Are Lobsters Ambidextrous? Read Free Page A

flower clusters) that break off.
    Usually, the stems of tumbleweed dry up and snap awayfrom their roots in late fall, when the seeds are ripe and the leaves dying. Although tumbleweeds cannot walk or fly on their own, they are configured to move with the wind. The above-ground portion of the thistle is shaped like flattened globe, so it can roll more easily than other plants.
    In his March 1991 Scientific American article “Tumbleweed,” James Young points out how tumbleweed has adapted to the arid conditions of the Great Plains. One Russian thistle plant can contain a quarter of a million seeds. Even these impressive amounts of seeds will not reproduce efficiently if dumped all at once. But the flowers, which bloom in the summer, are wedged in the axil between the leaves and the stem, so that their seeds don’t fall out as soon as they are subjected to their first tumbles. In effect, the seeds are dispersed sparingly by the natural equivalent of time-release capsules, assuring wide dissemination.
    Young points out that tumbleweed actually thrives on solitude. If tumbleweed bumps into another plant, or thick, tall grass, it becomes lodged there, and birds and small animals find and eat the seeds:
 
    Hence, successful germination, establishment of seedlings, and flowering depend on dispersal to sites where competition is minimal: Russian thistle would rather tumble than fight.
     
    Although songs have romanticized the tumbleweed, do not forget that the last word in “tumbleweed” is “weed.” In fact, if the Russian thistle had been discovered in our country in the 1950s rather than in the 1870s, it probably would have been branded a communist plot. Thistle was a major problem for the cowboys and farmers who first encountered it. Although tumbleweed looks “bushy,” its leaves are spiny and extremely sharp. Horses were often lacerated by running into tumbleweed in fields and pastures, and the leaves punctured the gloves and pants worn by cowboys.
    Tumbleweed has also been a bane to farmers, which explains how tumbleweed spread so fast from the Dakotas down to the Southwest. The seeds of tumbleweed are about the samesize as most cereal grains. Farmers had no easy way to separate the thistle seeds from their grains; as “grain” moved through the marketplace, thistle was transported to new “tumbling ground.”
    Today, tumbleweed’s favorite victims are automobiles and the passengers in them. We get into accidents trying to avoid it, trying to outrace it, and from stupid driving mistakes when simply trying to watch tumbleweed tumble.
 
    Submitted by Plácido García of Albuquerque, New Mexico .
     
     

     
     
    When a body is laid out at a funeral home, why is the head always on the left side from the viewer’s vantage point?
     
    Why are so many readers obsessed with this Imponderable? And why are so many of them from Pennsylvania?
    We found no evidence that any religion cares one iota about the direction in which a body is laid out at a viewing. Discussions with many funeral directors confirmed that the arrangement has become a custom not because of religious tradition but because of manufacturing practice.
    Caskets can be divided into two types: half-couches, which have two separate lids, either or both of which can be opened; and full couches, whose lids are one, long unit. Full couches are designed to display the entire body at the viewing; half-couches are intended to show the head and upper torso of the deceased, with the option that, if the second lid is opened, the full body can be displayed.
    The hinges of all caskets allow the lids to be opened only in one direction. When the lids are lifted, they move first up and then back away from the viewers, to allow an unobstructed view for the bereaved. In many viewing rooms, the raised lids rest against a wall during viewing, dictating the direction the casket will be placed in a viewing room.
    According to Howard C. Raether, former executive director and now