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This week's newsletter has wildlife trafficking, endocrinological criminals, a transgender CEO, and Afghan girls just pretending to be boys.

This week: Luddites, Alzheimer's, fireflies, aliens, and lying books. Read on.

This week, we've got stories of earthquakes, luchadores, floating abortion clinics, stealing John Updike's trash, and more.

This week's newsletter features hermits, ladybugs, giant floating garbage piles and more. Check it out now.

#longreads

This week's newsletter is jam packed with stories about Wikipedia, Starbucks' scheduling problems, pedophile support groups, plus profiles on Tavi Gevinson and Edward Snowden.

This week's newsletter features stories about sports sounds, records, Bigfoot, sex dolls and Emoji. It's a good one.

#bigfoot #sasquatch #cryptozoology #science #longreads #sports #vinyl #emoji

This week's newsletter features stories of an ailing film industry, shady drug trials, coffee, Harry Potter, and clowns.

#harry potter #film #coffee #drugs #longreads

It's animal week at In Reading Around. Stories about dogs, cats, goats, squirrels, pigeons, and whooping cranes.

#animals #dogs #cats #goats #squirrel #pigeon

This week's newsletter includes stories about blood types, PTSD, pit bulls, animal senses, and gender swapping heroes. Plus, the inimitable Weird Al.

#weird al #the hobbit #blood #ptsd #dogs #pit bulls #longreads

What's Up With...Testing Animal Senses?

This one had been on my list for a while now--ever since I read this article about tigers--but it was last week's column that really got me thinking.

Read any description of a nonhuman animal, and you're bound to see a phrase like "A domestic cat's sense of smell is about fourteen times as strong as a human's," or "A tiger's night vision is six times stronger than a human's." I suppose it's only natural to use human senses as the yardstick to which we measure animal sense, but it always struck me as a bit odd: how do we measure nonhuman animal's senses? And, to take it a step farther, how do we quantify that? In order to say "x is incrementally stronger than y" we would have to assign number values to x and y, which seemed to me an unlikely thing to be able to do.

It seems, though, that I've been thinking about the question all wrong. I had been picturing scientists sitting dogs down in a lab to test their senses, maybe setting down a bowl of food and trying to figure out how smelly it seems to the dog. While face-to-face tests like these can be useful at times (eg. determining color blindness), it would be absurd--not to mention useless--for most applications.

So, instead of studying the actual physical abilities, then, scientists often look at more of the potential abilities, based on anatomy and receptors. We know that the olfactory epithelium is "the part of the olfactory system directly responsible for detecting odors," and that, in humans, it consists of about 5 million scent glands. That seems pretty impressive, until you compare it to cats (averaging 200 million) or dogs (ranging from 125 to 300 million, depending on breed). Clearly, we got the short end of the olfactory stick.

We can, actually, test a dog's vision in much the same way we test human's: with a modified version of the Snellen Eye Chart. Instead of the letters we're used to seeing on the chart, dogs are shown a grid made up of equal sized black and white vertical lines next to a uniform gray pattern. If the dog picks out the lines, he gets a treat; if he picks the pattern, he gets nothing. Just like with the human test, the lines get smaller and smaller as they move down the chart, until eventually the pattern can't be made out. Dogs, it seems, have 20/75 vision (for comparison, in the US, if your vision is worse than 20/40, you would need glasses to be qualified to drive).

We can also get a lot of information about dogs' eyesight by looking internally, as we did for their sense of smell. Dogs eyes have more rods, but fewer cones than humans eyes, which means their eye for detail is about 6 times worse than ours. But, those extra rods also give them night vision that's much better. So, turns out that, while we do use more advanced techniques to decipher animal senses, we can actually just use old-fashioned basic tests as well. And this is just looking at some of the senses we share with animals. There are animals out there with senses humans don't even possess.

#whatsupwith

I bet you didn't even realize Skee-Ball was a trademarked name. That's probably because--unlike Q-Tips, Kleenex, or thermos--there isn't really a generic term for it. That's Eric Pavony's basic argument, at least. Pavony owns a bar in Williamsburg called Full Circle, and is the co-founder of Brewskee-Ball, a competitive Skee-Ball league that's been gaining in popularity in recent years. But, he's also spent the past four years embroiled in a lawsuit with Skee-Ball, Inc. (SBI), who want Pavony to not only stop using the name in his bar and for Brewskee-Ball, but also the myriad puns surrounding the league ("Skee Amigos", "Skee Daddy", "From Skee To Shining Skee", to name a few). But the question remains: if SBI's suit is successful, what else can we even call it?

