Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! - HTDE: Crickets and Clowns

Episode Date: March 18, 2026

This week: How to tell the temperature outside without a thermometer. Plus, how clowns trademark their unique looks.Featuring Marlene Zuk and Julie Proctor.You can email your burning questions to [e-mail] To Do Everything is available without sponsor messages for supporters of Wait Wait…Don't Tell Me+, who also get bonus episodes of Wait Wait Don't…Tell Me! featuring show outtakes, extended guest interviews, and a chance to play an exclusive WW+ quiz game with Peter! Sign up and support NPR at plus.npr.org.How To Do Everything is hosted by Mike Danforth and Ian Chillag. It is produced by Schuyler Swenson. Technical direction from Lorna White.To manage podcast ad preferences, review the links below:See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey, everybody, it's Peter. And once again, we're featuring a new episode of How to Do Everything in this feed. So this week, Mike and Ian talk with top experts in their fields to unpack some of life's greatest mysteries. Mysteries like, do I need a coat to go outside today? The answer in today's episode might be the life hack you've been waiting for. If you are enjoying How to Do Everything, be sure to follow the show in their own feed. It's called How to Do Everything. It's easy to find.

And thanks for listening. This is How to Do Everything. I'm Mike. And I'm Ian. On today's show, some advice for the many of you who may be considering a career in clowning and trademark law. But first, the first day of spring is this Friday. Temperatures are, it's getting warmer. Let's say you find yourself outside on a hot day. Your phone is dead and you don't have a thermometer. Can you imagine going outside without a thermometer? Who are we? There is a trick to without a thermometer tell the exact temperature outside when it's warm. warm enough. Biologist Marlene Zuck is online. Marlene, can you tell us about it?

Sure. Over a hundred years ago, someone named Dolbert came up with a way to calculate mathematically the temperature in degrees Fahrenheit by counting the number of chirps you hear a cricket making in 15 seconds. And the formula is that if you count the number of chirps in 15 seconds and you add 40, you end up with the temperature in degrees Fahrenheit. The problem is that, like a lot of things, it actually only works under a very, very, very limited set of circumstances. Okay. So the idea is I find a cricket.

If it chirps 12 times in 15 seconds, then I add 40, I would know it is 52 degrees Fahrenheit. You would. You would. Really? Okay. It feels like if it's summer, it should be warmer than 52 degrees outside. There you go. Yes, that is precisely the point. Okay. So the reason that you could use a cricket chirping is that crickets, like all insects, are what are called exothermic, which is a more correct term than cold-blooded, which means that they get their heat from the temperature out.

side. And so when it's warmer, all of their body functions move faster. And when it's cooler, all of their body functions move slower. That includes chirping, which requires muscles to move and nerves to fire. And that all happens faster when it's warmer. So there's more chirps per 15 seconds or per minute or per whatever when it's warmer. And so you'd get a higher number. And then the adding 40 is just something that Dolbert seems to have figured out through, I guess, trial and error. So in a certain temperature range, a certain warm temperature range, the formula works. Right.

And that's a really good point. The second caveat is that this was done for something called a tree cricket, which happens to have a very stable chirp rate. it doesn't work for field crickets, which are the black ones that are on the ground, which I studied for many years. Sure. So it doesn't work for those because their chirp rate is more variable. It only works for one kind of cricket. Okay.

That's it. Wait, so are the tree? It's a pretty limited, like, life hack. I really wouldn't recommend it as a way to, like, I'm going to go out in wilderness without a thermometer. I don't know why you need to know the temperature anyway, But if you did, that would be kind of a limited thing. Are these tree crickets, are they the kind of thing that you maybe don't see, but you hear chirping in the trees?

Okay. So then if, let's say. They're called tree crickets, but so it's not so much, they're not in, like, way up in the canopy. They'll be in, like, tall, like in shrubs or in, you know, tall Forbes or something like that. But they're not calling from the ground generally. They're very beautiful. They're very beautiful. All listeners should immediately go and Google tree cricket.

They're lovely. They're green. They have beautiful sort of lacy-looking wings. I think they're much more glamorous looking than the field crickets, which, like I said, were my study subject for many years. That's a pretty low bar. Come on, right? I think tree crickets are pretty gorgeous. I really do.

Do you think, Marlene, if I was able to secure some tree crickets, and I wanted to put them near like a pizza oven where I was going to be making pizza that night, could they tell me the temperature of the oven and whether or not it was ready for me to make a pizza in it? Pizza cooks at about 500. They would die first, alas. You would have crispy. If you wanted to eat the crickets, it would work because they would crispin up. Oh, that's true.

