which was my original theory. I didn't find anything that discussed the effect of ripening on the peel, but I'm going to assume, based on the other things I found, that the fruit gets bigger because of everything the enzymes are doing to it, and the peel might get thinner for the same reason. I think it's safe to say that the peel does not turn into fruit. (see the comments to this entry for one reader's answer to this question.)

Sources
Chiquita, How Bananas Grow and How Bananas Ripen
University of Hawaii at Manoa, Knowledge Master database, General Crop Information on Bananas
Eastern Connecticut State University, Plants and Human Affairs course, Fruit Ripening
Catalytic Generators LLC, Ethylene FAQs
Mindfully.org, Ethylene Gas

Apple #47: Covered Bridges

COVERED BRIDGES

Recently, I went for a drive through the countryside and passed a covered bridge. I don't think I'd ever seen one of those in real life before. It looked kind of strange, like a long gray house with an empty, open road stretching out from either side of it. It made me think, "Why the heck did people put a roof over a bridge, anyway?"

Apparently, since covered bridges are not built any more, lots of people aren't sure why they were covered in the first place. But many reasons have been offered as possibilities:

• To shelter travelers during storms (but if that were true, why not build a roof over the whole road?)
• To provide refuge from Native Americans on the attack (ditto, and also unsettling, since people find covered bridges so quaint today)
• To hide the sight of water from teams of oxen who would otherwise balk at going over it (were oxen used in all parts of the US where covered bridges were built?)
• To level off the farmers' hayloads as they passed through (sounds too cute to be true)
• To provide additional support to the truss structure (this sounds more plausible, though my rudimentary knowlege of bridge construction makes me skeptical that these bridges would need a full-fledged roof to hold them up)
• To protect the wood decking of the bridge, which would otherwise rot from too much sun and rain exposure. It was easier to build a new roof than it was to build a new bridge. This explanation I believe.

With the advent of steel and iron at the turn of the 20th century, people stopped using wood for bridges, and the covered bridge became obsolete.

States where you can still see covered bridges:

• Maine
• New Hampshire
• Vermont
• Connecticut
• New York
• Massachusetts
• Virginia
• Georgia
• Alabama
• Tennessee
• Pennsylvania
• Ohio
• Michigan
• Indiana
• Illinois
• Wisconsin
• Iowa
• Oregon
• California
• Nova Scotia, Canada

If anybody's an engineer and knows something about bridges and can shed additional light on this subject, please ring in. For your convenience, I'm going to open up the comments so that anyone can post one -- having your own blog is no longer necessary.

Sources
Ozaukee County, Wisconsin History of the Covered Bridge (photo source, too)
Covered Bridges in Oregon (includes a very helpful explanation of various types of trusses. And this useful, authoritative page was made by two Oregon high schoolers. Go Springfield!)
Vermont's Covered Bridges
National Society for the Preservation of Covered Bridges

Apple #46: Soap

SOAP

So I was about to wash the dishes, and I thought, "How does soap work, anyway?" I have a dim idea that it somehow traps dirt so that you can then rinse it away, but is this idea correct, and how does the trapping part happen? And does it really get rid of the dirt, or am I just falling prey to some stupid, enormous ad campaign? And is dish soap that much different from hand soap, and shampoo, and laundry detergent, and all the rest?

• Soap works essentially by combining things with opposite natures. All soap is made of an acid plus a base. The acid is a fat, which is often a combination of a fatty acid and a triglyceride. The base is sodium hydroxide. When you mix the acid and the base together, the fat part splits, separating the fatty acids from the triglycerides. The fatty acids then combine with the hydroxides. All this, by the way, makes a kind of salt. Yes, soap is really a salt.
• The process of cleaning is easiest to understand if you think of soap molecules as having a head and a tail. The head part of the soap is the triglycerides, which attract and hold onto water. The tail part of the soap is the fatty acids, which don't like water. Dirt and grime don't like water either.
• When you run soap under water, the head of each soap molecule attracts and clings to water. When you rub the wet soap over dirt, the dirt will cling to the fatty acids because they're both in agreement that they don't like water. So now the tail and the dirt are clinging to each other, but at the same time, the head of the molecule is holding onto water.
• When you pour more water over the whole thing, the head of the molecule with the water on it goes right along with the other water, and even though the tail and the dirt would otherwise not budge, it's too late for them, they are connected to the head of the molecule, and they are carried off with it.

Antibacterial soaps

• The same process applies to bacteria. That is, regular old soap will also snag and carry off bacteria in the same way.
• Antibacterial soaps, which are supposed to be that much better, really aren't. They do have an extra agent in them that is designed to kill bacteria. However, you have to wash your hands for at least two minutes for these agents to work, and most people don't want to spend two minutes scrubbing their hands.
• You also don't want to kill every single type of bacteria on your hands. Some bacteria can be helpful. And bacteria can develop a resistance to antibacterials, which means that new strains of the bacteria could no longer be killed by the antibacerials. So if you do manage to kill the bacteria in the first place, you might actually be causing more problems.
• Also, some of the germy things on your hands are viruses, not bacteria. Antibacterial agents will not kill viruses.
• The upshot is, washing your hands thoroughly with regular soap will accomplish the same level of benefit, without the possibility of creating uber-bacteria.

