Apple #673: Mallard Ducklings

I hope you all had a lovely Memorial Day weekend.  I just participated in a mallard duckling rescue.



Mallard duckling. The fuzziness of these things is unreal.
(Photo from Postcards from Sussex)


I was walking around the park near my house when I heard all sorts of peeping.  It was getting near twilight, and I caught sight of a little bird in the grass that I thought at first was a sparrow.  But it was moving differently than that, sort of side to side, and then I realized it was a mallard duckling.  A little fuzzy thing, no adult ducks in sight, and it was walking around fast as its tiny little legs could carry it, peeping away like mad, clearly trying to find its parents.

Then it motored its little legs under a parked car.  Which turned out to have a person sitting in it.  She saw me looking under her car, so I told her a baby duckling had just run underneath it.  The woman immediately froze, even though she wasn't driving, didn't even have her car turned on.  She was asking me, "Is it still under there?  Is it still there?"  Every time the little duckling caught sight of me, it would run back under the car and hide next to one of the wheels.



Duckling on the water, where the little one I found probably would prefer to be.  Again, with the fuzziness.  It might be the fuzziness that makes people immediately protective of them.
(Photo by HAZY at RSPB)


Finally, it ran out the other side of the car away from me, across the parking lot, and toward the street.  I pointed out to the woman that the duckling was out from under her car, then followed the duckling to try to keep it from running out into the street.

I kept trying to get on the other side of it, to drive it back away from the street and in the direction of the duck pond.  I don't know if that's where it's parents were, but that's probably where the duckling would stand the best chance of finding them.  But the duckling kept running away from me, still peeping like crazy the entire time.

It ran into the grass, and then along came two dogs followed by their owner.  The dogs were very interested in the fact that I was walking slowly through the grass--clearly stalking something--and it was very hard to see by this time, so I don't think they knew the duckling was there.  The man asked the dogs, "What are you so curious about?"  I told him, "There's a little duckling here.  I'm trying to get it to go to the pond."

Immediately the man understood.  He got on the opposite side of the duckling and tried to close off the duck's exit to catch it.  One of his dogs went forward to get involved, but he pushed the dog out of the way.  The duckling was getting tired, but was still peeping like fire alarm.  The man got his hands on the duck but it wriggled out and ran toward me.  I bent down to scoop it up, and I almost had it.  The duckling was in my hands for not even half a second before it slipped out of my hands and kept running.

Another try, and the man got the duckling in both his hands, the duckling poking its little head out as far as it could to try to get free.  We thanked each other, and he went off toward the pond, carrying the duckling up next to his face, his dogs following, and I went on my way.



You know how you've always imagined that duckling down must feel completely soft?  Well, you've imagined absolutely right.
(Photo from Gower Bird Hospital, sourced from Barbelith)


I've already done a Daily Apple about Mallard Ducks, but I thought I would find out a few things about just the ducklings.

• A mother duck will not abandon her young if a human touches them.  However, if you come upon a duck family, it's best to keep your distance so you don't scare off the mother.  The ducklings can easily get separated from each other, which may have been what happened in this instance.

• Usually about 9-13 ducklings, or chicks, are born in one nest.  

• Predators, accidents, bad weather, and getting separated from the mother usually reduces the number of ducklings that survive by at least half.

This mother duck hatched 14 ducklings.  Eight weeks later, her family was down to 6.
(Photo from Words4It)

• Ducklings are born with their eyes open.  Ducks have excellent color vision.

• Ducklings can leave the nest within hours of hatching.  They have a full layer of down to keep them warm, so once they're hatched they do not need to return to the nest to keep warm.  

• So it is possible for ducklings to survive without their mother, but they stand a much better chance of getting enough food and taking care of themselves if they stay with her for the first 5 weeks or so.

A whole lotta ducklings = a whole lotta fuzziness.
(Photo from Gobirding.eu)

• They are also born able to swim, but they lack the oil gland called the "preen gland" that produces the oil necessary to waterproof their feathers.  The mother will collect oil from her preen gland and spread it over their down.

• From this photo (which says it's copyrighted to someone so I won't load it here), it looks like ducklings really get some power going in the water.

• (By the way, when you see adults ducks standing on the shore going over their feathers with their beaks, they are spreading the waterproofing oil over their feathers, as well as removing any bugs or unfriendlies that might be in there.)

• One farm that raises ducklings regularly ships day-old ducklings through the mail.  This is how hardy the little things can be.

This isn't exactly learning to fly.  It's more like, You can jump and you'll be all right.

• Ducklings eat mainly seeds and bugs or the larvae of bugs, as well as seaweed and other plants that grow in the water.

• Ducklings learn to fly at 5-8 weeks old, some say.  Others say the flight lessons don't start until 10-12 weeks.

• Ducklings look about the same, regardless of sex, for quite a while.  As they leave the fuzzy downiness of ducklinghood, their feathers become the camouflaged brown similar to an adult female's.  It's not until around 14-16 weeks that the males' feathers change and turn into the shiny gray and green.

These ducklings are in the process of trading their fuzzy down for feathers.
(Photo by Derek Stoner at The Nature of Delaware)



Mallard ducklings, about 8 weeks old.  I'd call these teen-agers, or young ducks.  You know, like young bloods.
(Photo from Words4It)

• One last fact: ducks are never completely asleep.  They often sleep with one eye open, especially if they are on the outer edge of a group and must keep watch.

Sources
Animal Corner, Ducks
Metzer Farms, Mallard Ducks
Mallard Ducks as Pets
Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Mallard
National Geographic's Mallard Ducks
Lakeside Nature Center, Critter Corner--Mallard

Apple #672: Sam the Sham & the Pharaohs

As you may be aware, I've gone on many travels in the past month or so.  Naturally, I encountered many things that made my Apple Lady brain ask many questions. I want to share some of those things with you. But first, I must tell you a story.  And then I will give you some Daily Apple facts.



Betty Boop as Little Red Riding Hood. This is relevant, I promise.
(Screen shot sourced from Pinterest)

On one of my travels, I happened to be in a small town in Michigan, the fair state of my birth.  I am not from that small town (I am not naming names so as to protect the, well, maybe not-so-innocent).  After I finished my a long day of work there, I went exploring.

I found a wonderful restaurant downtown, a pub that served British and Indian food.  Delicious, well-prepared, yet not that expensive.  The wine was tasty, the service was decent, the dessert delicious.  This was on a Wednesday night.  The next night, I tried someplace else and was disappointed.  Friday night, I thought, heck, I liked that first place so much, I'll go back.  Friday, the same place was a completely different scene.

What had been a quiet pub with few occupants toward the end of its night, on Friday, it was a bit of a local hot spot.  A roving guitarist was playing hit songs, and there was a gang of rather soused locals sitting at the top end of the bar.  One of them, a man who looked something like Brian Cox from a couple decades ago, was going back to his seat as I was walking in.



Brian Cox. The man in question looked something like him, hair a bit more lush, face a bit younger and also redder with drink.
(Photo from MovieActors.com)


I'll call our man Mr. Not Cox.

He was obviously having a good time, snapping his fingers along to the roving guitar man's song, which I think was "Yellow Submarine."  I ducked and paused in the doorway, waiting for Mr. Not Cox to pass.  He saw me, smiled, and stopped right in my path.  There wasn't much room to get past him so I was waiting for him to take a step to the side, but he held out his hand for me to go by, laughed, and said, "You're so shy."  It was not about shyness, but I did not want to discuss it.

