Hairy Tongues: Not Actually A Sign Of Madness

Stick out your tongue and touch your finger to it. Yu will feel two things at once: Your finger will feel your tongue. In turn, your tongue will feel and taste your finger. Just which tastes it picks up depends on your finger. Five basic possibilities–sweet, salty, bitter, umami (savory) and sour–can come together to yield more nuanced impressions (index finger with a hint of peanut butter, perhaps?). The taste buds themselves look like brain corals at the centre of which are the sensitive tips of taste cells, each of which ends in a thin hair. When you eat, little particles of food are washed over these hairs. If a sugar washes over a sweet taste bud’s hairs, a signal is sent by the nerves under the taste bud to your brain.

- from The Wild Life Of Our Bodies by Robb Dunn, who goes on to add that as late as 2005, no one knew we had taste buds in our guts. I didn’t know this. Did you know this?

For a fascinating interview with this author, about The Bellybutton Diversity Project, I recommend this podcast.

I blame Winnie the Pooh.

Our three-year-old loves honey. If I ask what she wants inside a sandwich, it’s always honey. She likes everything better with honey.

I’ve been blaming Winnie the Poo, specifically the illustrations, inspired by these sketches:

But it seems I’m not to blame poor old Pooh at all, but rather human evolution:

The honeyguide lives in much of Africa, where it eats the wax, brood, and eggs of honeybees. In this, it is relatively unique. Wax is indigestible to most animals. The honeyguide has been simultaneously blessed with the ability to eat wax and cursed with the dilemma of how to obtain it. Honeyguide beaks are too small to break into beehives. Humans have a different problem. We crave beehives for their honey. We are willing to do almost anything to get to honey. In Thailand, little boys are sent a hundred feet up into trees with a smoking stick to do battle with three-inch-long giant bees and take from them their honey… Honey, to paraphrase the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss has “a richness and subtlety difficult to describe to those who have never tasted [it], and indeed can seem almost unbearably exquisite in flavour… [It] breaks down the boundaries of sensibility, and blurs is registers, so much so tat the eater of honey wonders whether he is savoring a delicacy or burning with the fire of love.”

- from The Wild Life Of Our Bodies, by Rob Dunn

Comma Splices and Run-on Sentences

Not all commas are ‘stylistic’ or ‘optional’ or dependent upon author’s voice, and I’m a bit sick of hearing it.

The funeral [of my auntie] is a featureless crematorium in Lytham St Annes. Afterwards we go for lunch… I sit next to my grandmother’s niece, Cousin Florence, who keeps a boarding house in Blackpool… Grief is not much in evidence, though with Cousin Florence it is hardly to be expected. Her husband’s name was Frank, and six months before we had had a two-page letter filling us in on all her news. Halfway down the second page came the sentence: ‘Frank died last week, haven’t we been having some weather?’ Seldom can a comma have borne such a burden.

- Alan Bennett, Untold Stories

That is a comma splice.

A run-on sentence is when not even a comma appears between two separate sentences. I suppose the trick is in knowing the end of a sentence when you come to one.

Related: Do you know about the ‘donner party comma‘?

Damning Review Oneliners

“It was a book to kill time for those who like it better dead.”

- Dame Rose Macaulay

I’d much rather clean my apartment than finish this story. My apartment will soon be very clean.

- @jsinsheim

[The Change Up] is obscene, foulmouthed, scatological, creepy and perverted.

- Roger Ebert

Just saw Like Crazy. You probably shouldn’t see it if you’ve gone through a breakup, never had a relationship, in a relationship or married.

- @sarahlapolla

Related Link: Some Of The Meanest Book Reviews Of 2011 from Flavorwire

On Authenticity

I can understand if you’re fake around your boss but why do you have to pretend around me? I’m not paying you shit.

- @weirdtruefact

None of us are authentic, unless we suffer from some serious mental disorders. We all filter.

- Chris Brogan, from I Am Not Authentic

The Invention Of Lying is a film starring Ricky Gervais, about a man who lives in a society full of people who do not lie about anything at all. Like many high concept films, this one fizzles out and I couldn’t sit through more than the first third, but watching that first bit made me ponder the extent to which we all fake it in our everyday lives.

To what extent do you fake it? Freakonomics produced an interesting podcast on this topic, and I concluded that I’m far too honest for my own good. (I have thought this for a while now.)

Also interesting: A 1999 study by psychologist Robert Feldman showed that the most popular kids were also the most effective liars.

On Balanced Arguments

I think it is true that at least some media editors when they hear a point of view expressed, immediately say “oh, we’ve got to have the opposite point of view”.

It’s been said before that when two points of view are expressed with equal force the truth doesn’t necessary lie midway between them. One side could simply be wrong.

- Richard Dawkins, in reference to the idea that Earth is 6,000 years old.

Some More Than Others

One of the most obvious facts about grownups to a child is that they have forgotten what it is like to be a child.

- Randall Jarrell
US author & poet (1914 – 1965)

It’s difficult to remember what it’s like to be a child, because it’s impossible to undo adult knowledge.

- Alison Croggon, from Overland 202

To all the internet trolls I love

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.

- Kurt Vonnegut

How Often To Write

If you write one story, it may be bad; if you write a hundred, you have the odds in your favor.

- EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS

On Tidy Desks

by henry...

I only ever knew one journalist with a truly tidy desk, and he was eventually arrested for molesting small boys. Make of that what  you will; but just bear it in mind the next time somebody with a tidy desk invites you camping.

- Bill Bryson, from The Lost Continent

If a cluttered desk is the sign of a cluttered mind, what is the significance of a clean desk ?

- Laurence J Peter

There are plenty of self help articles extolling the virtues of tidiness in the work space, proclaiming, beyond any doubt, that tidiness leads to greater productivity. But where is the evidence for that? Logic works both ways:

1. Any time spent tidying, wiping and vacuuming is time that could have been spent producing actual work.

2. Are there any studies which show untidy people are any less productive than tidy people? Even taking account extra time spent searching for things which haven’t been returned to their ‘proper’ place, I’d wager searching time doesn’t outweigh the time tidy people spend on tidying.

3. A workspace which looks untidy to the visitor may well be as organised as its user needs it to be. My desk is cluttered, but I know exactly where to reach for a pen.

Besides, is it possible to turn an untidy person into a tidy one (short of sending them to army bootcamp)?

Tidiness is like spelling and punctuation. An individual either sees the point, or not. And if you don’t see the point, it’s almost impossible to persuade them otherwise, because tidy freaks, like grammar freaks, can be rightly accused of worrying about trivial matters which are not the slightest bit important in the scheme of things.