HTDE: Crickets and Clowns

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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 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.

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 what it's warm enough. Biologist Marley and Zuck is online. Marley and can you tell us about it?

Sure. Over 100 years ago, someone named Dolbert came up with a way to calculate mathematically the temperature and 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 and degrees Fahrenheit.

The problem is it 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. You would. You would. Great.

Okay. 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. Okay.

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 good 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. Sure. 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 trees? It's a pretty limited life hack.

I really would recommend it as a way to, like, I'm going to go out and wilderness without a thermometer.

“I don't know why you need to know the temperature anyway.”

But if you did, Sure. 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 they're called tree crickets, but so it's not so much, they're not in, like, way up in the canopy. They're, they'll be in, like, halls, like, in shrubs or in, you know,

tall Forbes or something like that. But they're not calling from the ground, generally. They're very beautiful. They're very beautiful. All listeners should immediately go and Google tree cricket.

They're, they're lovely. They're green. They have beautiful sort of lazy looking wings.

“I think they're much more glamorous looking than the field crickets,”

that's where my, one of my study subjects for many years. That's a pretty low bar come on, right? I think tree crickets are pretty gorgeous. I really, I really do. Do you think, Marley, and 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 at 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?

They would die for a last. You would have crispy, if you wanted to eat the crickets, it would work because they would crisp it up. 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.

“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 attract the female and the females come, and they chew on this gland on the back of the males 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 like what we would all strive for, right? Wait, what happens? What happens to the male cricket then afterwards?

He's kind of tired. Okay, but he's not dead. No, no, so this is not like man's head, where she chooses head off kind of. Yeah, no.

Okay. I'm glad you pursued that, because you're right. I'm glad you pursued that, because you don't want people to bring away from the thinking that, "Oh, but also they're really ghoulish." They're not ghoulish.

“It's just that they have this thing called Nupjilgift.”

They're hungry. They have this thing called what? Nupjilgift? Oh, it's called a Nupjilgift. A lot of, lots of singing insects produce them. In some Katie did, the Nupjilgift is produced by the male,

and he sort of secrete 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 looking at the audience." So imagine that 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. That's actually just quiet, everybody. Yeah, it usually quietes everybody down.

Yeah, it should. I mean, it works out similar to, what is it? Three-month 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-month salary is equivalent to 50 pounds of secretions that you need together. I'm sure that I'm sure that's how the jewelry company came up with that. Marlene Zuck's new book, which came out yesterday, is outside our 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 chips. Uh-huh. And you listening, you can count them with, it's going to be longer than 15 seconds

to the rest of the episode. Yeah. Count the cricket chips from now until the end of the episode. Add 40. Email us at [email protected].

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, from how old are these t-shirts at this point?”

They're pretty old. Yeah, they're in Roman numerals. Hey, if you've got a question for us, you can send it to us at [email protected]. Also, we, 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 deluished.

That's true. And the past 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 our name on her birth certificate.

And it is 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, uh, in each, 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.

This is a wild one. Okay. Lauren 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,

for introducing a new symbol, it's just going to look like a mistake. Most of the solutions, that is the problem for Autumn's. Yeah. Most of them just look like typos.

This is from Janine and 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. It 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. It seems good.

Tense suggests putting it, making it Autumn squared. So the little superscript to S. That's actually like that. That's good.

It solves the punctuation problem. It also makes her name look like an energy drink. This is another one for pegs. 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. Yeah.

“But for that make the same suggestion, Autumn's, I think this is Autumn's solution.”

And finally, we did get this note from Jeffrey just as please please fix her 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 pull 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 nearly 100 years ago, a guy called Stan Bought was a clown or circus enthusiast. He wasn't clowning himself, but he just loved it. He was such 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 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, just purely freeze on pleasure. He kept them very denombed with them.

And I suppose you would. And he would put them in a book. And they'd jump and she would. Okay. And that's just where to begin.

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, but 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 sensor conference.

And also a piece of the costume. So I get a little bit 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 the 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 rig because they don't know which one that they want to stick with.”

Oh yeah. Okay. Can you show us what the can you show us the most recent egg? Yeah. Oh.

Right. So this is the clown eggs. I've done some of them. And if you see people back next the drag queen. 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.

Yeah. Yeah. So why not? It seemed to me that and they would love to be immortalized somewhere in a month. Why not? Yeah.

So and and each egg is numbered. I'm going to register. I've got my register. 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. It's 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.

Well, 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.

You know what I noticed is that.

“When 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. They both started with someone saying hundreds of years ago or a hundred. Yeah.

They both started by talking about hundreds of years ago. 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 doomed to repeat it.

Yeah. 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 at it. So that's March 18th. 1926. March 18th.

1926.

“It says here that river pirates rated appear 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. A hundred years ago on this date. The assistant secretary of war, person named Hanford McNider.

Rejected, get this, a New York watchmaker's offer to design and install a wristwatch on the statue of liberty. So, 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.

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. It's such a beautiful icon welcoming immigrants to America. Just forage 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 war in a white. Once again, you can get us your questions, send them to us at [email protected]. I'm Ian. I'm Mike. Thanks.

Thanks.