Okay. Tree cricket sounds amazing. It's good looking. It tells you the temperature. and apparently it's a great source of protein. It's a great topping. Potentially, yeah. They also have super interesting sex lives,

but you probably don't really want to get into that. What's the... Give us the elevator pitch on how freaky they are. So the males call, and they put their wings up perpendicular to their body, and that attracts the female, and the females come, and they chew on this gland on the back of the male's wings,

which is nutritious, and so they're chomping away while the male is calling, and that gives the female some nutrition that helps her lay her egg. So it's kind of like cannibalism combined with music, which is, you know, like what we would all strive for, right? Wait, what happens? What happens to the male cricket then afterwards? He's kind of tired. Okay, but he's not dead.

No, no, so this is not like Mantid's where she chooses head off. kind of thing. Yeah. No. Okay. Okay. I'm glad you pursued that because you're right. I'm glad you pursued that because you don't want people coming away from this thinking that, oh, but also they're really ghoulish. They're not ghoulish. It's just that they have this thing called nuptial gift. They're hungry. They have this thing called what? Nupsule what? Oh, it's called a nuptial gift. Lots of, lots of singing insects produce them in some Katie did. The nuptial gift is produced

by the male and he sort of secretes it. as part of mating, and it can weigh up to 30% of his body weight. I often point out that, okay, now, so let's, you know, looking at the audience, so imagine that, you know, your average guy is going to weigh 150 pounds. So imagine that you'd have to manufacture something out of your own body that weighed like 50 pounds, which you had to give to your date before she would have sex with you. Wow. That usually just quiet everybody.

Usually quietes everybody down. Yeah, it should. I mean, it works out similar to, what is it, three months salary should be the price of the engagement ring. Oh, I never thought about making that connection. Yeah, that's very interesting. I never thought about that. Yeah.

Maybe they got the three months from thinking about Katie did. I always wondered where they got that number. Yeah, three months salary is equivalent to 50 pounds of secretions that you need to gather. I'm sure that's how the jewelry companies came up with that. Marlene Zook's new book, which came out yesterday, is outsider animals, how the creatures at the margins of our lives have the most to teach us. You know what we should do. We should play with this idea.

Yes. I think we should, for the rest of this episode, we should hide a bunch of cricket chirps. Uh-huh. And you listening, you can count them. It's going to be longer than 15 seconds the rest of the episode. but count the cricket chirps from now until the end of the episode add 40

email us at how to at npr.org the temperature you came up with whoever is right first will send you a t-shirt. Yeah, we have t-shirts. I think we have a couple from how old are these t-shirts

at this point. They're pretty old. Yeah, they're in Roman numerals. Hey, if you've got a question for us, you can send it to us at how-to at npr.org. Also, you can just tell us really anything you want in our email box. And that is something that we've, I would say we've been deluged in the past week with emails that we would like to talk about.

Yeah, we do read all of your emails. And we got a bunch of emails from people responding to our last episode, which involved our listener, Autumn's. Autumn's, you may remember, is spelled like the season apostrophe as the apostrophe is part of her name on her birth certificate, and it has caused her countless heartache and difficulty. Primarily, we should say, around punctuation. We don't know anything else about her life that's causing her heartache or any strife. It's mostly just punctuation. Many of you can't, rode in with solutions. We just want to read a few of them. Josh suggests just doing two, it looks like two apostations. And the S, which looks like you have a quotation mark. So it's autumn quotation mark S.

This is a wild one. Lorraine wrote in and said, I think we should adopt an upside down semicolon. So it's an apostrophe with a dot underneath. Oh. To go in the middle of her name. She says it would be like a second level possessive. That's interesting.

I do think that all of this stuff, if we're introducing a new symbol, it's just going to look like a mistake. Most of the solutions, that is the problem for autumn's. Yeah. Most of them just look like typos. This is from Janine. They say, I think the solution is in her two legal given names, Autumn's Hope.

That's her middle name. That's her middle name is lovely and can easily be Autumn's hopes as needed. So you add the apostrophe S to the middle name. Yeah, so whose bicycle is that? That's Autumn's Hope's bicycle. Seems good. Ted suggests making it autumn squads, So the little superscript 2, S.

That's actually, I like that. That's good. Solves the punctuation problem. It also makes her name look like an energy drink. This is another one from Peg. Same thing. Autumn's quotation mark S. That to me feels like that's gaining some momentum. And I actually think that might be what we need.