Zaire ebolavirus is a very serious virus: since its emergence in 1976, it has killed 1,717 of the 2,586 people it has infected. That's a fatality rate just over 66%. But still, compare it to the flu: "influenza kills approximately 500,000 people every year. In 38 years, Ebola has killed a little less than 2,000 people. The flu? Nineteen million." This is, in part, because it's relatively easy to contain. It's passed through contact with blood or bodily fluids, so "modest containment efforts, such as gowns and gloves and dilutions of bleach," can go a long way toward controlling an outbreak. Then how do we explain our cultural fascination with the virus, with scores of stories, like Outbreak and The Hot Zone? "Maybe our obsession with the horrors of Ebola says more about us than anything else. That it kills so rarely, and, for many of us, so far away makes it more nightmarish to contemplate." +Still, it doesn't matter how easy it is to contain an outbreak if you won't even acknowledge it exists. Such disfunction is rampant in Sierra Leone, where, until recently, health workers didn't even wear gloves unless the case was confirmed as Ebola. Many people don't know how the virus spreads, or even the symptoms. Perhaps most disturbingly, some still don't think it's even real.

After the American Civil War, as many as 7,000 Confederates left the United States for Brazil, spreading to São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and down the Amazon River. Only one community survived, though, in a place called Americana, chosen for its similarity to Georgia (and not, allegedly, because slavery had still been legal in Brazil at the time). Writer Stephen G. Bloom visited Americana back in 1979, and found a bizarre world. A man, looking like he could be Colonel Sanders' twin, who "spoke an American English that, while wholly fluent, sounded nothing like I had ever heard before. There was the cadence, a slow molasses drawl, but...[with]a Portuguese accent, and his inflection and the words he used, how he strung them together, it sounded all wrong." The family was, in short, entirely, intentionally, and painstakingly unique.

The Hasidic Jews of Williamsburg are not exactly known for being accepting of outside cultures. Settling in Brooklyn after fleeing Europe during and just after World War II, the ultrareligious sect's mindset was, says Frieda Vizel, "Here we are. We have recaptured; let us not lose it again." Vizel, herself a former Hasidim, is trying to peel back the curtain just a little bit. “My goal is to bring the culture down from this exotic place to a human level.” For the past year, Vizel has been giving tours of the neighborhood to outsiders, in an attempt to foster understanding between the groups.

I've watched enough sci-fi movies to know that it's only a matter of time before robots take all of our jobs and then exterminate us and harvest our organs for fuel. It may be some small consolation, however, that for now, the robot apocalypse may actually be beneficial to journalists. A North Carolina-based company called Automated Insights recently unleashed software called Wordsmith, which the AP is hoping to use to write up to 4,440 earnings reports per quarter. While at first blush, this sounds terrible for journalists, Kevin Roose is in favor of the software (or maybe he's just sucking up for when Skynet becomes self-aware). "The stories that today’s robots can write are, frankly, the kinds of stories that humans hate writing anyway." Passing the buck onto our metal slaves can potentially free up journalists' time to write the kind of pieces they actually like to write (and, by extension, the kind of pieces we like to read).

This week I'm introducing a new section to the newsletter: What's Up With...

"I’ve been keeping a list for some time now of questions I have that I want to look into. It’s mostly silly little things that I come across throughout my day and think, 'Huh, I wonder what the deal is with that.'"

For the first post, I try to figure out why my cat hates citrus.

#longreads #journalism #robots #hasidim #brazil #ebola #skee ball

What's Up With...My Cat Hating Citrus?

I've been keeping a list for some time now of questions I have that I want to look into. It's mostly silly little things that I come across throughout my day and think, "Huh, I wonder what the deal is with that."

This column, then, will be me trying to get to the bottom of these questions. It's generally not going to be any kind of scientific or scholarly study; the work will be done almost primarily through web searches. Wikipedia will likely be a big source of the answers. Sometimes these posts will be long and informative; sometimes, I expect, I won't even be able to find an answer. I'm okay with either.

So, here's the first post.