I went to my table, ordered my food, and watched the Tigers game on TV.  Roving Guitar Man came by, dropped a piece of paper inside a plastic protective sleeve, and told me sotto voce (though his face mike picked it up so that anyone paying attention could hear) to see if there was anything I wanted to hear.  He roved on, playing someone else's earlier request.



This is Usher, but I'm showing you this for the face mic.  Mr. Roving Guitar was wearing one like this, and he also had his guitar wirelessly amped, so wherever he went in the restaurant, everyone could hear him.
(Photo from CelWalls.com)


Names of songs were printed, in alphabetical order, in two columns down the 8-1/2 x 11 sheet of paper.  The list of songs continued on the back.  They included fairly standard 60s & 70s rock songs -- Beatles tunes, some Neil Diamond numbers, Gordon Lightfoot, some Johnny Cash, "A Horse With No Name," you get the picture.  Kind of impressive, that he was essentially saying, "I can play any one of these 150 songs. You name it, I play it."

But he was playing them all in the same boom-chick, happy-go-lucky, hey-everybody-let's-all-have-fun kind of style.  When he roved back to my table a few songs later, I asked him to play Elvis Costello's "Alison," just to see if he could put any kind of real feeling into one of his renditions.





Nope.  He played this song with the same boom-chick, happy-go-lucky style.

I thought that request might be my only shot, but it took a while for my food to arrive, and other people at tables were finishing up and leaving, so Mr. Roving Guitar had fewer people to ask what they wanted to hear.  He came back around to me and asked for another request.

I'd noticed "Little Red Riding Hood" from Sam the Sham & The Pharaohs and thought about asking for that one.  But I decided I'd rather choose something that maybe the whole room could get into.  The soused locals at the bar were getting a little more vocal, singing along to "Cheeseburger in Paradise," so I thought a more sing-along item would go down better.  So I asked Mr. Roving Guitar for "Ring of Fire."





When Mr. Roving Guitar kicked off the song with its unmistakable, "Love, is a burning thing," while still standing near my table, Mr. Not Cox at the bar turned around with excitement and shouted across to me at my table, "Yes! I almost picked this song!  I LOVE this song!  I almost picked it! What a coincidence!"

I nodded with what I hoped was a neutrally pleasant expression and went back to my dinner.

Mr. Roving Guitar clearly knew the soused locals at the bar because he asked a few of them by name what songs they would like to hear.  They asked for all sorts of items from the list--I can't remember now what they all were--and I was half-listening to the music, half-watching the Tigers game.  After a while, I looked over toward the bar to see what the soused locals might pick next when, uh-oh, here comes Mr. Not Cox sliding off his barstool and coming over to my table.

Standing in front of me, he said in a somewhat deprecating fashion, "Our eyes met at some point tonight, I'm not sure when" (I thought, was it when you shouted at me across the bar, or was it that awkward moment when I first walked in and you thought you were being a gentleman but you were really not? But I kept that neutrally pleasant smile on my face and said nothing), "and I thought I'd just come over and say hello, and maybe I could join you for a drink."

I said something completely non-committal in return, like, "Hello," since that was the minimum that was asked of me.  I really did not want Mr. Soused Not Cox to sit down at my table because, in my experience, guys in his condition are not really interested in anything meaningful, they just want to blather on about themselves and say stupid things, and they're hoping to get some physical thing or other out of the deal.  So I tried to let him know, No dice, without having to come out and say it.

Then he says, "I can see you're reluctant.  I didn't mean anything by it.  I just thought, hey, our eyes met at some point, maybe we could have a friendly conversation.  But if you don't want to, hey, that's life."  He shrugs as if to say, no big deal, you want to be a jerk, that's up to you, it's got nothing to do with me.

So I thought I could either tell him to beat it and feel like a jerk, or I could say, No, it's fine, sit down.  So I said, "No, it's fine, sit down."

Instead of taking the chair right next to where he was standing, he went around the table and sat in the one against the wall.  I don't know why he did that, but I thought it was kind of odd.  Maybe so he could still see his fellow soused locals at the bar?  Maybe it was so he could see the bartender and simply wave and call to her, "Could I have another Pinot Grigio?  I don't need two, I'll just take one."



Pinot Grigio.  He didn't need two, just one.
(Photo from Chatham Imports)


So he started talking.  He had retired in November, he loves music, really loves it, loves what this guy plays, loves my purse, how it's blue and all, and he has a place up on Lake Superior where he likes to spend as much time as possible in the summer, but now that he's retired, he can go up there so much more often, and it's beautiful, really beautiful. 

I'm sure it is beautiful.  I like the Great Lakes, myself.  But this was all said with a soused, show-off manner, and I was nodding, half-smiling, all the time thinking, as soon as I've finished my half-glass of wine, I'm out of here.

Then, here comes Mr. Roving Guitar again, playing his latest request, "Little Red Riding Hood."





He's roved over to my table where Mr. Not Cox is still talking, trying to talk over the music, but Mr. Roving Guitar gets louder.  Now, if you don't know the song, you really need to click the button and listen to it.

Because, lo and behold, when Mr. Roving Guitar gets to this verse, the song changes key and gets serious:

What big eyes you have,
The kind of eyes that drive wolves mad.
So just to see that you don't get chased
I think I ought to walk with you for a ways.

and Mr. Roving Guitar, who until now was all boom-chick, play everything exactly the same way, GETS DOWN ON ONE KNEE IN FRONT OF ME AS HE IS PLAYING and is singing to me and in essence telling me, with great, exaggerated but no less sincere seriousness, that the guy sitting at my table is the Big Bad Wolf.

I start laughing because though I do not need him to tell me this, he is absolutely right, and I am impressed at his chutzpah in doing this right in front of the soused locals who surely know him the same as they know Mr. Not Cox.

The thing is, I'm not sure Mr. Not Cox understood what was happening.  He was chuckling away merrily, as if his mark was not being explicitly warned against him.

And then, as the song is going on and Mr. Roving Guitar continues to sing so clearly in my direction he might as well be speaking entire paragraphs to me, my face turns red.  Flaming, super-hot, and I am sure, beet red.

"You're blushing!" Mr. Not Cox announces, pointing.

How very astute.  There's nothing like being pointed at to make a blushing person stop blushing.  Right. 

I said, "Yes, I know," and tried to make myself stop by taking a sip of wine.  Mr. Roving Guitar got up off his knee and went roving around the rest of the bar, finishing his song.

Well, I sat and listened to Mr. Not Cox talk for a little while longer, until I had finished my wine and paid up, and then I took my leave.  I looked around for Mr. Roving Guitar so I could wave in his direction and let him see I was leaving by myself, no wolf with me.  But Mr. Roving Guitar had finished his set and was talking to a woman he knew at the bar.  So I tipped my mental cap to him and left.

And now I will tell you a few things about Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs.



Sam the Sham & the Pharaohs, in a publicity still for a 1965 terrible re-make called When the Boys Meet the Girls
(Photo from Robert Kruse's page on Sam the Sham etc.)

• You may know them by their more famous song, Wooly Bully.

• Sam the Sham's real name is Domingo Samudio.  Some sources spell it Zamudio, except people shortened his last name and called him Sam.

• Sam was born in Dallas, Texas, and that's where his group hails from.

• He was in the Navy in Panama, and then he was a carny for a couple of years, after dropping out of U Texas-Arlington, and before forming the band that would become the Pharaohs.

• They dressed up and called themselves Pharaohs after Yul Brynner's costumes in The Ten Commandments (1956).

•  "Old Ramses, the King of Egypt, looked pretty cool," Sam said once in an interview, "so we decided to become The Pharaohs." 

