Do Elephants Jump? (17 page)

We almost didn’t research this Imponderable because we assumed that the two-minute warning was instituted at the behest of the television networks, who wanted to make sure there were plenty of opportunities to plaster a block of commercials at critical points in the game — right before the climax of the first half and the end of the game. But we were wrong.

We regret ever thinking that the fine executives of professional football and broadcasting might ever be motivated by anything as crass as the mighty dollar. The two-minute warning debuted in 1942, and was created to remedy a nagging problem that threatened the fairness of the game. Until 1942, the official time was kept on the field, and scoreboard clocks often bore little resemblance to the official time. According to Faleem Choudhry, a researcher at the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio, before the two-minute warning, scorekeepers had to notify each team when there was somewhere between ten and two minutes left in the game.

The looseness of the rules constrained coaches. Bob Carroll, executive director of the Pro Football Researchers Association, e-mailed us about the implications:

These days, teams spend a part of most practices running their “hurry-up” offenses (sometimes known as a “two-minute offense”), a prearranged sequence of plays that require no huddle and are designed to burn off as little time as possible. Often the hurry-up offense will commence with the first play following the two-minute warning — after the more than two minutes of TV commercials, of course.

Americans pledge allegiance to the flag. We salute the flag. We burn the flag. We try to pass constitutional amendments to criminalize burning the flag. We fight for the flag. We die for the flag.

A flag is an icon, imbued with emotions, dreams, and fears that extend far beyond its cloth and dyes. You can tell quite a bit about a country by its attitudes toward its flag. Case in point: Japan.

You are probably all familiar with the Japanese flag, the
Hinomaru
(“sun disc”), which some trace back to the time of the Emperor Monbu in the early eighth century.

According to Dan Scheeler, librarian at the Sasakawa Peace Foundation USA Library in Washington D.C.:

During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when various clans and military figures were vying for control of Japan,
Hinomaru
were displayed as military insignia (sometimes with different color schemes to designate particular factions, but the red sun on white background was most common).

For almost 300 years, Japan isolated itself from the West, but in 1853, the militias of two feudal lords fought and killed some sailors from the Royal Navy of England. One of the clans, the Satsumas, fought under the
Hinomaru,
and the English mistakenly assumed that this was their national flag. In order to avoid being mistaken for foreign vessels, a shogun agreed that it might be advisable for Japanese vessels to all carry the same flag, as Richard Allen Jones, of the Japan Information Center of the Consulate General of Japan, explains:

None of this activity likely had the slightest effect on the average Japanese person. But things were about to change. In 1868, the Tokugawa Shogunate was stripped of power, and the Emperor Meiji assumed power. In January 1870, the prime minister proclaimed that all ships must fly the
Hinomaru,
and mandated the dimensions of the flag, which still remain the same today. According to Richard Allen Jones, the first time the
Hinomaru
was flown at a national ceremony was in 1872, on the occasion of the opening by Emperor Meiji of Japan’s first railway. For more than a hundred years after the beginning of the Mejii era, Japanese citizens might fly the flag on important holidays, yet the
Hinomaru
did not possess great iconic value, possibly because it wasn’t officially the national flag of Japan.

Soon after Meiji’s reign, a special flag for the Imperial Navy was introduced. Beginning in 1889, naval vessels flew a sun disc flag with sixteen rays extending to its borders:

Masahiko Noro, executive director of the Japan Foundation in New York, wrote
Imponderables
:

The naval flag, then, is not another version of a national flag. Indeed, there really was no official national flag to be a variation of! So this Imponderable was based on an understandable misconception. We mistakenly assume that the “ray” flag is a variation of the national flag, when it is not related. Most Americans are familiar with the “ray” flag because so many depictions of the Japanese flag we have seen come from war movies, specifically World War II movies, where the naval flag is (realistically) depicted as the military ensign of the Japanese warriors. Even more confusing, the Treaty of San Francisco, which settled the conclusion of World War II, mandated that Japan eliminate its armed forces, so there wasn’t much need for the naval flag after 1945. But in 1952, Japan started to build up “self-defense” forces, which looked suspiciously like a navy to most foreigners. In 1954, the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Forces reclaimed the naval ensign as its own, and it still flies today.

Ironically, while the military flag’s reemergence stirred little passion in the West, the Japanese exhibited deep ambivalence about the
Hinomaru
. To leftists, intellectuals, and union members, in particular, the flag represented a period (1931–1945) of xenophobia and unjustified military aggression. Even those without such strong political feelings tended not to be preoccupied with displaying the flag — even government buildings often did not fly the sun disc.

It was not until 1999 that the
Hinomaru
was officially proclaimed the national flag of Japan, and even then, only a particularly sad incident prompted the change. In Hiroshima, a high school principal was unsuccessfully attempting to use the
Hinomaru
and a patriotic song, the “
Kimigayo,”
in the school’s commencement ceremony. Teachers objected not just to the flag, but also the song, which they thought glorified the imperial system, which was responsible for abhorrent military practices during the war. The lyrics do give credence to the grievance:

The principal, caught between a school board that wanted the flag to be flown and the song to be played at commencement and faculty that was balking, committed suicide the day before graduation. Within days, the government pushed for legalizing the
Hinomaru
as the official national flag (and the “
Kimigayo”
as the national anthem) of Japan, and within six months, accomplished the task.

The brouhaha over the resurrection of the sun disc flag proves that it had become an icon in Japanese culture. Even for those who disagreed with making the
Hinomaru
the official flag, the symbol became worth fighting for.

Want to see stars? We heartily recommend going to the countryside, where there are few lights, and looking up, especially on a cloudless night. As Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller so eloquently phrased it in their song “On Broadway,” “At night the stars put on a show for free.”

If looking up in the sky isn’t edgy enough for you, you can try conking your cranium. Not that it costs anything to bump your head, except potential medical bills. But a knock on the noggin isn’t as reliable as the sky or a visit to the local observatory — you may or may not see stars. And then there’s the little matter of the ensuing headache.

We consulted with several neuro-ophthalmologists, as we weren’t sure whether we saw stars because of damage to the eye or damage to the brain. As it turns out, there is a bit of controversy on the subject, but most agree that most of the time, the “eyes have it.”

Lenworth Johnson, a neuro-ophthalmologist at the Mason Eye Insitute at the University of Missouri, Columbia, wrote to us that when you bump your head, you shake the vitreous gel in the eye. The vitreous gel, also known as the vitreous humor, is a transparent, colorless jelly that fills the eyeball behind the lens (front part) of the eye. The vitreous, which is adherent to the underlying retina, then “jiggles the retina.” The retina is the sensing element of the eye that sends information to the brain about light, color, and brightness. This jiggling sends the signal of stars to the brain. As Johnson analogizes it:

The jostling of the retina doesn’t translate to pain, though, as Scott Forman, associate professor of ophthalmology, neurology, and neuro-surgery at New York Medical College, explains:

If you want to see
someone else
see stars, your best shot is a Warner Brothers cartoon — many an occipital lobe has been banged by a hammer in cartoons. But athletes, accident victims, and crime sufferers who undergo concussions (the soft brain knocking against the hard surface of the skull) also often see stars. One study indicated that nearly 30 percent of athletes who suffered head injuries from direct impact saw stars or unusual colors. Epileptics sometimes see stars during seizures, and sometimes after them.

So you can see stars by disturbing the brain directly, and leaving out the “middle man” (the retina), but chances are that, unlike bunnies in a cartoon, any bop on the head that is strong enough to make you see stars is sufficient to send you to an emergency room.