Do Elephants Jump? (21 page)

You
can
buy fresh baby corn at specialty food stores, especially Asian markets, and we spoke to three wholesale produce markets that sell the stuff. But factors conspire to keep it out of your local supermarket.

The biggest problem in marketing baby corn is that there simply isn’t enough demand for the little ears. Few Western recipes call for baby corn, and the family that decides to roast baby corn to accompany the barbecued hamburger is doomed to frustration, if not starvation. First of all, baby corn in its natural state requires husking, which is more time consuming and difficult than cleaning “regular” corn. Then, even if the ears are successfully de-silked, it tends to dawn on consumers that baby corn is, uh, tiny, and not sufficient to sate the appetite.

Most tend to buy baby corn as a novelty or garnish, according to Eddie Fizdale, of Peak Produce in Washington, D.C., especially as the little critters are more expensive than their full-sized brethren, and the edible portion averages only 13 percent of the weight of the ear and husk. Because of the expense, Lauren Hiltner of Babé Farm in Santa Maria, California, indicates that at this point, except for the Asian market, only high-end supermarkets tend to carry fresh baby corn.

The main customers for baby corn are restaurants and salad bars. Professional chefs know how to prepare the delicate corn without bruising or overcooking it. Salad bars use either canned or jarred baby corn to save preparation time, further diminishing the market for fresh baby corn.

Although most of the baby corn found in North America is imported from Thailand, Taiwan, and Indonesia, American farmers are increasingly trying to compete with homegrown products. Farmers can sell by-products from the baby corn, such as the husk, silk, panicle, and stem to cattle farmers for livestock feed.

Best of all, any kind of corn designed for human consumption can be grown as baby corn. Baby corn is produced from regular corn plants (and can grow alongside the other crop) and picked while very immature. Although the image of a baby six-inch-high plant, with little ears hidden in the brush is charming, in reality they grow on six-foot behemoths.

Reader Howard Labow’s drawers resemble those at
Imponderables Central.
We own two handheld Swingline staplers that refuse to degrade, but we wish we could say the same for our boxes of staples. The boxes are full of scruffy odds and ends — what we call “orphans” — “stripettes” of anywhere between five to twenty-five staples — enough to keep around, but annoyingly difficult to load into the stapler.

So we called Swingline Staplers and spoke to technical-support representative Anthony Lojo, who professed astonishment that we would have any problem. The standard Swingline strip consists of 210 staples, and the stapler itself is designed to provide a half-inch cushion before the follow block (the little piece that pushes the staple forward) locks.

Suspecting a whitewash, we sought refuge with Lori Andrade, a customer-service representative at Swingline’s biggest competitor in office staplers, Stanley Bostitch. But Lori reported that although half-strips are available for smaller staplers, she couldn’t figure out why the 210-strip wouldn’t fit in a standard office stapler from Swingline or Stanley Bostitch, and all of her companies’ staplers are designed to take full or half-strips.

Frustrated, we decided to further research this Imponderable by taking a field trip to the most appropriately named office superstore we could find — Staples. As befits its name, the office superstore offers a bewildering array of staplers, but every single basic office stapler offered was designed to accept 210-strips. As advocates of the scientific method, we decided to perform empirical research. We came home, emptied the magazine of our stapler of all staples, and inserted a 210-strip of staples in our Swingline. Guess what? It entered with no problem. No orphans.

Well, not exactly. Now we were left with the staples that we had extricated from the stapler. And that led us to what we hope will win us one of those “genius” fellowships.

When do we put new staples in our staplers? When the stapler doesn’t work, of course. Some of the time, we do so because the magazine is completely empty. But in our experience, this doesn’t occur often. Usually, a few staples have broken apart from the rest of the strip, and are not aligned properly. A pen or nail file is used to extricate the errant staple(s), and whatever significant portion of intact strip is left inside.

But perhaps the magazine is 80 percent empty. So like the prudent motorist who doesn’t wait for the fuel gauge to hit E before gasing up, we try to insert the new strip before the stapler’s magazine is emptied.