 

 
Sam and the Pharaohs, 1965

(Photo from Wikipedia)

• He called himself "the Sham" because, as he said, "what I was doing, fronting the band and cutting up was called 'shamming.'"

• The band went through a lot of iterations.  The first group recorded an album which didn't sell at all, so they broke up.  Then another group of people formed the band, they wrote "Wooly Bully" (which is about a monster with two big horns and a wooly jaw), which became all kinds of popular.

• The band changed some more, they recorded lots of songs about nursery rhymes, including "Little Red Riding Hood," and they took the show on the road.

• For a while, they were backed by a group of three female backup singers who called themselves The Shamettes.

• "When I was a kid, about 10 years old or so," Mr. Not Cox told me, "Sam the Sham and the Shamettes came to the fair and my dad took me to see them.  Now, we're from a small town and we're not dumb, there's just a lot you don't see.  And I had never seen anything like the Shamettes."

• "Why, what were they wearing?" I asked, thinking maybe they had on spangly suits like Las Vegas dancing girls.

• "I can't remember, I was only ten, but I do remember I had never seen anything like that." And he gestured with both hands in front of him, signifying, breasts.

Sam and the Shamettes.  They look pretty tame to me.  But maybe this was a relaxed moment, not on stage in all their Shamette glamor.  Or maybe what looks tame to adult-me seemed like a really big deal to a small-town 10 year-old boy.

(Posted on Reddit)

• Sam the Sham & the Pharaohs' fame started to fade as musical tastes changed in the late 60s and early 70s.  Sam tried to remake himself and recorded a blues album in 1971.  It won a Grammy --  for Best Album Liner Notes. 

How's that for a travel Apple?

Sources
Real Life
Robert Kruse's page on Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs
ClassicBands.com, Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs
IMDb, Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs

Apple #671: Why are Barns Red?

I went on a trip last weekend, and I learned many things on that trip that I'd like to share with you. But I also have many pictures to go through and make them look better for public viewing. So while I get that stuff together, I'll tell you something I learned from another trip I took a week or two before.

So I was in the car with my parents, and we were taking a back-roads way to get somewhere.  My dad said, "Look for the big red barn."  That was his landmark at the corner where we were supposed to turn.  I thought, why are barns red, anyway?

Thus a Daily Apple is born.



Even this dog is wondering, I wonder why that barn is red.
(Photo from Bedlam Farm)

• When the States were first being colonized and Europeans were building barns here, they didn't paint them at all.

Present-day unpainted barn in Ontario.
(Photo from East Gwillimbury CameraGirl)

• People back in Europe painted their barns, but paint was really expensive and the early settlers didn't have that kind of money.  So they made do without paint.

• The problem with the unpainted barn was that it was susceptible to mold and sun damage and other forms of decay.  So you'd have to replace parts of the barn every so often, which could also get expensive.

• After a few decades of trial and error, people discovered that one particular mixture was good at protecting the wood from some of the decay.  Ingredients:

• milk--a very common base in what was paint in those days
• lime--the mineral, not the fruit, used as whitewash
• linseed oil--a plant-based oil, good at repelling termites and other wood-eating bugs.  It is naturally orange-ish tan and it stains wood that color too.

• But while the linseed oil was good at stopping bugs, it wasn't very good at stopping the mold.  Soon farmers discovered that mold really does not like rust.  So they started adding rust to their barn-painting mixture.  Rust, a.k.a. ferrous oxide or iron oxide, is also orange-ish in color, so that stained the wood an even darker color, something in between orange and dark red.

• Irony note (hey, that's a pun!): back then, people were adding rust to the paint to keep the mold away.  Today, people put paint on metal to keep the rust away. 

• (Read why physics guy Yonatan Zunger says we have dying stars to thank for red paint: short version; long version.) 

Someone in Leelanau, Michigan has a sense of humor.

(Photo from Ohio Barns)

• Then the Industrial Revolution happened, and toward the end of the 19th century, paint got a lot cheaper.  The cheapest color of paint was red.  Why? Because the ingredient that turns paint red is rust, and rust is some dirt-cheap and prevalent stuff.  So the rust made the red paint cheap.

• When people tell this story about the red barns, the don't say that the red paint also contained rust, though it probably did, at least at first.  People say that farmers bought the red paint because it was cheap. 

• The result was, a whole lot of people started painting their barns red.*  Eventually, barns eventually seemed to us non-farmers like they just plain ought to be red.

Red barn in Oklahoma
(Photo from Photos from [the Middle of] Oklahoma)

• I can't find anything that says for certain whether red paint today contains rust.  I suspect it does not.  I suspect the red is made using some other even less expensive materials.  Which in turn means that the red paint would not actually protect the wood from mold.  So probably the wood is treated in some other method, and then painted red for cosmetic reasons.

• *Not everybody painted their barns red.  In some places, whitewash was still the cheapest coating, so a lot of barns in those areas were kept white.  White is still the preferred color for dairy barns in some parts of the country, especially in Pennsylvania. But now that preference probably has less to do with cost and more to do with people's associations with white and milk and cleanliness.

Whitewash barn, location unknown
(Photo from donnan.com)

• *In tobacco-growing states like Kentucky and North Carolina, barns are often painted black.  This is because black absorbs and retains more heat, which helps to cure the tobacco that's stored in the barns.

Black barn with tobacco leaves hanging from the ceiling, being cured. This is in Harrison County, Kentucky.
(Photo from Prune Picker)

The red paint also makes a really nice contrast against green grass. So people like to paint red barns. I mean, they like to paint pictures of red barns. Like this:



Red barn painting by William Erwin
(Prints available from fineartamerica)

Sources
Howstuffworks, Why are barns usually painted red?
Live Science, Why Are Barns Traditionally Painted Red?
Mental Floss, Why Are Barns Usually Red?
Farmers' Almanac, Why are barns painted red?
Smithsonian, Barns Are Painted Red Because of the Physics of Dying Stars
Elizabeth Jayne, Milk Paint: Easy to Make, Economical, and Eco-Friendly Too

Apple #670: Easter Candy Facts

A lot of people have a lot of opinions about Easter.  I have mine, you have yours.  But one thing we can all agree on is Easter candy.  So here are your fast Easter candy facts to have at the ready as you're sitting around with friends & family this weekend, gnawing the ears off some hapless chocolate bunny.

The bunny might be hopless too, since it's chocolate. Hahahaha!

Look at the ears on those chocolate bunnies.  Just asking for it.
(Photo and chocolate bunnies from Lake Champlain Chocolates. Each year, they make a 3-pound chocolate bunny they affectionately call Mr. Goodtime Bunny.)

• After Halloween, Easter is the biggest candy holiday of the year.  Bigger than Christmas. 

• 120 million pounds of Easter candy are sold each year in the United States.

• The total amount of candy manufactured in anticipation of each Easter includes:

• 90 million chocolate bunnies
• 91.4 billion eggs of various sorts
• 700 million marshmallow Peeps
• 16 million jelly beans

• Children's favorite color of jelly bean: red. 

There's one marshmallow Peep born every 6 seconds.
(Photo from Buzznet)

• Altogether, we Americans spend $14.7 billion with a B on Easter stuff.  Not just candy, but decorations, clothes, Easter bonnets, etc.  That's about $131 per household. 

• $2.1 billion with a B of that is candy.
• 70% of the $2.1 billion is chocolate.

• 76% of chocolate bunny-eaters say they eat the ears first. 

• According to Guinness world records, the largest chocolate Easter egg was over 34 feet tall and weighed 15,873 pounds. I'd hate to be around when that thing hatched.