___________________________________________________________________

Last week, a neighborhood stray cat followed us home. A few days later, during a heavy thunderstorm, we decided to take her in for good. She's a mischevious little cat that we named, appropriately enough, Little Cat (aka. LC aka. Elsie). She seems to get an idea in her head and obsessively stick with it for a few days until something new comes along. For a little while, that meant climbing up on top of the kitchen cabinets and sleeping there all day.

For the past few days, though, she's forgotten about the cabinet spot, instead favoring the living room table. We'll walk by and find her sleeping up there. Sometimes, it just seems like she's taunting us, making a game out of jumping up where she knows she doesn't belong. This is problematic because a) she can't be trusted not to swipe food right off your plate, and b) of the three people living in the apartment, I'm the only one who's not allergic to her.

We tried tried lining the edges of the table with aluminum foil, but that didn't work. Little Cat liked the crinkle of the foil against her face, so she would jump up just to rub on it. We tried using tape with the sticky side up, but it kept getting stuck to our arms as we sat at the table. Besides, while it deterred her, she seemed to struggle to get it unstuck from her paws. I worried about what would happen when I wasn't around to help out with my opposable thumbs.

Then a pet store employee told me to try citrus. "I put orange-scented potpourri on my table, and the cat won't go near it," she said. That sounded ridiculous. Can't possibly work, I thought, but I happened to have a can of citrus-scented air freshener, so figured it's worth a shot. And sure enough, just spray a little bit of it and watch her run.

It's such a strong and instantaneous reaction, it got me thinking: what is it about this scent that she hates so much?

The scent of citrus is attributed to a hydrocarbon called D-Limonene, which is also responsible for the burning if you get lemon juice in your eye. A cat's sense of smell* is 14 times stronger than a human's. Contrary to popular belief, they actually have even more olfactory receptors than dogs (though this varies by breed). What seemed to me to be an overdramatic reaction at first suddenly makes sense. Just one whiff, I'd imagine, must feel to her like squeezing a lemon straight up your nose.

It also seems that there's a defense aspect to the aversion as well. Citrus fruits can cause vomiting and diarrhea in cats and dogs, though "Excessive amounts would need to be consumed for truly severe reactions".

So, bottom line is, cats really don't like oranges.

*Cats, like dogs, and horses, also have a scent organ in the roof of their mouth called the Jacobsen's organ. This organ also happens to be the reason snakes flick their tongues.

#cats #whatsupwith

Animals living in captivity are safe from the threat of predators or the shortage of food, but they often pay for it in other ways. "An animal in the wild can’t afford to be depressed. It will simply be killed or starve, since its environment requires constant vigilance." When zoos face a troubled animal they can't help on their own, they call Dr. Vint Virga. Through careful observation and understanding, he's often able to diagnose and treat the animals. Medication, for Virga, is a last resort; often, he's able to fix the problem just by addressing the needs of the individual. “Scientists often say that we don’t know what animals feel because they can’t speak to us and can’t report their inner states. But the thing is, they are reporting their inner states. We’re just not listening.”

When it comes to meditation, it's easy to jump right to a cynical conclusion. "When meditation first came to the West in the 1960s it was tied to the drug culture, the hippie culture...People think it’s just a bunch of crystals or something, they roll their eyes.” But, argues Nobel Prize winning scientist Elizabeth Blackburn, there's something to it. Our DNA has a protective cap known as telomeres. "When [telomeres] get too short, our cells start to malfunction and lose their ability to divide – a phenomenon that is now recognised as a key process in ageing." Blackburn's research shows that chronic stress plays a part in shortening these caps. She's also shown, more controversially, that regular meditation can slow the erosion of telomeres--and can possibly even lengthen them again--thus leading to a longer life.

That's good news, especially if you're not rich. Currently, the life expectancy for a college-educated white male is 12.2 years longer than that of his high school graduate counterparts (the gap is slightly shorter for women, at about 11 years). These numbers are expected to explode in the coming years, with the introduction of new drugs to extend lifespans. Drugs that only the affluent will likely have access to. "Will anyone just accept that the haves get two lives while the have-nots barely get one?"

