AnswerMan

Volume XIII
Issue 7
July 2010

The Dating Game
Question: If sour cream is already sour, why do they put expiration dates on containers of sour cream?
AnswerMan: A question of redundancy. Well, there's sour and then, there's sour. The "sour" in sour cream, as it comes from from your grocery store cooler, is a carefully controlled, bacterially manufactured sour. When fresh sour cream is eaten directly from the container (admit it, you've done it), the word "sour" doesn't even come to mind. When sour cream has worked its way to the back of your refrigerator and remains undiscovered for several months, the expiration date assumes real meaning. Just pop the lid and take a good whiff. Now, that's sour sour cream.

Here's a question for you. What is the point in putting a "born on" date on a can of beer if you don't know the life expectancy of the contents? How do we know when our beer has reached that perfect sipping age? How long is a month in "beer years?"

All You Need is Love
Q: Why is the scoring in tennis so weird? "Love" which equals zero, 15-30-40-game?
A: A digital question. Scorekeeping in tennis is rooted deeply in the ancient origins of the game. It was among the very first alternatives to dueling and warfare which has since developed in to what is now collectively known as "sports."

Because tennis was originally played with potentially lethal clubs and rocks, each contestant began with a score of "love" as a reminder that what they were about to do was only a game and should not escalate into deadly combat. The first point scored was valued at 15, because it is exactly three times 5, the number of digits on the human hand. Why three and not two? We just don't know.

The second point was set at 30 because is was exactly two times the first point value. The third point scored was counted as 40 to account for the ten-digit footwork that normally accompanied reaching this level. The final point was assigned no value because it won the game, so who cared?

Lost to history are why the founders of tennis decided that each game must be won by two points, but the score never progresses beyond 40-40, stalling as a series of "deuces" and "advantages."

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