HTDE: Crickets and Clowns

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0:36It's called How to Do Everything. It's easy to find. And thanks for listening. This is How to Do Everything. I'm Mike. And I'm Ian. On today's show, some advice for the many of you who may be considering a career in clowning and trademark law. But first, the first day of spring is this Friday. Okay, temperatures are, it's getting warmer. Let's say you find yourself outside on a hot day, your phone is dead, and you don't have a thermometer. Can you imagine going outside without a thermometer? Who are we? There is a trick to, without a thermometer, tell the exact temperature outside when it's warm enough.

1:14Biologist Marlene Zook is online. Marlene, can you tell us about it? Sure. Over 100 years ago, someone named Dolbear came up with a way to calculate mathematically the temperature in degrees Fahrenheit by counting the number of chirps you hear a cricket making in 15 seconds. And the formula is that if you count the number of chirps in 15 seconds and you add 40, you end up with the temperature in degrees Fahrenheit. The problem is that like a lot of things, it actually only works under a very, very, very limited set of circumstances. Okay. So the idea is I find a cricket, if it chirps 12 times in 15 seconds, then I add 40, I would know it is 52 degrees Fahrenheit.

2:08You would. You would. Really? Okay. It feels like if it's summer, it shouldn't be, it should be warmer than 52 degrees outside. There you go. Yes, that is precisely the point. So the reason that you could use a cricket chirping is that crickets, like all insects, are what are called exothermic, which is a more correct term than cold-blooded, which means that they get their heat from the temperature outside. And so when it's warmer, all of their body functions move faster. And when it's cooler, all of their body functions move slower. That includes chirping, which requires muscles to move and nerves to fire.

2:52And that all happens faster when it's warmer. So there's more chirps per 15 seconds or per minute or per whatever when it's warmer. And so you'd get a higher number. And then the adding 40 is just something that Dolbert seems to have figured out through, I guess, trial and error. So in a certain temperature range, a certain warm temperature range, the formula works. Right. And that's a really good point. The second caveat is that this was done for something called a tree cricket, which happens to have a very stable chirp rate. It doesn't work for field crickets, which are the black ones that are on the ground, which I studied for many years.

3:38Sure. So it doesn't work for those. because their chirp rate is more variable. It only works for one kind of cricket. Okay. That's it. Wait, so are the tree... It's a pretty limited life hack. I really wouldn't recommend it as a way to... I'm going to go out in wilderness without a thermometer. I don't know why you need to know the temperature anyway, but if you did, that would be kind of a limited thing. Are these tree crickets, are they the kind of thing that you maybe don't see, but you hear chirping in the trees? Okay, so then if let's say...

4:41looking than the field crickets, which, like I said, were my study subject for many years. That's a pretty low bar. Come on, right? I think tree crickets are pretty gorgeous. I really do. Do you think, Marlene, if I was able to secure some tree crickets and I wanted to put them near a pizza oven where I was going to be making pizza that night, could they tell me the temperature of the oven and whether or not it was ready for me to bake a pizza in it. Pizza cooks at about 500. They would die first. Alas, you would have crispy. If you wanted to eat the crickets, it would work because they would crispen up.

5:24Oh, that's true. Okay. Tree cricket sounds amazing. It's good looking. It tells you the temperature. And apparently it's a great source of protein. It's a great topping. Potentially, yeah. They also have super interesting sex lives, but you probably don't really want to get into that. Give us the elevator pitch on how freaky they are. So the males call, and they put their wings up perpendicular to their body, and that attracts the female. And the females come, and they chew on this gland on the back of the male's wings, which is nutritious. and so they're chomping away while the male is calling and that gives the female some nutrition that helps her lay her eggs.

6:07So it's kind of like cannibalism combined with music, which is what we would all strive for, right? Wait, what happens to the male cricket then afterwards? He's kind of tired. Okay, but he's not dead. No, so this is not like mantids where she chews his head off kind of thing. Yeah. No. Okay. Okay. I'm glad you pursued that because you're right. I'm glad you pursued that because you don't want people coming away from this thinking that, oh, but also they're really ghoulish. They're not ghoulish. It's just that they have this thing called nuptial gifts. They're hungry. They have this thing called what?