It's been a constant source of frustration in my life that I will never get to see a living dinosaur. The idea of these gigantic creatures walking around is almost beyond belief, and to not be able to see one just makes no sense to me. It's also crazy to me how little about these beasts we actually know. What little we do know, though, doesn't come from where we'd expect. "Stars such as T. rex, Stegosaurus, and the Triceratops bask in the glory of public attention while little known dinosaurs such as Hadrosaurus, Deinonychus, Maiasaurua and other unsung species do the heavy lifting of scientific revelation." Revelations about family bonds, body types, etc. were all learned from these lesser-known dinosaurs, yet they get none of the glory. (though I might argue that this is at least partially the scientists' fault. T. rex will always be king, but if a kid isn't into Hadrosaurus, maybe (s)he just needs to be told more about it.) +Related: Dimetrodon isn't even a dinosaur.

The men's rights movement, for all its bluster, has a kernel of truth behind it. Men were hit harder by the recession, and are taking longer to recover; women are enrolling in college at higher percentages than men; men are committing suicide more often. Underneath all this, "boys do not have the same support network as girls their age." But, as Jessica Roy found while reporting for Time, these organizations are hardly providing a helpful support network (to put it kindly).

How would you describe colors to someone who's never seen them? Tommy Edison was born blind, and did just that. The responses were sometimes profound (“The thing that makes me think of gray is the smell of rain on asphalt.”) and sometimes contradicting ("It feels gray. Like cotton balls."), but while not very informative, still it's still an interesting project.

As always, I welcome your comments, questions, hate mail, etc. And if you have any links you'd like to share, let me know!

#dinosaurs #meditation #animals #zoo animals #longreads

In order to feed the Earth's ever-increasing population, we may soon need to come up with new ways to grow our crops. The population is on track to increase to between 9 and 16 billion people, driving up demand for food. Meanwhile, "higher temperatures and longer, more dramatic swings between drought and rain mean the plants that we rely on will have a hard time weathering the strain." One scientist may have an answer: custom bred microbes that can help plants produce more food, with "little or no environmental downside." The team has yet to publish the results of their initial tests, but says, “We have actually seen huge differences in the weight of the cassava roots...We thought it would work but not to such an extent.”

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This week's Longreads Member Pick is free again, and it's a good one: an excerpt from Sam Kean's new book The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons. You may remember Kean from a few weeks ago, with the article about Phineas Gage. In this excerpt, he explores the case of "H.M.", a young man who was left an amnesiac after a surgery to help with his epileptic seizures went awry. What followed was years of study, leading to some major neuroscience breakthroughs, such as the difference between short- and long-term memory. +Longreads recently relaxed their Member Picks a bit, making some of them available for non-members. But really, you should all just become members anyway.

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The dead mother trope has long been a fixture of animated movies: from classics like Cinderella and Bambi to new movies like Finding Nemo and Mr. Peabody and Sherman. A newer trend is emerging in recent years, however: the fun dad ready to take mom's place. The films follow the aloof and inept father figure as he grows and redeems himself. This cliche just doesn't mesh with reality though. "Did you know that 67 percent of U.S. households with kids are headed by married couples, 25 percent by single mothers, and only 8 percent by single fathers (almost half of whom live with their partners)?"

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Radiolab's Robert Krulwich brought us two great stories this week about off-the-wall science experiments. In the first, a Catholic priest and scholar from the 16th Centuryset out to prove that living creatures do not spontaneously appear from non-living things. His method of disproving this widespread belief was putting pants on frogs to act as condoms. Of course. In the second story, John James Audubon challenged the popular belief that vultures find their food by smell, rather than sight. What followed was a series of bizarre, but ultimately informative experiments, culminating in an incredible test involving tricking vultures with a painting of a dead sheep.

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Kurt Vonnegut, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, Vincent Van Gogh, Sylvia Plath. The list of creative geniuses goes on and on. Neuroscientist Nancy Andreasen has beenstudying creativity for decades, and may be closer to the answer than anyone else. She has spent years extensively interviewing and studying creative and non-creative people to work out where this genius comes from, and why it seems to be so linked with mental illness.

