The Rituals That Ward Off Bad Luck Aren’t Arbitrary - Facts So Romantic
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Launch Ritual: NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has a tradition of eating peanuts during big, risky spacecraft events, such as Mars rover landings. Photograph by Kevin Baird / FlickrFor the last two years of his baseball career, George Gmelch didn’t eat pancakes. Playing in the Detroit Tigers minor league system in the 1960s, two disappointing post-pancake games were enough to make him swear off hot cakes altogether. That wasn’t the only superstition he adopted. “Somehow, I decided that holding the ball during the national anthem gave me bad luck,” recalls Gmelch, who was a first baseman. “From that point on, for the rest of that season and maybe beyond that, when the ball came to me I would quickly toss it so that I wouldn’t have it in my glove or my hand.” Gmelch, now an anthropologist at (...)