The Ins and Outs of Belly Button Lint

Your navel hard at work

Now for a cultural reference that Star Wars nerds like me will recognize: Remember the Sarlacc from Episode VI -- the ravenous creature in a huge desert pit lined with inward-facing spines that swallowed hapless victims (like Billy Dee Williams) alive?

Well, that's how your navel gathers lint.

An Austrian researcher named Georg Steinhauser devoted 3 years of his life to studying belly button fuzz and here are his in-depth findings: You belly hair scrapes it off your shirt and sucks it remorselessly down into your omphalos.

"The hair's scales act like a kind of barbed hooks," Dr. Steinhauser proudly reported. "Abdominal hair often seems to grow in concentric circles around the navel."

A Random Question

Photo credit: Joe Sullivan

"Mommy? Where does face powder come from?"

"Why, from a magical wonderland far away, full of colorful chemicals and high-pressure machines. Here, let me show you..."

Kids, don't try this at home!

Noticing the current trend of trusting the news more if it's delivered by comedians, ABC News decided to try some of that hilarious Bad Lip-Reading on the Prime Minister of Canada. But they really should have practiced more first.

Click here for more!

I'm Shocked -- Shocked -- That Such Things Occur in Casablanca!

POOF!

Two years ago in Azilal, Morocco a man named Abragh Mohamed received the sad news from a Casablanca hospital that his wife had been in a horrible car accident and probably wouldn't survive. But they needed him to drive back to Azilal and get some more cash so they could operate on her.

By the time Mr. Mohamed returned 4 hours later, doctors told him his wife was dead. They handed her corpse over to the grieving man wrapped in a shroud and sealed in a casket. Back home she was buried.

Then, two years later, she showed up on TV.

A friend of the poor widower called to say he was watching Mr. Mohamed's dead wife on a program called Al Mokhtafoun ("The Vanished") and she was searching for her husband. She told the show that they had "lost touch" 1 1/2 years ago.

To all appearances her grave is still intact -- no tell-tale zombie marks or anything. So in all likelihood the hospital gave her husband somebody else's body to bury. And the doctors declared his wife dead when she was quite non-dead (but not undead, thank goodness).

The moral of our story? Don't trust doctors!

Focused Like a Laser Beam!

Blogging picture by Erkan Yilmaz 

So, I'm a guy with several blogs -- just like all of you, right?  And depending on my mood and things I'm interested in at any particular time and which blog will take the least amount of time to write a post in and how tired I feel after work and random things people say and whether my cats have done something bad on the carpet and etc. and etc. I'll post in one blog for a month or two while ignoring all the others.  This leads to very sporadic blogs.

But there comes a time in every man's life when he has a rendezvous with destiny and a time for choosing, when he puts down roots and spreads his branches and picks a blog to focus on. And my friends, this is that blog.

I pick this blog for the best of reasons, chief among them the fact that it's about stuff I think and so takes a minimum of research. Unless I actually think of something interesting (unlike most of the time); then there may be a brief spurt of research, like that post I did about the secret, underground truth about of Labor Day.

So, hard luck for you all, but there will now be a sudden uptick in random, nonsensical writing on the A Few Paragraphs blog.

Just so you know.

Another Benefit to Living in California

So, apparently, mermaids are real. At least in California.

                      

The Meaning of Life Revealed -- Briefly

Sold!

Like most deep and heavy people in the world, you too have no doubt contemplated the question: What is the meaning of life?

Well, you're just out of luck!

The actual meaning of life was discovered by a guy named Postmil back in 2000, and he offered this blinding revelation to the highest bidder on eBay.  Here's what the most important moment in all of history looked like if you had been chosen by the Fates to be bidding at the right place and at the right time.

Description

I have discovered the reason for our existence and will be happy to share this information with the highest bidder.

Bidding

But you weren't. And so, after a total of 8 bids, the infinite truth of all existence was passed down from the Trancendent Ascended Master postmil to the new avatar for a new age mojo120843@aol.com  on February 8, 2000 for a suitably humble and self-effacing $3.26.

And the cosmos was changed forever.

Michigan Under Seige! Is No Meat Safe??

"Now where's that freezerrrrrrrr..."

Deep in the fog-shroudded Ypsilanti night a dark figure slithered through the quiet neighborhood. Spying an open window he or she slid inside, ready to silently relieve the inhabitants of their most valuable possessions...

Which turned out to be "frozen meats and a chain saw."

Never captured nor even sighted, the dreaded "Frozen Meat & Chain Saw Monster" still stalks the nights of eastern central Michigan -- and the nightmares of her people. Who knows what frozen meats he will desire next? What brand chain saw will he purloin?

It is conjectured that the fiend may have watched this very video before embarking on his crime wave:

Mystical Mars

More evidence of Mars' highly advanced magic powers!

