HTDE: Crickets and Clowns

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Hey everybody, it's Peter,

and once again, we're featuring a new episode

of how to do everything in this feed.

So this week, Mike and Ian talk with top experts

in their fields to unpack some of life's greatest mysteries,

mysteries like, do I need a coat to go outside today?

The answer in today's episode might be the life hack

you've been waiting for.

If you are enjoying how to do everything,

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It'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 stage 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.

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.

Biologist Marlene Zook is online.

Marlene, can you tell us about it?

Sure, over 100 years ago, someone named Dolbert

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.

OK, so the idea is I find a cricket.

If it chirps 12 times in 15 seconds, that I add 40,

I would know it is 52 degrees Fahrenheit.

You would, you would.

Really?

OK.

It feels like if it's summer, it shouldn't be warmer

than 52 degrees outside.

There you go.

Yes, that is precisely the point.

OK.

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.

And 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.

That 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.

Sure.

So it doesn't work for those.

Because their chirp rate is more variable.

It only works for one kind of cricket.

OK.

That's it.

Wait, so is a pretty limited life hack?

I really wouldn't recommend it as a way

to like, 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?

OK.

So then if let's say they're called tree crickets,

but so it's not so much.

They're not in like way up in the canopy.

They'll be in like in shrubs or in tall forbs

or something like that.

But they're not calling from the ground, generally.

Actually, they're very beautiful.

They're very beautiful.

All listeners should immediately go and Google tree cricket.

They're lovely.

They're green.

They have beautiful sort of lacy looking wings.

I think they're much more glamorous looking

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 like 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.

Oh, that's true.

OK.

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 lies

but you probably don't really want to get into that.

What's the, 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.

So 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.

OK, but he's not dead.

No, no.

So this is not like Mantis where she chooses head off.

Yeah.

OK.

OK.

I'm glad you pursued that because you're

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 gift.

They're hungry.

They have this thing called what, nuptial what?

Oh, it's called a nuptial gift.

A lot 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, OK, 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.

OK.

Actually, just quiet everybody.

Yeah, usually quiet everybody down.

Yeah.

That should.

I mean, it works out 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.

Yeah.

Three months salary is equivalent to 50 pounds of secretions

that you need to gather.

I'm sure that I'm sure that's how the jewelry companies came up

with that.

Yeah.

Marlene Zook's new book, which I came out yesterday,

is outsider animals.

How the creatures at the margins of our lives

have the most to teach us.

You know, 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.

And you listening, you can count them.

It's going to be longer than 15 seconds

for the rest of the episode.

But count the cricket chirps from now until the end of the episode.

Add 40.

Email us at how to 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.

Yeah.

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Hey, if you've got a question for us,

you can send it to us at how to 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.

That's true.

Last week with emails that we would like to talk about.

Yeah, we, 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,

Autumn's.

Autumn's you may remember is spelled

like the season apostrophe asked the apostrophe.

It's part of her name on her bread certificate.

And it has caused her countless heartache and difficulty.

Primarily, 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 can't wrote in with solutions.

We just want to read a few of them.

Josh suggests just doing two,

it looks like two apostrophes in the S,

which looks like you have a quotation mark.

So it's autumn quotation mark S.

This is a wild one.

Lorian wrote in and said,

I think we should adopt an upside down semicolon.

So it's an apostrophe with a dot underneath.

Oh, to go in the middle for a name,

like she says,

it would be like a second level possessive.

That'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 is lovely.

It can easily be Autumn's hopes as needed.

So you just, 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 putting a,

making it autumn squared.

So the little superscript two S.

That'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 for 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, Hensel also recommends the quotation mark

in place of the apostrophe.

That's good.

Yeah, 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 Jeffreech.

It says, please, please fix your episode.

My 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 clown's

international egg register.

Julie Proctor is in charge of the register.

Julie, can you explain to us how this works?

Okay, so really how did Jesus go?

A guy called Stan Bott 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 realize

that there were different faces and he registered them on eggs.

So 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, yeah, just purely for his own pleasure.

He kept them, they'd be numbered them

at being an accountant, I suppose you would.

And he wrote them in a book, a legion,

I suppose 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 him.

Can I be one of those eggs?

And that's really how it began.

Yeah, 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 clown,

well, several pictures,

I need to see the whole, in the 360 views answer conference.

And also pieces of the costume.

So I get little bits of fabric or whatever

and I create the brace 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 the rigs

because they don't know which one that they want to stick with.

Oh yeah, okay.

Can you show us what,

can you show us the most recent egg?

Yeah.

Oh.

All right, so these are the clown eggs I've done, some of them.

And you can see the big ones back next to the drag queen.

Oh, sure, yeah.

Oh, so Julie, you have,

this has been done with clowns for almost a hundred 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 the time.

Yeah, yeah.

So why not?

It seemed to me that and they would love to be immortalized

somewhere in a movie.

Why not?

Yeah.

So and each egg gets numbered and put into a register.

I've got my register here that I started with the click with

the drag queen eggs.

It's just as 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.

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 eggs.

Yeah.

And Julie, thank you so much for talking to us about this.

That's okay.

That's okay.

Well, that does it for this week's show.

Would you learn again?

You know what I noticed is that,

so we had an interview with Marlene who told us about the crickets.

And with the interview with Julie told us about the clowns.

Two very different subjects.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

They both started with someone saying hundreds of years ago

or 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 or do them to repeat it.

Yeah, that's, 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

100 years ago, there's the, 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 and, 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.

100 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.

So just think, 100 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.

You just imagine he's just looking out

of the southern tip of Manhattan, just looking

at the Statue of Liberty thing.

But it's so beautiful, what a,

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 Swinson

with technical direction from Lorna White.

Once again, you can get us your questions,

send them to us at howtoatnpr.org.

I mean, I'm Mike.

Thanks.

Thanks.

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