6:44Nuptial what? Oh, it's called a nuptial gift. Lots of singing insects produce them. In some Katie did, the nuptial gift is produced by the male, and he sort of secretes it as part of mating and it can weigh up to 30 % of his body weight. I often point out that, okay, now, so let's, you know, looking at the audience. So imagine that, you know, your average guy is going to weigh 150 pounds. So imagine that you'd have to manufacture something out of your own body that weighed like 50 pounds, which you had to give to your date before she would have sex with you. wow okay usually just quiets everybody yeah it usually quiets everybody down yeah it should i mean it works out it's similar to what is it three months salary should be the price of the engagement ring oh i never thought about making that connection yeah that's very interesting i never thought about that yeah maybe they got the three months from thinking about katie did i always wondered where they got that number.

7:51Yeah. Three months salary is equivalent to 50 pounds of secretions that you need to gather. I'm sure that's how the jewelry companies came up with that.

8:05Marlene Zook's new book, which came out yesterday, is Outsider Animals, How the Creatures at the Margins of Our Lives Have the Most to Teach Us.

8:19You know what we should do? We should play with this idea. Yes. I think we should, for the rest of this episode, we should hide a bunch of cricket chirps. Uh-huh. And you listening, you can count them. It's going to be longer than 15 seconds the rest of the episode, but count the cricket chirps from now until the end of the episode. Add 40. Email us at howto at npr.org. The temperature you came up with. Whoever is right first will send you a T-shirt. Yeah, we have t-shirts. I think we have a couple from... How old are these t-shirts at this point? They're pretty old. Yeah, they're in Roman numerals.

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9:44Hey, if you've got a question for us, you can send it to us at howto. at npr.org. Also, you can just tell us really anything you want in our email box. And that is something that we've, I would say we've been deluged in the past week with emails that we would like to talk about. Yeah, we do read all of your emails. And we got a bunch of emails from people responding to our last episode, which involved our listener, Autumns. Autumns, you may remember, is spelled like the season apostrophe S. The apostrophe is part of her name on her birth certificate, and it has caused her countless heartache and difficulty.

10:28Primarily, we should say around punctuation. We don't know anything else about her life that's causing her heartache or any strife. It's mostly just punctuation. Many of you wrote in with solutions. We just want to read a few of them. Josh suggests just doing two. It looks like two apostrophes and the S, which looks like you have a quotation mark. So it's autumn quotation mark S. This is a wild one. Lorianne wrote in and said, I think we should adopt an upside down semicolon. So it's an apostrophe with a dot underneath to go in the middle of her name. She says it would be like a second level possessive.

11:08That's interesting. I do think that all of this stuff, if we're introducing a new symbol, it's just going to look like a mistake. Most of the solutions, that is the problem for Autumn's. Most of them just look like typos. This is from Janine. They say, I think the solution is in her two legal given names, Autumn's Hope. That's her middle name. That's her middle name. It is lovely and can easily be Autumn's Hopes as needed. So you add the apostrophe S to the middle name. Yeah, so whose bicycle is that? That's Autumn's Hopes bicycle. Seems good. Ted suggests making it Autumn squared, so the little superscript 2, S.

11:48That's actually, I like that. That's good. Solves the punctuation problem. It also makes her name look like an energy drink. This is another one from Peg. Same thing. Autumn's quotation mark, S. That to me feels like that's gaining some momentum, and I actually think that might be what we need. Yeah. Look, here's another one. Hensel also recommends the quotation mark in place of the apostrophe. That's good. We're going to get four that make the same suggestion. Autumn's, I think this is Autumn's solution. And finally, we did get this note from Jeffrey. It just says, please, please fix your episode.