Thanks to Curiosity the Martian Rover we are learning more about the red planet than we did in all the centuries of scientific endeavour before it got there. As you know if you faithfully read these pages, we've discovered the first evidence of petrified lizards in space. In addition, Sleestaks from Land of the Lost have also been found next to the last of their bowling balls.

But now, in possibly the most mind-boggling revelation yet, NASA has uncovered (and simultaneously denied, as they always do)  great feats of magic performed millennia ago by the now-fossilized lizards. Apparently, the mighty power of their levitation tricks still floats spoons in the reddish wilderness to this very day!

Mysteries of History #1

Shigir Idol

In Russia there is a mysterious wooden statue covered with pictographs and faces called the Shigir Idol. It was discovered in Western Siberia in 1894, having been preserved for years in an old bog. Scientists have always known it was ancient, but through various modern gizmos they have now discovered that actually it's the oldest wooden sculpture in the world -- carved 11,000 years ago!

Nobody knows what the markings hacked into it mean, though most every expert insists they were intended to communicate unfathomable mesolithic knowledge, as opposed to, say, just being some whittlin' to fight off the mind-numbing boredom of prehistoric Siberian nights. For all we know this may be their god of monotony and despair, worshipped in the name of nothing else to do. The fact that the idol is the height of a 2 story building shows the central place tedium held in their world.




Meanwhile...

Kinfolks??

Long Road to Salem

Kate Brown Secretary of State (and

maybe next Governor) of Oregon

Politics in Oregon, land of old hippies and majestic scenery, is getting weird... weirder. On Tuesday Governor Kitzhaber, himself an old hippy who wears blue jeans to his inaugurations (he's had 4), suddenly and mysteriously summoned the president of the National Association of Secretaries of State, Kate Brown,  away from a high-powered Washington, DC conference for a 1-on-1, personal, secret meeting in his office.

She, being his own Secretary of State, dutifully hopped the next jet back to Salem, leaving all her fellow Secretaries mystified. But when she breathlessly hurried into the Capitol, the Governor looked up and asked, "Why'd you come back so soon?"

Now mystified just like the other 49 Secretaries of State, she politely asked what in the name of Lewis & Clarke was so freaking important that it merited a nine hour plane flight?? "Oh," he said, "Well, I'm not going to resign."

Now, the Secretary of State, who is also next in line for Oregon's throne by the way (that's how they do it there, because they're hippies and they like to be different from states like Mississippi where they have a boring, establishment-type Lt. Governor), didn't think the Governor was resigning either when she left for DC. But he's in some hot water these days, what with his live-in fiancee who once committed a federal crime but the statute of limitations ran out and is also a paid government consultant on clean energy. And there are two 'Recall-the-Gov' campaigns currently running. The main thing tho, according to the New York Times, is that folks are just sick of him.

So the scuttlebutt is that in between the time his Secretary of State left for the nation's capitol and when she rushed back, Gov. Kitzhaber firmly decided to finally resign, then just as firmly changed his mind.

Stay tuned for more adventures!


UPDATE: OK, he's really, really resigning for real next Wednesday. Really.

I Like Pluto

When I was a kid in middle school I read a great Robert Heinlein book called Have Spacesuit, Will Travel, wherein a kid wins an old, castoff spacesuit in a contest by a cornflakes company and promptly is kidnapped by aliens while wearing it in his backyard.

One scene I remember vividly to this very day (and Heinlein books were very good at painting vivid scenes in my mind) is where Kip -- the hero -- almost freezes to death while trying to set off a rescue beacon and save a good alien he calls 'Mother Thing' while outside in the liquid nitrogen snow of Pluto.

This caused me to be fascinated with Pluto for the rest of my
life. This was partly because it was supposed to be a solidly frozen world, which conjured up images of a glistening glassy sphere in dark space. A crystal ball in space would be very cool!

Pluto

Photo by Eurico Zimbres

But it was also because the place was so far away that nobody could see what it looked like. It was just a tiny blip of light that slowly moved against the inky background. That's how Clyde Tombaugh discovered it: flipping back and forth between two photos of space and noticing this little light that cruised along at the outer reaches of the solar system.

But in six months that will all change with the arrival of the New Horizons space probe. This July 14th it will buzz by Pluto taking pictures from about 8500 miles away and aiming a battery of scientific instruments at it.When it's finished, and wandering off into the Kuiper Belt, we should know a whole lot more about that little blip of light.

Duck and Cover

The Bio-Duck of song and story

Photo by 玄史生

Out here on the sea, a man sees many a strange sight and hears tales in the dead of night that makes his blood run cold. But most fearful of all are the tales of a creature so terrifying that the mighty Kraken cowers before it, aircraft carriers change course to avoid it, and Great White Whales skitter swiftly away. Some say it's a demon, some that it's a refugee from the Jurassic age, and others don't dare guess -- just sit in despair in the darkened corners of their sailing ship's hold and weep like a grizzled baby.

