About Real Estate: Of doomsayer birds, an arsonist mouse and Mr. Crapper’s first invention
With April Fools’ Day nigh, it’s a good time to debunk a few real estate-related myths while confirming some other tales.
Q. I know several people (including my grandmother) who swear that a wild bird that flies into a house or into the closed window of a house portends the imminent death of one of the property owners. How did this legend get started?
A. The myth has been around since before the Middle Ages, when people would study nuances of everyday life to make sense of the strange and unknown world around them.
“Everyday things, such as the way fires burned or candles sputtered, were studied for their portents,” according to the myth-busting snopes.com website. “But it was to out-of-ordinary events that special attention was paid, because these were believed to foretell the greatest shifts of fortune. Unusual incidents were understood as urgent messages falling directly from the lips of the gods.”
Some placed no time limit on when a death would come after a visit from an uninvited avian. Others believed the passing would come within a year.
The superstition is still going strong today. Some homeowners won’t even keep a caged canary or a framed picture of a bird in their house, wary of tempting fate. Late comedian Lucille Ball certainly was a big believer: Even as an adult, she refused to stay in any hotel that had paintings of birds or incorporated their images into the hotel’s wallpaper.
With April Fools’ Day coming soon, I’m devoting this entire column to debunking some real estate-related myths and confirming some real-life facts.
Q. I have heard that your automatic dishwasher is broken or about to break if there’s water left in the bottom of the appliance’s tub after it is done running. There is always water left in the bottom of my dishwater’s tub, but it works fine. What gives?
A. Water left in a dishwasher’s tub is no cause for alarm. It’s supposed to be there.
I’ve heard this myth before, and sometimes I wonder if it was started or is perpetuated by unscrupulous plumbers and repairmen. Truth is, the standing water keeps the rubber seals that protect the motor and other parts of the machine moist. The seals will crack if they instead dry out, which can cause the dishwasher to leak — and thus create a legitimate (and very expensive) problem to fix.
Q. Did a man named Thomas Crapper really invent the flush toilet?
A. No. The flush toilet was invented in 1596 by Sir John Harrington in England. Crapper, also from England, wasn’t even born until 1836.
Crapper, though, helped popularize flush toilets by openly talking about the need for more sanitary ways of relieving oneself at a time when the topic was considered taboo. He also made several key improvements to toilets of his day, including the invention of the first floating ballcock now found in most modern water closets.
Q. We live in a semirural area in a house that is on a hill. Our home has been struck by lightning three times in the past four years, although the strikes created little damage. Still, why do people always say that “lightning never strikes twice”? We beg to differ!
A. And differ you should. Lightning often strikes the same object repeatedly, especially if it’s a home or tree that sits in a high, relatively isolated area. That’s because lightning bolts are kind of lazy: They tend to strike the closet target, and tall objects are easier to hit because they are nearest to the sky.
The 102-story Empire State Building in New York, for example, is sometimes hit by lightning more than 100 times a year.
Q. Is it true that some guy’s home was destroyed by a mouse that was on fire?
A. Yes, it’s true. Or, like most tales told on April Fools’ Day, it is at least partly true.
I wrote about this story about four years ago, not long after homeowner Luciano Mares decided to burn a pile of weeds in the backyard of his home in New Mexico. Though details of the resulting events are a bit murky, Mares apparently picked up a mouse he had caught in a glue trap and threw the little critter — still wiggling to get out of the trap — into the growing bonfire.
Heat from the blaze melted the glue, and the free but now burning rodent made a beeline back to the house. He scampered through an open window and, according to both Mares and the local fire chief, the entire home was engulfed in flames about 90 seconds later.
No one was hurt, but the house and all of its contents were destroyed.
Skeptics initially thought that the whole story was a hoax, in part because the homeowner changed his story several times before reverting to his original version of events. Others thought the blaze was part of an insurance scam, but that theory was debunked after investigators discovered that Mares had no fire-insurance hazard policy.
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