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#radiolab #mental illness #kurt vonnegut #virginia woolf #ernest hemingway #vincent van gogh #sylvia plath #creativity #science #longreads #disney

It's a question that's been plaguing evolutionary biologists for 25 years now: if we rewound time and started the world again, would life as we know it exists? Would we (i.e. humans, animals, plants, bacteria, etc.) look and act the way we do now, to would something wholly different emerge instead? According to some evolutionary biologists, like the late Stephen Jay Gould, no: "Random mutations and chance extinctions would build on each other...driving the evolution of life down one path or another." But, according to others, "Organisms have to configure themselves to the realities of the physical, chemical, and also biological world,” so life as we know it, on a long enough timescale, they argue, was inevitable.

We (if we're lucky) sleep for eight hours a day. "If there were a widespread disease that...deprived people of a third of their conscious lives, the search for a cure would be lavishly funded." Personally, I wouldn't consider my time spent sleeping to be depriving me of my life, but there are those who still seek an alternative. Leading the charge is the military. Soldiers, out on active duty, need sleep, but it's not always possible to get the rest they need. What if they could take a pill that would artificially induce the restorative powers of sleep? Or better yet, use "transcranial direct-current stimulation" to jump right to deep sleep, essentially allowing them to get a full rest in just half the time? This article, from 2013, and its author Jessa Gamble, just won the Best Feature award from the Association of British Science Writers.

A mysterious noise ("a dull, steady droning like that of a diesel engine idling down the street"), known colloquially as the Hum has been plaguing between 2 and 10% of people for decades. Beginning suddenly and apparently never leaving, this sound has been ruining the lives of those who hear it. One man reportedly took a chainsaw to his ear just to silence the noise enough to sleep. Finally, though, after nearly 40 years, investigators have reached a general consensus that the Hum is comprised Very Low Frequency, or Extremely Low Frequency (VLF and ELF, respectively) radio waves, which can penetrate walls and travel very long distances. What is to be done to stop it, however, remains to be seen.

Today's farm animals have gone through a lot to get from their wild ancestors to what we know today. Mosaic looks back through the several thousand year history of the domesticated pig, from the forests of China and Europe to the factory farms of the American Midwest. New technologies are allowing farms to move away with the controversial (and, I would argue, inhumane) gestation crates in favor of a larger communal pen. But, can further advancements be made through selective breeding? "Farm animals inhabit designer homes and bodies that we humans have tweaked, and continue to tinker with, across millennia. We are, without exaggeration, the creators of their world, and they our greatest resource – and heaviest burden. If they suffer, does the fault lie in our failure to innovate?" +Semi-related, Jon Mooallem wrote a great NY Times opinion piece about streaming eagle cams, and the odd place animals hold in our lives.

What if we could domesticate diseases, just like animals, making them more benign, less likely to infect and harm us? "Mosquito-proof housing would cut off the mosquito’s access to anybody infected with a strain of [malaria] virulent enough to confine its host to bed. If the mosquito’s food sources are restricted to people healthy enough to be outside, walking around, then the only relatively non-virulent strains of Plasmodium can circulate." It could be an easy fix for a deadly disease.

"We make kids learn about biology, literature, history, and geometry with the promise that navigating the wider world will be easier for their efforts. It'll be harder and harder not to include computing on that list." These days, computer coding is just a part of our lives. It's time for our education system to acknowledge that.

#coding #pigs #domestic animals #the hum #evolution

Robert W. Fieseler and The Big Roundtable bring us the most exhaustive account of the aluminum can you could ever hope for. From production, to manufacturing and shipping, to consumption, to "canners" gathering cans to collect the deposits, and finally recycling. “Recycling is a transportation business. Material has to be transported from A to B, and who’s paying for the shipping?” When it comes to cans, there's high demand, and low shipping costs, so a nice incentive to recycle (as opposed to the flipside, with glass, which will likely end up in a landfill). “Every can body could be reconstructed with 90 percent old cans, if you could collect that many.”

Can you believe it's already been 5 years since the balloon boy hoax*? Well now he's back, fronting a metal band with his brothers to support his parents, who believe they are descended from aliens, as they travel around chasing storms. This story just got cooler, but at the same time, infinitely sadder. *I had either forgotten, or somehow never heard that it was actually a hoax within a hoax: not only was he never in the balloon, but his parents had orchestrated the whole "our son was hiding in the attic the whole time" story. Brilliant.