12:24My head is exploding. when a person becomes a clown maybe you're becoming a clown you need a way to claim your particular look the makeup you've come up with the your whole thing and there is a way to make it yours you do this by joining the clowns international egg register julie proctor is in charge of the register julie can you explain to us how this works okay so nearly 100 years ago a guy called Stan Bolt was a clown or circus enthusiast. He wasn't a clown himself, but he just loved it. He was actually an accountant, I believe. And he decided that he was going to have a collection of all the different faces, and he realized that there were different faces, and he registered them on X.

13:16So there's a story of how it all began. So, sorry, we're very new to this. So he was interested in clowns and he would put their specific clown makeup faces on eggs so he could remember them and have something. Yeah. Just purely for his own pleasure. He kept them. Then he numbered them. Being an accountant, I suppose you would. And he wrote them in a book, a ledger, as you would. Okay. And that's just where it began. It was just a bit of a hobby to start off with. And then more and more clowns discovered this. And they asked, they asked him, can I be one of those eggs? And that's really how it began.

14:00Yeah. So that basically became an encyclopedia of all of the different clowns out in the world that we knew. Basically a record of all the clowns. Yeah. So I get sent a picture of the clowns. Well, several pictures. I need to see the whole 360 degree sets of conference. and also pieces of the costume. So I get little bits of fabric or whatever, and I create the base as well, which would be part of their costume, and paint the egg. Is the registry sort of, do clowns think of it as a way to kind of claim their look and kind of trademark it? Yeah. That's why they take so long to get their eggs, because they don't know which one that they want to stick with.

14:43Oh, yeah. Okay. Can you show us the most recent egg? Yeah. Oh. All right. So these are the clown legs I've done, some of them. And if you see the big old back next to the drag queens. Oh, sure. Yeah. Oh. So, Julie, you have – this has been done with clowns for almost 100 years. You have now started using the eggs so that drag queens can register their makeup as well. Well, they have their own unique look, all of them. Yeah. Yeah. So why not? it seemed to me that that and they would love to be immortalized somewhere in a museum why not yeah so and and each egg gets numbered and put and put into a register i've got my register here that i started with the with the drag queen x it's it's just it's golden and it's got loads of high heel shoes on the front you know so it's kind of looks a little bit special um but that's quite new that's actually a new thing so i haven't pushed that too much at the moment because i'm painting lots of bags.

15:42Yeah. Well, Julie, thank you so much for talking to us about this. That's okay. That's okay.

15:51Well, that does it for this week's show. What'd you learn, Ian? You know what I noticed is that, so we had an interview with Marlene, who told us about the crickets. And we had the interview with Julie, who told us about the clowns. Two very different subjects. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They both started with someone saying hundreds of years ago. They both started by talking about hundreds of years ago. Huh. What do you take from that? What does it make you think? I don't know. I mean, I think it means that you and I believe that the past is prologue. Sure. I think you and I are always saying to each other that those who do not understand history are doomed to repeat it.

16:30Yeah. I guess that's true. Also, I was thinking maybe let's... So right now it's March 18th. Yeah. I just want to look up what happened on this day in history a hundred years ago. Okay. I don't know, but I'm looking it up. So that's March 18th, 1926. March 18th, 1926. It says here that river pirates raided a pier but missed out on the loot. They ransacked... This is in the New York Times from March 18th, 1926. They overpowered eight people, ransacked an office, and then vanished in an unlighted motorboat. Oh, here we go. A hundred years ago, on this date, the assistant secretary of war, a person named Hanford McKnighter, rejected, get this, a New York watchmaker's offer to design and install a wristwatch on the Statue of Liberty.

17:26So, just think. Wait. A hundred years ago, a guy went to the Assistant Secretary of War and he was like, Mr. Secretary, I have an idea for that statue out on Ellis Island. Can you just imagine he's just looking out off the southern tip of Manhattan, just looking at the Statue of Liberty, thinking, it's so beautiful. It's such a beautiful icon welcoming immigrants to America. I'm just worried she doesn't know what time it is. That's the problem with the Statue of Liberty. She was always late. She was always late to stuff. How to Do Everything is produced by Skylar Swenson with technical direction from Lorna White.

18:09Once again, you can get us your questions. Send them to us at howto at npr.org. I'm Ian. I'm Mike. Thanks. Thanks.

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