Any way you attack the problem, you end up with orphans. If you take out the remnants of the old strip, they become lame-duck staples. If you try to insert the full strip, it won’t fit. If you break the strip in half, at least you end up with an intact fraction of an orphan strip, but it’s still an orphan.

There is only one solution to this less than earth-shattering problem. If you end up with bits and pieces of staples, toss them.

The stapler manufacturers might have blanched when we suggested that their staplers weren’t large enough to accommodate a strip of staples, but they were well armed for this Imponderable. They get asked to solve this mystery often enough that Swingline put an answer on the FAQ (frequently asked questions) section of its Web site:

Staplers were invented in the late nineteenth century, but were too expensive and labor intensive (early staplers could hold a grand total of one staple) to be widely available. Before the proliferation of staples in the early twentieth century, papers were fastened together by pins, the origin of the
pinning
term for outwardly oriented staples. Because pins were not clinched, it was relatively easy to remove them without damaging the documents they were fastening. And that’s still the primary advantage of the pinning feature today — Lori Andrade, at Stanley Bostitch, said that dry cleaners are fond of pinned staples for their short-term stapling jobs, precisely because it is easier for customers to detach the staples from boxes or bags. Pinning isn’t as reliable a fastener as the clinched staple, but it does make it easier to add new documents to already gathered papers.

Why have you likely never used the pinning orientation for your stapler? In our experience, the minuses outweigh the pluses for any job. Not only do pinned staples not fasten well, but the “legs” of the staple stick out, and can catch on other objects, such as your hands! If you are worried about maiming documents with the standard staple, consider some other obscure alternatives — such as paper clips or a folder.

Before there was
Peanuts,
there was
Li’l Folks,
Charles Schulz’s cartoon produced for his hometown newspaper, the
St. Paul Pioneer Press,
starting in 1947. Fortunes are not made from selling cartoons to one newspaper, however. So Schulz pitched
Li’l Folks
to the United Features Syndicate, who was interested in the work, but not the name of Schulz’s strip.

UFS perceived two possible problems. Schulz’s existing title evoked the name of a defunct strip called
Little Folks
created by cartoonist Tack Knight. And there was a comic strip that was already a rousing success that United Features already distributed —
Li’l Abner.

Who decided on the name
Peanuts
? The credit usually goes to Bill Anderson, a production manager at United Features Syndicate, who submitted
Peanuts
along with a list of nine other alternatives to the UFS brass. The appeal of
Peanuts
was obvious, since as Nat Gertler, author and webmaster of a startlingly detailed guide to
Peanuts
book collecting (http://AAUGH.com/guide/) notes:

Charles Schulz not only didn’t like the name change, but also objected to it throughout his career. Melissa McGann, archivist at the Charles Schulz Museum and Research Center in Santa Rosa, California, wrote to
Imponderables
:

In his essay on the
Peanuts
creator, cartoonist R. C. Harvey quotes Schulz to show how much the usually soft-spoken man resented the
Peanuts
title:

Gertler points out that when Schulz first objected to the name change, UFS held the trump cards: “By the time the strip was popular enough for Schulz to have the leverage, the name was too well established.” But in the media in which he had control over the name, Schulz avoided using
Peanuts
alone, as Gertler explains:

In fact, we’re not aware of a single animated special that even contains the name
Peanuts
— the majority of titles feature Charlie Brown, and a significant minority Charlie’s untrusty companion, Snoopy.

So we are left with the irony that the iron man of comic strips, the giant who created the most popular strip in the history of comics, who made more money from cartooning than anyone, detested the title of his own creation. Schulz probably appreciated not only the royalties from foreign countries, but the knowledge that especially in places where peanuts are not an important part of the diet or had no association with children, his strip was called something else:
Rabanitos
(“little radishes”) in South America,
Klein Grut
(“small fry”) in the Netherlands, and the unforgettable
Snobben
(“snooty”), Sweden’s rechristening of Snoopy.