Sunday July 31: Ectomorphs, Mesomorphs, and Endomorphs

Today,we're thrilled to have a guest blogger: Liora, who is visiting California today.

It is always an enormous pleasure to do the Acrostic. How much more so with another acrostically-inclined member of the family. This one ended up with a quote from a particularly unusual book, David Feldman's collection of everyday oddities and, as he calls them, imponderables, Do Penguins Have Knees? That question, for now, will remain unresolved. Apparently it is a true imponderable. This quote, however, had nothing to do with penguins. But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

After scanning the clues this week Doug and I immediately got our first clue: The coiner of "doublespeak" and "Oldspeak" were none other than George Orwell.

Soon after we looked a few clues downwards, and remembered something from our high school days of studying the periodic table: krypton and xenon are Noble Gases. I should note that I did the Saturday New York Times crossword puzzle on the way up to SFO from LAX and found a very similar answer: INERT GAS.

In any case, noble gas gave us the S in the first word of the puzzle, and Doug suggested that the first word would be USING, which got us going with the quote.

We spent a while speculating about Archemides' bathtub discovery, wondering which principle of science derived from his Eureka moment. We thought buoyancy or suchlike, but didn't realize it was density until somewhat later on.

Meanwhile, though, we realized that the Adirondacks are in upstate New York and A Christmas Carol and Billy Budd are examples of Novellas.

Things were starting to come together. We realized we had the word LS in there, which is nothing other than the plural of the letter L. Great, I thought, a quote about words or letters. And we saw that there were going to be some other plurals of letters in there, too. But it took us sometime to understand the subject of the quote.

Memories of high school science classes served us two more times in the puzzle: What is a "Meteorologist's line of work?" We knew immediately that it was some line on a map that a meterologist might use. A front? The jet stream? But somewhere, from deep in the recesses of my repository of 9th grade earth science came the beginnings of the answer. iso--, iso--, is it isomer? We put that in for a few minutes, before realizing that, no, an isomer came from 11th grade chemistry, not 9th grade earth science. The word was isobar. And Mrs. Bell, who taught that 9th grade earth science class came in handy one last time. What is a "flaky sort of stone?" I remembered Moh's scale of hardness, and scratching rocks with other rocks. Eventually we came to it: schist, which sounds so delightfully inappropriate.

We filled in one of the cleverer clues: where might litter be picked up? Of course, in a Pet Shop.

Then, as we filled in some of the parts of the quote, realized how W.H. Sheldon must have classified a "beanpole": an ectomorph. This story, which we look up on wikipedia after, is worth some attention.

W.H. Sheldon was a serious kook. Born in Warwick, Rhode Island, in 1898, Sheldon was most interested in anthropometry, or the measurement of human bodies. On the side, he came up with an unusual system to classify different kinds of American pennies. The anthropometry, though, was the weird part. He classified humans into three types: ectomorphic or slim (hence the "beanpole"), mesomorphic, or muscular, and endomorphic, or fat. These body types had real social implications. The ectomorphs were more likely to end up in mental institutions; the mesomorphs more likely to become criminals. In service of this classificatory system, Sheldon engaged in what seems today to be his most bizarre project: collecting scores of nude photographs of incoming ivy league freshman, particularly at Yale. With the science behind them discredited, the Smithsonian eventually decided to shred its collection of photos.

Back to the puzzle, though. Things at this point were coming to a close. The real breakthrough was getting the word "CAPS" in the beginning and "CARTOONISTS" just after and realizing that this was a quote about the use of capital letters by cartoonists. Why? Because capital letters are more equal in size than their lowercase counterparts.

And what about James Taylor? Yes, his album was called Gorilla. And the song, "How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You) is just as catchy as ever.

So that was it for the acrostic. But now we had to look up this highly unusual book, the source of the quote itself. Do Penguins Have Knees? also answers questions about why sticks of butter are longer and narrower on the East Coast and shorter and wider on the West Coast. But the answer wasn't on the Amazon preview, so we still don't know.