Kidnap, Murder, And Kermit’s Cousins
Things are not always what they seem.
In 1997, Disney sent me from Florida to California, to help finish their 35th animated movie, "Hercules".
The flight was my first important business trip as an adult, and I felt very... ‘executive-y’, as I landed smoothly on the West Coast. I picked up my rental car and headed for the LA Hilton, which was to be my home for the next three months.
As an adult, I had never checked into a hotel that I hadn’t paid for myself. This also felt good, and I made sure that everyone I met, knew my very special and important situation.
“Hi, I’m checking in. The name’s Daniel Cohen, but the reservation might be under (pause for dramatic effect...) ‘Disney’?”
“Thanks for bringing my bags to the room. Have you worked here long? Oh, and speaking of work, I’m here on a business trip. I work for... Disney Animation.”
“Hi, excuse me, can I get some extra towels? I’m with Disney and they paid me to come here.”
Fun fact. Did you know that between the West and East Coasts of mainland America, there is a time difference of three hours? We don’t have that issue in England, because I think that between the two edges of my skinny little country, the time difference is only about fourteen seconds. Of course, my brain knew about time zones, but somehow my body refused to accept the situation, and so at 4:30am California time, I found myself wide awake and ready to start the day.
There was nothing I could do, so I embraced and accepted the situation. I was not going back to sleep, so I phoned my wife for some support and encouragement. I answered questions like: “Why are you awake so early?” and: “Are you crazy?” And then I got some breakfast and drove to work.
Disney allowed people to work overtime hours early in the morning, so as odd as it seems, I stayed on Florida time for my entire three month trip. This routine worked well until I was at my desk one morning, listening to the radio, when I suddenly I felt a wave of dizziness like I’ve never experienced before. The sensation was very similar to the ‘sudden, heart-racing plummet’ part of a rollercoaster ride; not exactly unpleasant, but certainly not what I was expecting at 7am. I took a deep breath and shook off the feeling, putting it down to the heavy workload, and tiredness from all those early morning starts. And then:
- “Woah!” said an artist to my right. “Did you just feel that?”
“Wait,” I said. “What? How did you..?”
- “Woah!” echoed the host of the early morning radio show I was listening to. “That was a weird one!”
For a moment I felt that either the world was going crazy, or I was. Or both. How on Earth was it possible, that everyone around me could feel the same dizziness happening in my head...
- “...getting reports of a rolling earthquake,” explained an interrupting special breaking news report on the radio, before launching into lots of facts about the quake’s magnitude and intensity. I ignored all the details, in my relief that I hadn’t gone completely mad that morning. It had just been one of those insignificant earthquakes that made it into the morning news, but certainly not recorded in the history books.
Things are not always what they seem.
I've been watching my popcorn plants very closely. They started as a fun experiment to see what would happen if I buried a few kernels of corn in a pot instead of popping them into a tasty snack. This quickly became five healthy plants; four are now growing in a container, and one sits happily in the raised bed, next to my tomatoes. They are all about five feet tall, and since corn is a type of giant grass, they provide some nice looking greenery to the area.
Most of the things I grow do not require much effort to pollinate. Inside a single tomato flower is everything needed to turn it into fruit, (when disturbed by a bee, an electric toothbrush or a phone set to vibrate - see essay #8 "Dental Hygiene For Tomatoes"). The same is true for the peppers, strawberries and sunflowers. The herbs grow leaves without any extra effort from me, and the recent radishes I planted should just fatten up underground by themselves, paving the way for the carrots that I'm planning to grow in the late summer months.
The popcorn plant is different, in that it has very distinctive male and female parts, located separately from each other. The male, called the "tassels" grow from the top of the plant and look like sheathes of wheat. They spread out like sprawling grain fireworks, with a single aim in their life, to drop pollen.
Meanwhile, in two places where the side leaves meet the central stem, long hairs have started to sprout. These are the female "silks", and if you've ever removed ("shucked") an ear of corn, these are the stringy inedible fibers living under the outer covering, that seem designed to make a huge mess in the kitchen.
The most remarkable thing, is that each of these fibers is in fact a flower, and each one feeds the development of a single kernel of corn. To ensure that ears are filled with healthy rows of corn with no gaps, every silk must be pollinated. Getting the pollen from the tassels to the silks is more straightforward in a large field than it is when you only have five stalks, so I followed instructions to do this by hand. Each morning before 8am, I carefully place a brown bag over the head of the plant, and shake the tassels. I'm sure that the neighbors think I am practicing how to kidnap people, but the bag on the head collects the pollen, which then gets poured over the silks in the hope that this will be enough to get every kernel to grow.
Things are not always what they seem.
As I sit here typing this essay in my back yard, it’s late afternoon and my neighbor has just finished cutting his grass. The smell is unmistakable; from a chemical point of view, the air is a pungent mixture of organic compounds called green leaf volatiles (GLVs). To the human nose, it's the quintessential satisfying smell of a rich, green summer. The GLVs that grass releases aren't very different from those of fresh fruits and vegetables, so it triggers an evolutionary reflex in our brains that tell us that something smells good.
But most amazing of all, it has been discovered that the smell of freshly-cut grass is actually a plant distress call.
Plants release these GLV molecules when they come under attack by insects, infections, or humans armed with lawn mowers. And the smart thing is that different GLVs are released, depending on the type of assault they experience. For example, a study found that when tobacco leaves are besieged by caterpillars, the blend of GLVs released by the plant act as a distress signal that attracts predator insects to come and feast on their attackers.
Similarly, when humans mow the lawn, the GLV bouquet sends out a signal to neighboring areas that they are under attack. This allows time for nearby vegetation to redirect sugar and other resources toward its roots and away from its flowers, minimizing the plant's potential losses to help it grow back later.
Things are not always what they seem.
As night falls, the sounds of cicadas, birds and squirrels have now been replaced by the unmistakable "ribbit ribbit" sound of frogs.
Except, if you hear a “ribbit” around my home in White Plains, New York, you are in fact mistaken.
Out of the 4,810 known varieties of frogs, only a small handful of species from the North American Pacific Coastal region actually make that distinctive sound, and some frogs are completely silent.
We have been trained to believe that every frog makes that "ribbit" sound, because the Pacific tree frog happens to live around Hollywood, California. In this same area, humans happen to make movies, and the calls of the local frogs were recorded to use as ambient sound effects. As night falls in a western, Kansas cowboys sit around a campfire to the surrounding sounds of Hollywood frogs. Meanwhile 10,000 miles away, Tarzan goes to his jungle bed, with the same Californian frog chorus in the background.
Things are not always what they seem.
In this Coronapocalypse, socially distanced world, we cannot currently go into movie theaters, but look closely at nature, and you can experience breathtaking action and exciting dramas with great sound effects. There is even popcorn, if you take the trouble to disturb a tassel or two!