Wooden pallets are one of the invisible driving forces of our industrial society. Thanks to these splintery collections of cheap wood, we're able to unload shipments that used to require "nine men, several four-wheel trucks, a forklift, and a warehouse mule to unload" with significantly less time and effort. The pallet world is run by two main groups: "whitewood" representing the basic pallet, and CHEP, the evil cabal out to destroy whitewood with strong-arm tactics and a slightly improved pallet. I'm exaggerating, but just barely. +That article was brought to my attention thanks to a recent episode of the great podcastPlanet Money.

Sitting down all day is terrible for you, lowering your good cholesterol, raising your risk of diabetes, and even seemingly negating any benefits you may have acquired from exercise. So in response, Dan Kois stopped sitting for the entire month of April, and realized that standing all day is just as bad for you. Most interesting, to me, was the social impact of the experiment. "I had never really thought about the social implications of standing versus sitting until this month brought them to the fore. At restaurants, I feel as though I’m delivering an hourlong toast; at the playground, my mien is transformed from relaxed-dad-on-a-bench to that of a pacing nervous parent, ready to intervene at the slightest sign of trouble."

Robert Diamond is a man with a simple mission: dig under the streets of Brooklyn to uncover a forgotten subway tunnel in which the secret diary of John Wilkes Booth is hidden, proving that a group of high-ranking, pro-Confederate New York officials were complicit in the murder of Abraham Lincoln. That sounds insane, right? But, every time he gets even a little close, the DOT shuts him down. So maybe there's more to it than one might think.

#cans #recycling #metal #balloon boy #pallets #shipping #npr #abraham lincoln #john wilkes booth

David Sneddon was 24 years old when he disappeared while hiking in Western China. US and Chinese officials insist that he must have drowned, but that explanation never sat right with his family. After a decade of searching, visiting the area, talking to locals, and human rights workers, they became convinced that David was abducted by North Koreans. The officials still refuse to listen. How could the US and China just turn their back on a potentially kidnapped citizen? Like most things, it comes down to politics. "Asking too many accusatory questions about David could potentially threaten America’s vital relations with China. If David was in fact detained in China, it would mean that China broke its treaty obligation to inform the U.S. within four days. Pressing the issue with North Korea, meanwhile, would jeopardize possible nuclear negotiations. 'It’s simply more convenient for the United States if David is dead.'"

It's an age-old trope of movies and television: men, chained at the ankle, with shovels and picks on the side of the road. Or stamping out license plates in factories. Most of us probably never gave it much thought; it's just another part of prison life. But theselong, hard hours of work for such little pay are doing nothing to discourage recidivism. Men and women are leaving prisons with no savings and no job prospects. With this in mind, some hybrid business/rehabilitation programs are putting inmates to work in jobs that teach them real skills so that once they leave prison, they'll be able to support themselves. And it's working: "On the federal level, inmates who have worked in correctional industries are 35 percent less likely to land back in prison." The problem is, these programs often butt heads with unions and others in local economies who see their jobs threatened by the prospect of cheap labor.

It seems counterintuitive, but legalized elephant hunts actually appear to help elephant populations. By controlling the hunts, governments are able to drive local economies, and since the hunts are the locals' main livelihood, they're less likely to tolerate poachers. The numbers support the theory: in Botswana, where hunts are sanctioned, there were 127 seizures of illegal ivory between 1989 and 2011, versus 581 in Kenya, without the legal sanction. For GQ, writer Wells Tower accompanies an exclusive hunting party on one of the last legal elephant hunts in Botswana.

Long-time In Reading Around favorite Matterrelaunched this week with a few changes. In their first week back, they brought us three very different pieces: what it's like to write about racial hatred; acartoon from Matt Bors about an LA Clippers intern filing a class action lawsuit alleging he's owed back pay; and Britney Spears' Las Vegas residency. Very different fare from their previous science/tech beat, but I'm excited to see where this new direction takes us. In between the time I wrote the above and when this email will reach you, Matter published anepically long interview with Buzzfeed's Jonah Peretti by Felix Salmon.

"When microbes aren’t killing us, we are largely oblivious to them. So, we construct narratives of hosts and pathogens, heroes and villains, us and them...We place ourselves at the centre of their world. We make it all about us." But a handful of new studies suggest that view might be wrong: in some (though certainly not all) cases, microbes aren't trying to kill us, we're just collateral damage. "According to this outlook, we’re not central actors in the dramas that affect our lives. We’re not even bit players. We are just passers-by, walking outside the theatre and getting hit by flying props."

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