• Cadbury starts making & selling their creme eggs on New Year's Day through Easter.  So get 'em now before they vanish for the rest of the year. 

What's the creme in those Cadbury eggs made of? Sugar & water. That's it.
(Photo from Buzznet)



Hoppy Easter!
(Photo from Healthline)


Sources
Do Something.org, 11 Facts About Easter
ABC15 Arizona, Easter candy: 9 facts that may surprise you
ABCNews, 90 Million Chocolate Bunnies and Other Fun Easter Facts
Chicago News Tween US, Hunting for Easter egg trivia? Find 11 fun facts here

Apple #669: La Brea Tar Pits

I've been meaning to do an entry on the La Brea Tar Pits for quite some time.  A recent news tidbit about bee fossils from the Tar Pits reminded me, so now seems as good a time as any.

To go along with that news, here are a few facts about the tar pits:

• Since people are always talking about fossils and natural history discoveries and things they learned about animals found in the tar pits that lived a long time ago, I always assumed the Tar Pits were out in the boonies somewhere.  

Also, this is the kind of picture I've always seen of the La Brea Tar Pits.  Enormous animals duking it out in some ancient wildnerness, teetering on the edge of the tar pits and about to fall in and become fossils for us to discover centuries later.
(Image from Wikipedia)

• Nope.  The La Brea Tar Pits are in downtown Los Angeles.

• The park is just off Wilshire Boulevard, which is LA's "Miracle Mile" -- its high-class main street that goes right through downtown and extends all the way to Santa Monica.

One of the many modern-day structures on Wilshire Boulevard: the LA County Museum of Art
(Photo by Luis Sinco at the LA Times)



A popular tour route of Los Angeles and Hollywood, including stops such as Paramount Studios, Melrose Avenue shopping, the Chinese Theatre, Beverly Hills -- and the La Brea Tar Pits, (down at the bottom of this map).
(Map and tour from City Discovery)



Present-day pictures of the tar pits still look rather wilderness-y, with statues of giant now-extinct animals duking it out in the tar pits.  Oh, but there's a modern-day building tucked behind those bushes.
(Photo by Roger Weller from Cochise College)

• Long, long ago, back before the tar pits even existed, Los Angeles used to be underwater.  The marine animals and fishes that lived in the water died and their skeletons along with all the other stuff that's in water settled at the bottom.  Over time, more stuff accumulated, pressing down on those dead fishes et cetera, until they got turned into the good old fossil fuels we all know and love.

• Eventually, the crude oil that was formed seeped up through cracks in the ground to the surface.  Wouldn't oil barons of today love that -- a pool of oil just sitting there on the ground.

• But the "lighter components" of the oil evaporate out, and what's left behind is what we call tar.  

• Actually, it's asphalt. The black, hot, sticky stuff that road crews onto the street.  And did I mention it's sticky?

• To recap, we've got a pool of marine animals which died and got turned into oil, which surfaced and now that's turned into a giant pool of asphalt, which is super sticky.  Animals that blunder into it get stuck, can't pull away, and since it's a deep pool of the stuff, they sink into it and die.  Then they get turned into fossils.  This happened right around the end of the last Ice Age.  These are the fossils that people today are excavating and examining.

• Right in the middle of downtown Los Angeles.  I still can't get over that.

• Before the pits were turned into a natural park, people did scoop out the tar and use it.  Early Native Americans used it as caulk for their canoes and baskets.  Later people used the tar for roofing material, just as we use asphalt to make shingles today.  It was when they started drilling for oil in the 1800s that they discovered the skeletons in the pits.

• It just so happens that asphalt makes an excellent preservative.  Bird bones, exoskeletons of insects, even the unborn larvae of bees are kept so intact, researchers have been able to understand a whole lot of things about plants & animals that don't even exist anymore.

• The asphalt does turn the bones brown, but otherwise, everything is really well-preserved. That's how scientists are able to study such tiny and specific things as the pupae of leafcutter bees.

• As of 1992, people studying the tar pits had unearthed more than 3.5 million individual plants and animals that belong to over 600 species.  Of course studies are ongoing, so there are more likely many more specimens in the collection; they just haven't done a census recently.

• Some of the types of animals that have been found in the tar pits include:

• Squirrels
• Rabbits
• Skunks
• Bats
• Herons
• Ducks
• Vultures
• Hawks
• Falcons
• Owls
• Pigeons
• Roadrunners
• Pocket gophers
• Raccoons
• Ground sloths
• Saber-toothed tigers
• Horses
• Cattle
• Camels (I know; camels?!)
• Mastodons 
• Elephants
• Bears
• Humans (one person, a woman)

• Can you imagine, being a bird and being all light and feathery and flying around, and then you get some of that dastardly asphalt on your wings.  You're a stuck bird and you ain't going no place.

• This list represents only a fraction of the plants & animals & insects that have been found and identified, from 6 pits so far.  More research is underway at a new location, and they will also be looking at "microfossils."  So who knows what else they may discover.

Skull of the saber-toothed "tiger."
(Photo from the University of California Museum of Paleontology)

• The saber-toothed tiger (Smilodon) is the second-most common mammal fossil that has been found in the tar pits.  More than 2,000 of them have been excavated.

• It's not actually that closely related to today's tiger.  It was about a foot shorter than our lions today and instead of a long tail, it had a bobtail.  Which suggests it didn't run after prey in which case it would need a tail to help it navigate, but rather ambushed its food.

• Their incisors were 8 inches long.  

• Most likely, they ate bison and sloths and camels.  Yes, camels.

• The saber-toothed tiger went extinct about 10,000 years ago.  Which, in paleontology terms, is pretty recent. 

This is what scientists at the La Brea museum think the sabertooth tiger might have looked like. This is a life-sized puppet, created with help from Jim Henson's Creature Shop.
(Photo from the La Brea Page Museum)

Camelops skull
(Drawing from the National Park Service)

• The species of camel that has been found in the Tar Pits -- Camelops -- is now extinct.  But camels actually originated in North America, not the Middle East.

• Southern California and Idaho were not desert-like back in that time, but were more likely grasslands or even wetlands.  

• Since humps are not the sort of thing to get fossilized, scientists aren't sure whether the Camelops had a hump or not. 

• It is thought that camels did not adapt to desert conditions until after they arrived in Asia and the Middle East.  It is thought that they traveled there over land, which was possible way back then when the geography was much, much different than it is today.

• Camelops are more closely related to today's llamas.

Artist's rendering of what the Camelops may have looked like.
(Drawing from the La Brea Page Museum)



Skeleton of Harlan's Ground Sloth
(Photo from Fossil Treasures of Florida)

• Skeletons of Harlan's Ground Sloth (Paramylodon harlani) and other types of ground sloths, all of which are extinct, have been found in all sorts of places, from La Brea to Antarctica, Florida to Patagonia.

• The Harlan's Ground Sloth lived all across what is now the United States, but mostly in the West.

• These dudes liked the grasslands best, too.

• The Harlan's Ground Sloth was probably about 9 feet tall and weighed somewhere around 2,300 pounds -- "bison-sized" as one site puts it.

• They were probably prey for the saber-toothed tiger (Smilodon).

• They had bony knobs the size of pebbles (osteoderms or dermal ossicles) embedded in their skin which would have acted as a kind of armor. 

• Their closest relatives today are anteaters, armadillos, and pangolins.  Armadillos & pangolins also have osteoderms, but of a much different shape and growing closer together in complex patterns.

Artist's reconstruction of a Harlan's Ground Sloth. This one looks quite friendly.
(Drawing from the La Brea Page Museum)


For a really good pictorial overview of the history of the Tar Pits from 40,000 years ago to today, check out the La Brea Page Museum's Timeline.