Aye, thar be a name for this nameless horror, a name even the boldest sea captains can barely whisper. Oceanographers quail in fear as they slowly write it on their white boards, the hair of rugged Maine lobstermen turns instantly white when it's spoken, and the crews of nuclear submarines simultaneously lose their lunches when they hear that dreaded name: THE BIO-DUCK!!!

The Bio-Duck's angry and unpredictable undersea quacking has bedeviled mariners for 50 years and more. But now, heedless of the danger, devil-may-care scientists have gathered their courage and invaded the Bio-Duck's dark lair. The tables have been turned on this foul beast at last, finally unmasking the ferocious Bio-Duck as...

...the lovable Minke whale!!

Bio-Duck Unmasked!

From Itsnature.org

How Do You Like Your Deer?

At Rainier Shattles' house in Jackson County, Mississippi mystery lights are appearing out of nowhere and flash-frying all the baby deer! And there are pictures.

That's what I conclude after hurriedly glancing at their story. But it's a free country (?) and we're at liberty to make up marginally true stories at will and, when backed against the wall, call them metaphors.

Here, judge for yourself:

Waste Product Mystery

An unheeded warning

Some places in this fair land of ours (i.e., America) have been terrorized by the likes of Bigfoot, Mothman, and even -- as reported here last week -- creepy clowns. But in the normally placid Michigan town of Ypsilanti an unspeakable monster skulks through the streets and alleyways in the dead of night. Evading stake outs and cameras with almost supernatural ease this creature mysteriously leaves his or her dreaded calling card on the plastic kiddie slides of the city: Piles and piles of excrement. Yes, I speak of the 'Mystery Pooper!'

Some believe the pooper is some sad soul denied bathroom privileges when they were in grade school. Others feel certain that these deposits are the product of a sporadic wormhole connecting Prospect Park with some unimaginable alien 'toilet.'

And others, of course, say it's just Michigan's Bigfoot answering the call of nature after a pizza dinner.

The Mysterious Selfie Man

Who is this man?

And you thought selfies were just a phenomenon of the iPhone age! But in ancient times they had a wonder of modern (for then) engineering called the Photo Booth, and anybody with spare change and the gumption could take as many primitive selfies as they liked.

Most folks were satisfied with just a few. It wasn't the most convenient thing, after all. Some people though caught the selfie fever, including the strain popular in our time of taking the same photo of yourself repeatedly over time so you can watch yourself get old.

Recently, a treasure trove of mysterious, ancient selfies were unearthed in an antique shop and are currently on display at Rutgers University. 450 of them, and all lovingly framed. Historians are digging into them because no one has any idea who this man was or why he was so persistent.  Did he mean to leave them behind as a small legacy of his existence? Or was he just OCD? It's an enigma.

Look closely -- is this your Grandpa?  If so, give the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers a call.

_____________________

UPDATE:  Good news! Selfie Man has been identified! It turns out he was a happy-go-lucky gentleman named Franklyn Swantek who owned Swantek Photo Service, Michigan's biggest photo booth business until he passed away in the mid-1980s. Apparently, he took all those pictures of himself to check whether his photo booths were working right.

Slurpees Were the Key

Artist's impression of Bigfoot going for
a Slurpee

Just in case you were wondering, remember the Bigfoot shot in 2012 by an intrepid yahoo using $200 in ribs as bait? It was a fake.

Which is good in a way, since he claimed to have killed it near San Antonio and it's unlikely that Bigfeet live a solitary existence. He would have had family lurking around the fringes, in the vast San Antonio wilderness. That's what made me doubt his story: The 7-Elevens haven't reported an upsurge of Sasquatches walking in to order Slurpees.

"30 Minutes or its Free!"

Photo courtesy of Dean Muskett

Tiny, secret aircraft are buzzing us down here in Texas. We assume they are 'ours,' but you never know. What if the President of China feels like Tex-Mex? It could be perceived as a sign of weakness in the all-important geopolitical arena of down-home cooking to just call up an Amarillo restaurant, you know. This could be may be their best bet to get some that's hot and fresh. Their space program is going well, so this is probably a cinch!

Our Cruddy Oceans

One obstacle to finding the wreckage of MH370: all the other junk out there!

Your Friendly Neighborhood Clown

"He was just waving and holding balloons..."
Photo courtesy of Michael Leavy via SILive.com

How do feel about... clowns? Well a lot of people find them really, really creepy. So many in fact that there's a name for the intense fear of clowns: Coulrophobia.

If you happen to be a coulrophobiac and have plans to visit Long Island, you might want to change them due to the recent epidemic of Evil Clown sightings there.

And, just like Bigfoot, there are actual photos of him, such as this comforting portrait.