Other soaps

• Soaps can be calibrated, so to speak, depending on how you'll use it. Soaps that will be used on your body are made to be milder than those that will clean things that are not on your body. And if you're not going to touch it at all, soap can be made as harsh as it needs to be, to get the job done.
• So, yes, you will get better results if you use dish soap on dishes and shampoo on your hair. If you use shampoo on your dishes, for example, your dishes might not get so clean.

Improved soap

• The fatty acids in soaps can cause problems. Some of them don't link up to the molecule chain, and because they don't like water, it can be hard to rinse them away. When the fatty acids won't rinse away, you get soap scum. This is what gives you a ring in your bathtub, a film that dulls your hair, or a gradual graying of your clothes. If you have hard water, which contains extra minerals, the fatty acids will cling to those to form more salts, which basically means the soap scum is even worse.
• So it's essentially soap scum that's led chemists to experiment with all kinds of synthetic building blocks for soap to work as effectively as possible, depending on what type of surface you're trying to clean, what kind of dirt you're trying to get rid of, and what's already in your water.
• Another reason chemists have added synthetic items is to give soap some extra benefits, many of which we take for granted but which are really not things that soap will do. If your soap does any of the following things, it's because somebody's added an extra something, which means it is technically no longer soap but a synthetic detergent, and which also means that the manufacturer has to list the ingredients on the package:
• deodorizes
• moisturizes
• is an antiperspirant
• fights acne
• cures dandruff
• gives a clean, fresh scent
• makes you more attractive

Oh, and by the way, before all this experimenting started, soap used to be made from animal fats and wood ashes.

And yes, my dishes are still waiting for me to wash them. Although the dirt, which hates water, is very glad I have not yet washed them...

Sources
Howstuffworks, "Is antibacterial soap any better than regular soap?"
Poison Ivy, Oak, & Sumac Information Center, How soaps work
About.com, How Does Soap Clean?
US Food and Drug Administration, Office of Cosmetics and Colors Fact Sheet, "Soap," February 3, 1995

Apple #45: Venus de Milo

VENUS de MILO

I saw the Venus de Milo once, when I was in Paris several years ago. I went to the Louvre, which is massive, got a map, and went looking. Following the map, I turned left at Winged Victory like I was supposed to, but every time I thought I was about to find her, I wound up in the stupid decorative porcelains room. Finally, I ran out of time and had to leave the museum. So I went back the next day and looked some more. When I finally found her, it was like the angelic music played and a light shone on her. I sat on the carpeted bench that surrounded the dias where she stood and just sat there, for a good ten minutes. I'm sitting here with the Venus de Milo, I told myself. That's the Venus de Milo right behind me.

And she really was that beautiful. There's such grace and movement in her pose, and a kind of cockiness too. She's not a woman who just stands there and looks pretty. She's got a force in her, no denying it.


(Photo from UTexas' syllabus on Aphrodite)

• Venus de Milo is the Romanized version of her name; she is more accurately called Aphrodite of Melos, after the Greek island where she was found.
• Aphrodite is the Greek goddess of love and beauty. It's pretty bold to say, Yes, I can carve a statue that is the epitome of beauty.
• People say the way the cloth is draped about her hips represents that kind of bravado, in that it is intricately carved, yet manages to convey a sensuousness at the same time. The drapery also cleverly hides the seam where the statue, carved in two sections, joins together.
• It is not certain who sculpted the statue, but people are now pretty sure it was probably Alexandros of Antioch, son of Menides, who was also a singer and composer.
• (Alexandros was also the name of Paris, the guy who essentially started the Trojan War, when he picked Aphrodite in a goddess beauty contest because she promised him the most beautiful woman in the world.)
• The statue was sculpted around 150 BC, in an era known as the Hellenistic period.
• She was found by a Greek peasant on an island in the Aegean sea, called Melos (hence, the name), in 1820.
• At the time, the Turks were in charge of Greece, so they took the statue from the peasant.
• The French then purchased her from the Turks for 1,000 francs, or roughly the cost of a sizable herd of goats. This purchase was part of France's campaign to acquire excellent pieces of classical art and thus compete with England and Italy.
• As it turned out, the statue was not of the classical but Hellenistic period, which meant to the French at that time that it was not as good. So they went to lots of trouble to try to obscure some of the facts about its history, and in so doing, created lots of publicity for the statue. This was the beginning of the Venus de Milo's rise to its current level of fame.
• The statue was presented to King Louis XVIII, who was so fat he was carted around in a wheelchair. French sculptors tried to provide arms for the statue, depicting her holding all kinds of things, from apples to lamps, and pointing in various directions. The king declared that she should be left armless, that her beauty should not be marred by the additions of any other sculptor. This was unheard of at the time, that a broken statue should be left as it had been found.
• She is now the second-most famous work of art in the world, behind the Mona Lisa.
• The number of websites selling reproductions of this statue is staggering. It's hard to find even a picture of the real thing.

Sources
Loggia's art history section, Aphrodite of Melos
Wikipedia's page on the Venus de Milo
The Louvre's page on the Venus de Milo, translated from the French
"Base Deception," Smithsonian Magazine, October 2003
Photo from the Louvre