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Why Girls Can't Throw
...and Other Questions You Always Wanted Answered
By Mitchell Symons HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
Copyright ©2006 Mitchell Symons
All right reserved. ISBN: 0060835184
Chapter One
Why Girls Can't Throw
...and Other Questions You
Always Wanted Answered Q Considering you can buy a plot on the moon from the Sunday newspaper classifieds, to whom would you apply for planning permission if you wanted to build on it?
If you think this is an extraordinary question, you will be amazed by the answer. It turns out that this whole area is a potential legal minefield. Here's why. In the 1960s, when space travel proved to be feasible, the Americans and the Russians could agree on just one thing: that no one country should own the moon (remember: there was a time when the Americans feared that the Russians might get there before them). To this end, an Outer Space Treaty was signed in 1967. However, an American named Dennis M. Hope saw a loophole in this treaty: while no country could own the moon, there was nothing to stop an individual, and so, on November 22, 1980, he filed a declaration of ownership -- or rather the exclusive right to administer legal rights to a piece of the moon, and, indeed, all the planets and all their moons.
Call him a lunatic (think about it) if you will, but he's a rich one. And adiligent one. He duly divided the lit surface of the moon into individual square acres. He also made a deal with the U.S. Navy for its satellite to photograph it so that he would be able to provide his customers with photographic "proof" of their landholding.
He called his business the Lunar Embassy and there are "ambassadors" throughout the world. Britain's Lunar Ambassador is Francis Williams (and his wife, Sue) who, through Moon Estates, will "sell" you a unique acre of the moon -- with a deed, constitution, property map, and mineral rights -- all for $20.
As for developing your land, well, this is trickier. I checked with a lawyer and, once he could stop giggling, he told me that planning would be fraught with difficulties.
"Even supposing that they have perfect title -- "
Dennis Hope is certain that they do.
" -- against any other claimant on earth, what about people from other galaxies? Would they accept our jurisdiction? If not, who would arbitrate? Meanwhile, there are no planning regulations yet in place: if and when the moon is sufficiently well established to be developed, these might turn out to militate against individuals developing their land -- at least in the way they want to."
Obviously, the whole thing's a parcel of bollocks but, hey, no one forces anyone to buy anything and it's only twenty bucks for what is really rather quite an unusual gift.
Q Are there any benefits to smoking?
Yes, there are -- and I say that as an evangelical nonsmoker. It had been known for some time that smokers were less susceptible to Alzheimer's disease, but researchers at Reading University, backed by scientists at Duke University Medical Center in North Carolina, conducted tests that demonstrated how nicotine not only relieves the symptoms of Alzheimer's patients (by prolonging their attention span) but might also arrest further decline. The implications of these findings are extraordinary, as it could even lead to nicotine -- in the form of patches rather than cigarettes -- being used to help schizophrenics and those with attention deficit disorder. But that's not all! A 2001 study from Tel Aviv University suggests that sufferers from ulcerative colitis (a condition of the guts which you really don't want to know any more about) who smoke recover quicker than nonsmokers do. But that's not all! According to the New York Times, "Nicotine literally alters the availability of important brain chemicals involved in feelings of reward and well-being. There is evidence that cigarettes make task performance easier, improve long-term memory, reduce anxiety, increase tolerance of pain and reduce hunger."
Q Is it true that, given an infinite amount of time, a chimpanzee with a typewriter could produce the complete works of Shakespeare?
The question this really raises is: "How long is infinity?" and, as such, is more philosophical than it is literal. Having said that, however long infinity is, it's not long enough for a chimp to press enough random typewriter keys to churn out Shakespeare's entire output. Let me illustrate this:
pougLWENGlegfnELGFKNewfdsfDFLNegflkndfkmdvwgmsdgv
Yes, that's what I got from approaching this task in the same way as a chimp would, and it doesn't bear much resemblance to "to be or not to be that is the question" (even if you leave out the spacing). Given that there are twenty-six letters in the alphabet -- and assuming a typewriter that doesn't have any punctuation marks on it -- the chances of producing that tiny phrase would be one in twenty-six to the power of thirty (a figure much too large for my calculator to work out) correct keystrokes in a row, that's ignoring spaces as well as punctuation. The odds against that are so huge that it is safe to say it wouldn't happen from, well, here to infinity -- and beyond. As for the complete works . . .
Q How and when did the American accent evolve?
I had an idea that it might have had something to do with the fact that the American accent evolved from West Country accents (for example, the Plymouth Brethren who colonized America on the Mayflower) as opposed to the Standard English you hear on Radio 4 News, but that was as far as my thinking took me. So I turned to linguist and philologist Dr. Caron Landy, and her reply startled me.
"It's not so much that their accent evolved as that ours did. We were the ones who changed words, not them. All emigrant languages have a tendency to linguistic nostalgia, and they preserve archaic forms of pronunciation long after we've dispensed with them. Let me give you an example. The final 'r' you'd associate with American English is a distinctive growl produced near the back of the mouth. This sound is standard in the west of England (Shakespeare would have growled his final "r" sounds), in the north, and in Ireland. Most of the settlement in North America in the nineteenth century from the British islands came from the north and west of England and from Ireland (especially the six northern counties of Ulster)."
Continues...
Excerpted from Why Girls Can't Throw by Mitchell Symons Copyright ©2006 by Mitchell Symons. Excerpted by permission.
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