Sources
Wilshire Boulevard, a Main Street that stands apart, Los Angeles Times, March 23, 2013
University of California Museum of Paleontology, La Brea Tar Pits, What Is a Sabertooth? Timeline 
Howstuffworks, How the La Brea Tar Pits Work
Los Angeles County Natural History Museum Rancho La Brea Collections
La Brea Tar Pits Page Museum Collections
National Park Service, Camelops
San Diego Zoo Library, Extinct Ground Sloth, Tardigrada
Fossil Treasures of Florida, Harlans Ground Sloth

Apple #668: Yellow Sac Spiders, Mazda6s, and the Smell of Gas

All right, you lazy copycat reporters.  I'm calling you on your mindless repetition of other sources without doing any fact-checking of your own, right here and now.

There's a story getting repeated like mad by every major news source, minor news source, TV news page, web newsjunkie page, and car fan blog out there.  They're all saying the same thing over and over so it probably doesn't matter which source I quote, so I'll just pick one.

[EDIT: Since search engines are picking up the portion of this entry that repeats the untrue statement, I am going to amend the news article so that it is factually correct.]

The 2014 Mazda6 -- not included in the recall.  The recall only covers some 42,000 Mazda6s made in 2010-2012.  But all you reporters who are reporting repeating this story had BETTER look at things differently.

(Photo by Aaron Gold, from About.com Cars)

Here is the story from the AP Newswire, picked up and reposted verbatim by ABCNews [and edited to be correct, by me]:

Mazda is recalling 42,000 Mazda6 cars in the U.S. because spiders can weave a web in a vent hose and cause the fuel tank to crack.

The recall involves cars from the 2010 through 2012 model years equipped with 2.5-liter engines.

The yellow sac spider, which is [NOT NECESSARILY] attracted to hydrocarbons, builds webs [SACS] that [MAY] cause pressure to build in the fuel tank. That increases the risk of fuel leaks and fire.

Mazda recalled cars in 2011 for the same problem. It put covers on the vent line, but has found spiders can get past them.

Mazda will update the cars' software for free beginning this month to ensure that the fuel tank pressure doesn't build up.

Mazda says no injuries or fires have been reported due to the issue.

SPOILER: I can find no evidence whatsoever that yellow sac spiders "are attracted to hydrocarbons" or "like the smell of gas" or any other such anthropomorphic explanation for their behavior.  So how many other elements of this story are untrue, and continuing to be repeated as if they are?

Of the innumerable sources reporting repeating this story, many have headlines such as 

• Gas-Loving Spiders Cause Mazda Recall
• Gasoline-Sniffing Spiders Strike Back
• Spiders [sic] Gasoline Huffing Cause Mazda Recall
• A Gasoline-Addict Spider Gets 52,000 Mazda6 Cars Recalled in the US.

• (Some clarification: This particular model of car was recalled in 2011 for the spiders-in-the-fuel-line reason.  So there are two bouts of news stories on this topic, one batch from 2014 and another from 2011.  The fix that Mazda came up with in 2011 was insufficient to keep the spiders out.  They've figured out a different solution, so they've issued a new recall to get people to bring their cars in to get the new fix.  Both bouts of news stories did the same repetition thing, with the occasional clever headline meant to incite hilarity.) 

• Some further clarification: It's not that the cars are infested with spiders, as some headlines suggest.  It's that sometimes a spider may build a nest in the fuel line. If that happens, damage to the fuel-related parts may result.  Mazda wants to recall the cars to put in a fix in order to prevent that damage.

I thought, "This is interesting, a spider that likes the smell of gasoline.  I want to know more about that."  So I did some searching about the yellow sac spider.  Here are some of the basic, most salient facts:



The yellow sac spider is very common.  You probably recognize it by its pale body and the dark tips at the end of its legs.
(Photo from Jonesblog)

• The yellow sac spider is very common throughout the United States.

• It likes to hang out under leaves or in crevices or in hidden spots because it stalks and hunts its prey, usually at night.

• Typical nesting spots include under leaves, in woodpiles, or under stones. In or around a house they may be found up in the corners, under eaves, or behind baseboards.

• This spider is so-named because its body is yellow and it builds sacs, rather than webs.  (Let me repeat that: this spider does not build webs.)  In addition to being the spider's daily retreat, the sac is also the place where the female stores her eggs until they hatch.

• The only reason people pay much attention to this type of spider is because its bite contains a mild venom that can be painful to people.  If you get a spider bite that hurts and maybe even swells a bit, it is probably from a yellow sac spider.

• If you've gotten such a bite, clean it with iodine or other antiseptic and put ice on it. 

One example of the kind of Photoshopped images showing the yellow sac spider in a gas tank. 
(Image from Free Republic)


None of the pages describing the yellow sac spider in & of itself said anything about the spider liking the smell of gasoline, or hydrocarbons, or hydrogen oxide.

Let me repeat that but in a slightly different way: all of the entomology/spider/species resources I checked said NOTHING about this type of spider liking the smell of gasoline.




Yellow sac spiders do have one unusual physical feature: they have 8 eyes, 2 more than most spiders have.
(Photo by Joseph Berger, from Bugwood.ord, sourced from CNNMoney)

• There are a couple types of spider that do utilize hydrocarbons: 

• The males of certain very tiny dwarf spiders (linyphiids) emit a type of hydrocarbon that works sort of like a pheromone and tells females the male is fit and would make a suitable mate.

• Another type of spider called corinnids mimic the ants that they live among so they can eat the ants with impunity.  These types of spiders look or walk like the ants. One species even has the mimicry down to such a science, they also emit a hydrocarbon, similar to one that the ants themselves use, which tells the ants "I am a colony-member, not an intruder."  Like the yellow sac spider, corinnids build sacs.  But corinnids are in the genus Castianeira, and yellow sac are in the Cheiracanthium genus.

• These are the only two types of spiders I found that have anything to do with hydrocarbons.  But these are not yellow sac spiders.

The only sources I found that said anything about the yellow sac spider in particular liking the smell of gasoline, or hydrocarbons, or hydrogen oxide, were all news articles or blog posts about the Mazda recall.

Seemed pretty fishy to me. I wondered, did someone make a factually incorrect statement at some point, and everyone has just kept repeating that statement without checking it, for years?

So I started looking into some of the supposedly factual statements in the news release.

For example, you may have noticed that the AP story I quoted above (and all the others robotically following suit) says that the spiders in the Mazda gas tank are building webs and it's the webs that are causing problems.  But, as we've learned, yellow sac spiders do not build webs, they build sacs.

Is it the news sources that are incorrectly describing what the spiders are doing?  Maybe the original information from Mazda was more specific and accurate.  So I found the recall notice.



Diagram showing Mazda's evaporative canister and other parts of the fuel system where the spider may build its home. 
(Diagram from Engine-Codes.com)

• The text of the actual 2014 recall notice from Mazda says that a spider "may weave a web" in the evaporative canister vent line, causing a restriction.  It says that in November 2013, Mazda "found that there was a crack in the fuel tank and a spider web was present in the canister vent line," and they found 9 cases of similar situations.  Webs. 

• In February 2014, they changed the way they wrote the software code that controls the fuel tank pressure to keep the tank from cracking "even under such a severe condition as the canister vent line is clogged by a spider web."  Again, web.

Well, maybe Mazda are just trying to be general in their description, to use language everybody will understand, rather than to use something more specific like "spider sacs" or some such.  Or maybe the thing they were seeing in the fuel line was really a web, and not a sac.  So maybe this particular spider isn't really a yellow sac spider at all.