Yeah. Look, here's another one. Hensel also recommends the quotation mark in place of the apostrophe. That's good. Yeah. What do we get? Four that make the same suggestion. Autumn's, I think this is Autumn's solution.

And finally, we did get this note from Jeff Riechis says, please, please fix your episode. My head is exploding. When a person becomes a clown, maybe you're becoming a clown. You need a way to claim your particular look, the makeup you've come up with, your whole thing. And there is a way to make it yours. You do this by joining the Clown's International Egg Registry.

Julie Proctor is in charge of the register. Julie, can you explain to us how this works? Okay, so nearly 100 years ago, a guy called Stan Bolt was a clown or circus enthusiast. He wasn't a clown himself, but he just loved it. He was actually an accountant, I believe. And he decided that he was going to have a collection of all the different faces and he realized that there were different faces and he registered them on eggs. So there's a story of how it all began.

So, sorry, we're very new to this. So he was interested in clowns and he would put their specific clown makeup faces on eggs so he could remember them and have something. Yeah, it's just purely for his own pleasure. He kept them, then he numbered them being an accountant, I suppose you would. And he wrote them in a book, a ledger, as you would. Okay. And that's just where it began.

It was just a bit of a hobby to start off with. And then more and more clowns discovered this. And they asked, they asked him, can I be one of those eggs? And that's really how it began. Yeah. So that basically became an encyclopedia of all of the different clowns out in the world that we knew. Basically a record of all the clowns. Yeah.

So I get sent a picture of the clowns. clowns, well, several pictures. I need to see the whole 360 degrees sounds of compromise. And also pieces of the costume. So I get little bits of fabric or whatever. And I create the base as well, which would be part of their costume and paint the egg. Is the registry sort of do the, do clowns think of it as a way to kind of claim their look and kind of trademark it? Yeah.

That's why they take so long to get their eggs because they don't know which one that they want to stick with. Oh, yeah. Okay. Can you show us what the, can you show us the most recent egg? Yeah. Oh. All right. So these are the clown eggs I've done, some of them. And if you see big old back next to the drag queens. Oh, sure. Yeah. Oh. So Julie, you, you have, this has been done with clowns for almost 100 years. You have now started using the eggs so that drag queens can register their makeup as well. Well, they have their own unique look. All of them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So why not? It seemed to me that, and they would love to be immortalized somewhere in a museum. Why not?

Yeah. So, and each egg gets numbered and put into a register. I've got my register here that I started with the drag me next. It's just, it's golden and it's got loads of high-heeled shoes on the front, you know, so it's kind of looks a little bit special. But that's quite new. That's actually a new thing. So I haven't pushed that too much at the moment because I'm painting lots of eggs. Yeah.

Well, Julie, thank you so much for talking to us about this. That's okay. That's okay. Well, that does it for this week's show. What'd you learn, Ian? You know what I noticed is that... So we had an interview with Marlene, who told us about the crickets. And we had the interview with Julie, told us about the clowns.

Two very different subjects. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They both started with someone saying hundreds of years ago. Or a hundred... They both started by talking about hundreds of... of years ago. Huh. What do you take from that? What does it make you think? I don't know. I mean, I think it means that you and I believe that the past is prologue. Sure. I think you and I are always saying to each other that those who do not understand history are doomed to repeat it. Yeah, I guess that's true.

Also, I was thinking maybe let's, so right now it's, it's March 18th. Yeah. I just want to look up what happened on this day in history a hundred years ago. Okay. I don't, I don't know, but I'm looking up. So that's March 18th, 1926. March 18th, 1926. It says here that river pirates raided a pier, but missed out on the loot. They ransacked an... This is in the New York

Times from March 18, 1926. They overpowered eight people, ransacked an office, and then vanished in an unlighted motorboat. Oh, here we go. A hundred years ago, on this date, the assistant secretary of war person named Hanford McNighter,

rejected, get this, a New York watchmakers offer to design and install a wristwatch on the Statue of Liberty. So just think. A hundred years ago, a guy went to the Assistant Secretary of War and he was like, Mr. Secretary, I have an idea for that statue out on Ellis Island. You just imagine he's just looking out off the southern tip of Manhattan, just looking at the Statue of Liberty thinking, but it's so beautiful. It's such a beautiful icon, welcoming immigrants to America. I'm just worried she doesn't know what time it is.

That's the problem with the Statue of Liberty. She was always late. She was always late to stuff. How to Do Everything is produced by Skyler Swenson with technical direction from Lorna White. Once again, you can get us your questions. Send them to us at how-to at npr.org. I'm Ian.

I'm Mike. Thanks. Thanks.