This is the thing that a yellow sac spider builds: a sac.  Here, a female is tucking her eggs into it.
(Photo from Forestry Images)

• The text of the actual 2014 recall notice from Mazda does not name the spider, but says only "a certain type of spider" may get into the fuel works. 

So where did the assertion that this spider is a yellow sac spider come from?

• According to an LA Times article published in 2011 when Mazda issued the first recall notice, it was Mazda that identified the spider as the yellow sac: 

• "Mazda identified the culprit as the yellow sac spider, or Cheiracanthium inclusum. The pale, mildly venomous creatures lay their eggs in silk-wrapped bunches — usually in vegetation. But why they're choosing Mazdas instead of, say, Porsche Spyders, is a mystery. As is the fact that only the 4-cylinder Mazda6 cars are playing host."

So it is definitely the yellow sac spider that is spinning its webs building its sacs inside Mazda6 cars.  I'm going to give Mazda the benefit of the doubt on this point, and say that they use the word "web" in their recall notice so as to be easily understood, when they more accurately should have said "sac."

But we still have the question that got me started on all of this: where did this business of yellow sac spiders liking the smell of gas come from?  That, after all, is the reported reputed reason why they are building their webs sacs in the fuel lines of Mazada6s. 

• In 2011, when the first recall notice was issued, USA Today actually talked to an entomologist -- not one, but two!  The first one said that the yellow sac spider is very common, you often see them running around in your kitchen or basement.  

• The second entomologist said that yellow sac spiders

"are found throughout the nation, and there is no particular reason why they would choose the inside of a car body to hang out, rather than some other crevice, says Rick Vetter, a researcher at the University of California-Riverside."

• Nothing about liking the smell of gas.  Or hydrocarbons.  Or hydrogen oxide.  Only that inside a fuel tank is a nice, hidden little spot like any other hidden little spot that they like for sac-building.

• This business of yellow spiders liking the smell of gas seems to come from news stories around the time of that first recall in 2011.  And the original source for that assertion seems to be here (I'm quoting from Reuters, but a whole bunch of sources picked this up and repeated this verbatim):

"While it's very rare, this spider's distinguishing characteristic is that it likes the smell of gasoline, caused by the hydrogen oxide," said automotive journalist Mitsuhiro Kunisawa. "Once it smells the gasoline from outside, it will go inside."

• First of all, I think the referent for the "it's very rare" is not the spider but the (supposed) preference for the smell of gasoline.  Because Kunisawa does say a few sentences later, "In the United States, it's a relatively common type of spider."

• But what about "this spider's distinguishing characteristic is that it likes the smell of gasoline"?  Where does he get that?  He is an automotive journalist.  What does he know about particular spiders' distinguishing characteristics? 

• Even if Kunisawa was correct about that (and he wasn't; the distinguishing characteristic of the yellow sac spider is that it has a venom which results in mild pain when people get bitten by it), why didn't any of these countless news sources check him on that?  

Mitsuhiro Kunisawa.  A decent enough guy, I'm sure.  Loves reporting about cars.  But maybe not the most authoritative source on the habits of spiders.
(Photo from SixStar-ism)

• Why didn't anyone call up an entomologist and ask, hey, do yellow sac spiders like the smell of gasoline?  But they didn't.  They just quoted the automotive journalist about the reason for the behavior of a spider as if it were verified fact.

Lazy.  Lazy, sloppy journalism. Perpetuated through an entire news cycle in 2011, and then picked up and perpetuated again in 2014.

Now here are some actual facts:

• The yellow sac spider may or may not like the smell of gasoline.  Probably it has no opinion one way or the other.  The reason it (does not spin its web but) builds its sac in the fuel line of Mazda6s is probably because that spot is a nice, hidden location.

• Spiders of various species are known to occasionally build webs or nests in fuel lines of cars, regardless of make or model (See Car Talk; Hearth message board; and more Car Talk).  If you go to fill your gas tank and the nozzle shuts off after only about 1/4 of a tank for no apparent reason, and continues to do so after repeated unsuccessful attempts, it is possible a spider may have built a web in the works and that is causing fumes to accumulate and shut off the system.

• Spiders may build a nest somewhere in your car, but a spider building a nest in the fuel line so that it causes a crack or other failure is not that common.  Only 9 cases -- or was it 20? -- were reported to Mazda since 2011.  That's out of thousands and thousands of cars.

• Only some of the Mazda6s are being recalled -- only the ones built in the Flat Rock, Michigan plant from 2010 to 2012.

• Why the yellow sac spiders prefer only the Mazda6s from Flat Rock, Michigan, and not Mazda6s built elsewhere, Mazda does not say. 

• That, my friends, is probably where the real story lies: that it is only the fuel lines of cars built in Flat Rock, Michigan that are negatively affected by spiders.  Not some made-up anthropomorphic-mythological junk about spiders liking the smell of gasoline.

The Flat Rock assembly plant is no longer owned by Mazda.  As of 2012, it now belongs to Ford. They switched to building new Mustangs and the 2013 Ford Fusion sedan.

(Image from Mustangs Daily)

Sources
Recall news articles - 2014
Detroit News, Spiders prompt second Mazda recall for possible fuel tank problem, April 4, 2014
ABCNews, Mazda Recalling Cars Due to Danger from Insect, April 4, 2014
Reuters, Gasoline-loving spiders cause Mazda car recall for second time, April 4, 2014
WTVR.com, Gasoline-loving spiders prompt another Mazda recall, April 5, 2014
WKYC.com, For real? Mazda's latest recall due to a spider, man, April 4, 2014
WPTV, Mazda6 recall: Yellow sac spider can weave webs in vent hose, causing fuel tank to crack, April 5, 2014
Boston.com, Mazda6 recalled for spider infestations, April 5, 2014
CarScoops, Gasoline-Sniffing Spiders Strike Back, Mazda Recalls 42,000 Mazda6 Sedans in the U.S., April 4, 2014
Autoblog, Mazda spiders return,42k Mazda6 sedans recalled for webby fuel tanks, April 5, 2014
Edmunds.com, 2010-'12 Mazda 6 Recalled for Fire Risk Traced to Spiders, April 4, 2014
WebProNews, Spiders [sic] Gasoline Huffing Cause Mazda Recall, April 4, 2014

Recall news articles - 2011
USA Today, Experts: Spiders infesting recalled Mazdas are "common," March 4, 2011
USA Today, Spider infestation leads to recall of 65,000 Mazdas, March 3, 2011
Los Angeles Times, Mazda recalls 65,000 cars for spider problem, March 3, 2011
CarScoops, A Gasoline-Addict Spider Gets 52,000 Mazda6 Cars Recalled in the US, March 4, 2011
CNN, Spiders lead to Mazda recall, March 3, 2011
Reuters, Gas-loving spider prompts Mazda to recall in U.S., March 4, 2011

Yellow sac spider information
University of Nebraska-Lincoln Extension in Lancaster County, Spider Bites? Look for a Sac Spider
Michigan State University Diagnostic Services, Yellow sac spiders (Cheiracanthium inclusum and C. mildei)
The Ohio State University Extension Fact Sheet, Sac Spiders
Penn State University Entomology, Agrarian Sac Spider
Washington State University Department of Entomology, Yellow Sac Spider
Encyclopedia of Life, Cheiracanthium inclusum / Yellow Sac Spider
San Mateo County Mosquito and Vector Control District, Yellow Sac Spider brochure 
Orkin, Yellow Sac Spiders
PermaTreat, Yellow Sac Spider
Hulett Environmental Services, Yellow (Golden) Sac Spiders

Spiders who like hydrocarbons
ASBMB Today, Q&A with Stefan Schulz
Richard J. Adams, Field Guide to the Spiders of California and the Pacific Coast States

Mazda6 recall documents
NHTSA safercar.gov, Spiders may Block Fuel Tank Vent Line, Mazda North American Operations, March 11, 2014
NHTSA Recall Acknowledgment letter, April 3, 2014
Mazda letter to NHTSA submission of voluntary recall, March 11, 2014

Spiders in cars or fuel lines in general
Car Talk, Is the dealer spinning me a yarn about spiders in the fuel line?
Car Talk forum, gas tank fueling problem
Hearth.com, Filling the gas tank and spider eggs, October 22, 2009
Hyundai Forum, Gas tank
Daily and Sunday Express, Black widow spiders found in car, December 12, 2011
Yahoo Answers, How can I repel yellow sac spiders from my car?

Apple #667: The No. 2 Pencil

I thought, after my entry on 666, that I ought to do something at the opposite end of the spectrum.  What could be the opposite of fiery and dramatic and hysterical and murderous?  Hmm.  How about pencils.  So, ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Number 2 Pencil.


The ever-present yellow #2 pencils.
(Photo from the Iqra Foundation)

Let's begin with the basics and then we'll progress to the more complicated questions.

Why, if the writing stuff inside pencils is graphite, do we call it "lead"?

• Partly because once upon a time, way way back in Roman times, the forerunner of the pencil, the stylus, was made of lead.  But of course there is more to the story than that.

• In 1564, in Borrowdale, England, someone walked past a whole bunch of shiny black stuff stuck to the roots of a tree.  I suppose its shininess made it look like it ought to be good for something, and after people played with it a while, they discovered it made dark marks on paper -- good for writing things down, they decided.  Since it looked similar to lead, they called it "blacklead."  (Some people called it plumbago, which is Latin meaning "lead ore.)  Turned out, the stuff was graphite.

• Sidenote: Borrowdale happens to be in the Lake District.  How fitting was it that graphite, a great tool for writing, was literally in the ground of the birthplace of some of Western literature's finest poetry?

Graphite mixed in with tree roots, as it was discovered in Borrowdale, England.
(Photo from the Museum of Everyday Life)

• Holding blacklead by itself was messy and hard to use, so people thought it would be easier to use if they put it inside some sort of holder.  Hey, if you take a wooden stick, hollow it out, and fill it with blacklead, sort of like putting ink inside a quill, then you've really got something there!  (That was the first pencil.)

• In 1796, a German mineralogist figured out that blacklead was a different substance than actual lead.  So he called this stuff graphite.  Which comes with the Greek graphein meaning "write."  He was, in effect, saying, Hey, you can write with this!

• Thereafter, everybody knew that blacklead should be called graphite.  But for whatever reason, when it was inside a pencil, they still called it lead. You know, people. So resistant to change.

• (By the way, Germany started mass-producing pencils in the 1600s.  Faber-Castell, a name many artists will recognize, was founded in 1761 as one of those very early pencil-making companies.)

As the image says, this is the oldest known pencil encased in wood, from Faber-Castell.
(Photo from Pencils.com)

Faber-Castell 250th edition limited edition wooden case of pencils in 120 colors, plus watercolor pencils, pastel pencils, black-lead pencils, woodless graphite, compressed charcoal, and more.  All this started in 1761, from lowly hunks of black stuff stuck in some tree roots.
(Photo from Extravaganzi)

Was Henry David Thoreau really a competitive pencil-making manufacturer in his day job?

• The short answer to this question is yes.  

• (Test-taking hint: if they ask a complicated yes/no question, the answer is usually "yes." They wouldn't have asked it otherwise.)

• Now for the essay response.

• So, in the early 1800s, people in New England discovered that there was a whole lot of graphite thereabouts. Thus, many pencil-making businesses were founded in New England.

• One of those businesses, by the way, was the Joseph Dixon Crucible Company, founded in 1829 in Massachusetts.  One of its graphite mills was located in Ticonderoga, NY. Thus today we have the omnipresent Dixon Ticonderoga pencils.

  
The Dixon Ticonderogas.  These days, probably the most prevalent brand of No. 2 pencils in the US.  This package is available from Amazon for about $10.  Pre-Sharpened Pencil, #2, Yellow Barrel, 30/Pack - DIX13830

• Dixon's company was one of many pencil-makers in the early 1800s in New England.  Another such company was John Thoreau & Company.  John was Henry David's dad. 

Broadside advertising J. Thoreau & Company Pencils, circa 1845.
(Image from the University of Florida George A. Smathers Libraries)

• Thoreau's pencil company was in Concord, New Hampshire.  Another guy, David Munroe, had a pencil-making business of his own, also in Concord, New Hampshire. Munroe & Thoreau, being so geographically close and making the same product -- graphite pencils -- were therefore quite competitive.

• Munroe hired a cabinet-maker, Ebenezer Wood (yes, seriously, he was a cabinet-maker named Wood), to help him cut the cedar wood necessary to hold the graphite.  Wood was also pretty inventive, and he figured out better and faster ways of producing the pencils.

• The way Munroe was making pencils was faster than hollowing out sticks of wood and jamming solid graphite in the middle, but it was still pretty labor-intensive.  He basically made a graphite sandwich inside two slabs of cedar.  Munroe took the graphite, ground it to a powder, and mixed it with glue.  Meanwhile, he took the cedar wood, cut it into slabs to form a rectangular casing, hollowed out a trough in the casing, and then poured the graphite-glue mix into the trough.  Then he put another hunk of cedar on top of the first, and sealed the two with a veneer.  Once everything was dry, he cut the pencils out of the slab in a suitable size & shape. 

• Wood made this whole process go faster.  He was the first one to use a circular saw to cut the pencils out of the slab, and he also invented a machine that could mold & trim the pencils 12 gross at a time. He was also the first one to cut pencils in the octagon shape -- the same shape most pencils have today.

• All these innovations were a big deal.  Faster, cheaper, better -- everybody a hard time competing with that.  Thoreau and his dad were no exception.

Ebenezer Wood, inventor of many pencil-making processes that sped up the works, and a gadfly to the Thoreaus.
(Photo from Acton Conservation Lands)

• Although Ebenezer Wood was working & inventing for Munroe, he was also grinding the graphite in his mill for the Thoreaus as well as for Munroe.  In an act of further competitiveness, Munroe tried to get Wood to stop grinding the Thoreaus' graphite.  But he continued grinding the Thoreaus' graphite because, as it turned out, the Thoreaus had more customers and a bigger business than Munroe did.

• How did that happen?  Enter Henry David.

• After graduating from Harvard, good old H.D.T. wanted to make a go of it as a writer & teacher, but it didn't go too well.  So he went back home to his dad's pencil business.  He worked part time, probably writing in his non-pencil-making off hours.  But while he was doing his part-time-pencil-making, he came up with some pretty major inventions.

• He figured out how to inject the ground graphite goo directly into a hollowed-out pencil.  With his innovation, none of that cedar-slab-making-and-cutting business was necessary.  Sped up the process enormously, much faster than Wood's circular saw ever could.  Thoreau also invented a machine that would grind the graphite to an especially fine powder.

• Not usually how you think of old "I went to the woods" Thoreau, is it?  As an inventor of early industrial machinery?  But that's what he was first.

Henry David Thoreau, civil disobedient, woods-goer, and transcendentalist, was first a pencil-maker and a machine-inventor.
(Daguerreotype by Benjamin D. Maxham from Wikipedia)
 

• In fact, Thoreau continued to work in the pencil-making business off and on for most of the rest of his adult life.  A final nail in your coffin of innocence, I know.

• By the way, a lot of people are a little fast & loose with the facts, and they say that Thoreau came up with the idea of mixing poor-quality graphite with clay to make the ground graphite easier to work with and yield a better result at a lower cost.  In fact, this process was first invented by a French guy named Nicholas-Jacque Conté in 1795.  Thoreau's contribution to this process was to improve upon it a bit and to make it part of how his father's company made their pencil leads.

Are pencils rated on a scale of "hard" and "black"?

• Answer: yes.  Porno-industry-like though that may seem.

• The reason for this rating has to do with that process we just learned about, that graphite and clay are mixed together to make the pencil lead. 

• Sidenote: see, I'm still using that phrase "pencil lead."  Because the core of the pencil, as we now know, is not entirely made of graphite.  So it would also be erroneous to call it the "pencil graphite," or the "pencil clay."  The easiest shorthand to refer to the entire inner core regardless of its mixture is to say "pencil lead."

• As you cooks and chemists might guess, the ratio of clay to graphite makes a difference in the kind of mark the pencil lead will make on the paper.  Contrary to your expectations, the more clay, the harder the lead.  

• It also makes a difference what kind of graphite you have.  If you've got graphite from the Lake District in England, which is much harder and higher quality, it actually makes a lighter mark on the page.  If you've got the New England Thoreau graphite which is softer and of poorer quality, it makes a darker mark.

Pencils with different ratios of graphite & clay make marks of varying degrees of lightness & darkness
(Image from Artmaker)

• So British pencil-makers came up with a system of indicating the hardness of the lead in the pencil.  Hard was denoted with an H and soft was denoted with an S -- no, a B.  Huh?  Since when does Soft = B?

• Since the softer leads produce a darker, or blacker mark.  So Soft = Black which = B.  Harder leads got HHs or HHHs, and the softest/darkest leads got BBs or BBBs.  

• The midway point on this scale is M -- no, it's F.  Again, huh?  Some people say the F means the lead can be sharpened to a finer point, but that makes no sense because there's no reason that lead should sharpen to a finer point than any other lead.  Other people say there is no known logical reason for calling the midpoint F, and they leave it at that.  So I will leave it at that too.

• Leave it to the British to complicate things.  But wait, there's more.

• The British then decided they didn't like repeating all those Bs and Hs, so they put numbers in front of the Bs and Hs.  There was no number to put in front of the F since it's the midpoint.  Then, for reasons no one understands, they also added an HB (Hard-Black, apparently) which is just slightly darker than the F.  So in the end there is no actual midpoint.  And you get this:

How pencil leads are graded according to the British scale
(Image from The Almighty Guru)

• Do you feel us closing in on where Number 2 business comes from?  We are, but wait, there's still more.

• So, you'll remember that Americans were making pencils, too.  They decided they wanted a different scale for indicating the hardness/softness/blackness of their pencil leads.  They decided they wanted to use strictly numbers.  And their numbers would not exactly correspond with the numbers in the British scale.

• The American scale goes like this: 1, 2, 2½, 3, 4.  It's like they were saying, "I'm going to count to five, young lady," and so they threw the 2½ in there.  No, really, I don't know why the 2½.

• When you put the two scales together, you get this:

As you can see, the American #2 matches up with the British HB.

(Image from Jet Pens)

• So the Number 2 pencil that you used to take all those standardized tests in school was really the Hard Black pencil.

• You might be tempted to think that an HB pencil made by, say, Faber-Castell would be of the same darkness as a Number 2 pencil made by, say, Dixon.  It would be lovely if that were the case.  But it's not.  

• This grading scale does not correspond to any kind of industry-wide manufacturing standard.  The relative hardness/blackness of a company's pencils applies only to the company's own pencils.  Thus an HB you get from Faber-Castell may not be of the same HB-ness as an HB from, say, Uni.  So, serious pencil-purchasers are advised to try the pencils of various manufacturers to find the hardness/blackness they prefer.

So is the whole Everybody Must Have a Number 2 Pencil thing kind of a scam?

• Sort of, yes! 

• Not all Number 2 pencils are equal.  Since different manufacturers make their Number 2s to their own specifications, one company's Number 2 will be different than another's.

• The differences might be slight, but they are real.  

• The point of everybody having to get a Number 2 pencil was that was the closest approximation the test-makers could get to making sure everybody had the same writing instrument.  

• I want you to think about that for a minute and let that expand in your mind, especially in this era of standardized school testing.  They can't even get everybody using the same kind of pencil lead.  The best they can do is settle on an approximation. 

Those of us taking standardized tests are not the same.  Even down to our Number 2 pencils, we are different.
(Photo from New Futuro)

• Now seems like the right time to introduce the hotbed topic:

Was a pencil ever used as a murder weapon?

• (You know how to answer this) Yes.

• Most famously, when Julius Caesar was stabbed to death by members of the Senate, he tried to defend himself with the only weapon he had -- his stylus (a.k.a. pencil).  He managed to stab Casca with it, but it wasn't enough of a blow, what with all those other guys with their knives, and he was killed.

• More obscurely, a priest and teacher from the times of early Christianity/Roman rule, Cassian of Imola (a.k.a. Cassianus) was arrested for being a Christian.  He was told to renounce Christianity and he wouldn't do it, so his students "were invited to hack him to death."  The weapons they used were their styluses (pencils).  So it took a really long time for him to die.

• Talk about a violent classroom.

I guess the painter decided not to include the pencil in Caesar's other hand.  Probably thought it too undignified.
(Image from History in the Headlines)

Bonus Question: Why are number 2 pencils yellow?

• When an Austro-Hungarian pencil-making company, the Hardtmuth Company introduced their fancy new pencils at the 1889 World's Fair in Paris, their pencils were painted yellow.  

• The graphite in these pencils came from the Far East, and it was supposed to be the very best graphite in the world.  So to enhance the fanciness of their pencils, they named them after the Koh-i-Noor diamond, a famous diamond in India and the height of luxury, and they painted the outside of the pencils yellow.  Much fancier than the plain old bare cedar wood, these pencils were not only painted, but painted yellow, a color that was difficult to come by in paint in those days.

• Naturally, everyone copied the Hardtmuth Company.  Soon everybody's pencils were painted yellow.

• So, once upon a time, your yellow Number 2 pencils would have been considered luxurious by their very yellow-ness.

Ah, a bouquet of yellow pencils!  How lovely -- and how erstwhile decadent!
(Wallpaper of Bouquet of Pencils from IDMarching)

• Congratulations!  You have reached the end of the test.  Please put down your pencil to signal you have finished.

Sources
Mental Floss, What Makes #2 Pencils So Special?
The Straight Dope, How come you see #2 pencils but no #1 pencils? 
Online Etymology Dictionary, graphite
Jennifer Schuessler, Thoreau's Pencil, The New York Times, May 1, 2009
Pencils.com, Pencil History and Pencil Myths: The Unleaded Pencil
Acton Conservation Land, Early American Pencils
The Museum of Everyday Life, A Visual History of the Pencil
Today in Science History, Joseph Dixon: The Story of a Lead Pencil
Dixon Corporation, Joseph Dixon 1799-1869
The Almighty Guru, Pencil Grades
Jet Pens, Picking the Perfect Pencil Lead Hardness Grade 
Catholic Online, St. Cassian of Imola
New Advent, Classical Latin Literature in the Church
CBS Money Watch, Why Are Pencils Yellow?