Author: George Gillson

Dave Barry fan and Mad Scientist
Posted in zany, offbeat humor

Raccoon Tales

Posted on by George Gillson

Here in the Department of Occasionally Thinking About Raccoons, business has been kind of slow and there hasn’t been any decent raccoon-related news since I wrote about that raccoon in Minnesota who spent two days free-climbing a building that was over 20 storeys high.

Raccoon recently bitten by radioactive spider

All that changed when, once again my son, Drew, sent me a link to a newsfeed featuring Barney (not his real name), a raccoon who raided a liquor store in Ashland, Virginia, over-imbibed and then passed out in the bathroom. Ashland City Motto: We need 12-step programs that are more diverse, equitable and inclusive; furthermore, we also need more raccoon traps.

This raccoon behavior makes perfect sense according to what University of Arkansas at Little Rock researcher Raffaela Lesch PhD, zoologist and bioacoustician, has uncovered. Dr. Lesch says that the local Little Rock raccoons (Little Rock City Motto: We have a lot of rocks here but they’re all little; furthermore, we currently have no shortage of raccoons.) may be showing an early sign of domestication, following the path taken by ancient wild canines.

According to Dr. Lesch, the snouts of urban raccoons are getting shorter by a whopping 3.6%, compared to rural raccoons. This is a well-recognized sign of domestication. Other emergent raccoon behavioral traits that point to domestication include beekeeping, free-climbing buildings, stamp collecting, breaking and entering, and making an atrocious racket at night by purring, chittering, growling, snarling, hissing, whimpering, screeching and retching-when they drink too much.

Abuse of alcohol is another emerging sign.

“Clean-up in Aisle Seven”

As you can see from the carnage in Aisle Seven, Barney went on a bit of a rampage, probably because he couldn’t find his favorite brands of beer. Here’s one of them:

The Swedesboro Brewing Company is the proud recipient of the Beverage Testing Institute’s World Championship gold medal. No wonder Barney likes it. And in case you were wondering, Swedesboro is a town in New Jersey. Motto: We used to have a lot of Swedes here but now there are only about twelve of us left; furthermore, and Swedes aside, we have a crap-ton of raccoons: and of course, great beer.

Here’s another one of Barney’s favorites:

Streets of Toronto Raccoon Lager is unique as a neighbourhood-inspired charity beer. What’s not to like about that? And since you’re probably wondering, Toronto is quite Swedeworthy. Motto: “Last time we checked, we had about 16,000 Swedes according to the 2021 Census; furthermore, and like Swedesboro, we too, have a crap-ton of raccoons.”

For the record, I just want you to know that I am not Swedish. One of my posts, however, did contain a document entitled “Secrets of the Swedish Furniture Industry Revealed.”

Moving right along, I now relay a nugget of information given to me by John O’Sullivan, my former accomplice in the Emo Clinic. John spent several years in Uganda and he once told me that the locals there would brew their own beer by fermenting a mixture of mashed bananas, millet and water. The end result was known as Pombe or Banana Beer. A more potent hootch, known as Waragi and resembling gin, was made by distilling Pombe.

This propensity toward moonshinery might have been spontaneous but may also have arisen from the observation that elephants occasionally eat large amounts of overripe fermented fruits such as bananas and marula fruit, becoming somewhat tipsy.

From Newsbreak:

“Observers have reported elephants displaying a range of unusual behaviors after consuming marula or other fermented fruits. These include swaying and stumbling. Raccoon-like, the elephants would generally make a huge racket by vocalization aka trumpeting, often with a preference for “The Lion Sleeps Tonight aka Wimoweh.” These behaviors are reminiscent of mild intoxication. Some elephants appear more playful, chasing each other in circles, engaging in mock fights, gambling online and drunk-trunk dialing. Or is it trunk drunk-dialing? Others simply collapse for a nap in the shade, seemingly content and relaxed.”

Intoxicated Elephant Husband (trumpeting): “Doo doo doo-doo, doo doo doo doot doo, doo doodoo doo doo-doo. Doo doo doo doo-doo, doo doo doo-doo doo doo doo-doo doodoo, etc.”

Elephant Spouse: “Here! Grab my tail. I’m leading the way home. Why do you have to gobble 50 kilos of over-ripe fermented bananas every time we go to a party? And another thing. If you don’t shut your trunk and stop trumpeting The Lion Sleeps Tonight I’m going to trample you senseless.”

This fermented-fruit intoxication narrative seems a little too easy to swallow (!); however, there are alternate explanations. High blood sugar is one of them. Another explanation is that the elephants might be experiencing side effects from eating the pupae of beetles that live under the bark of the marula trees. These same beetles are used to make poisoned arrows. In case you were wondering.

Anyway, it’s nice to know that raccoons aren’t the only critters who like to take a nip now and then. Or maybe I meant nap.

Posted in zany, offbeat humor

Keeping Down With the Homo Sapiens

Posted on by George Gillson

I was sitting around for the first half of November, wondering what I was going to write about; nothing was leaping out at me when suddenly I received a text from my son Drew. It was a link to an article describing the fashion preferences of chimpanzees. Just so we’re clear, a chimpanzee is not a monkey: it’s an ape. Almost all monkeys have tails: apes do not. The only reason this matters is because I was going to use “Monkey See: Monkey Do” as the title for this post.

Good thing I checked out the ape-monkey thing. The last thing you want to do is tick off a chimp by calling it a monkey. A chimp could easily rip your arm clean off if you so much as looked at it sideways. Ditto hippopotamuses. Tail or not, never trust a hippo, even if it looks like it is peacefully meditating. It will crush you like a potato chip if you disturb it.

Om, Om, Om…

And since you asked, I would also recommend giving Komodo Dragons a wide berth, especially if you happen to resemble a deer.

It seems I’m getting a bit off topic here. This is supposed to be about fashion trends amongst chimps. It turns out that chimpanzees are a lot like humans when it comes to fashion. (Not surprising, since we share about 99% of our DNA with them.)

This is how it works: say that you have a kid who is in the habit of wearing regular jeans with straight legs and a belt around his waist.

If you just now actually spoke that phrase out loud: “that you have a kid who is in the habit of wearing regular jeans with straight legs and a belt around his waist” then I suggest you stop reading this post immediately. You are probably suggestible and very easily hypnotized.

Anyway, one day your kid comes back from “The Mall” wearing sagging jeans: jeans that are buckled somewhere just below the butt. Your kid may now be shuffling along like he is in a chain gang but that’s not my point.

My point is that there is a high probability that your kid saw ANOTHER kid wearing sagging jeans and Sneetch-like, decided to join the club.

Chimps are no different. In 2010, a chimp named Julie, in the Chimfunshi Wildlife Orphanage in Zambia, decided to stick a blade of grass in her ear and leave it dangling for no apparent reason. Shortly after that, seven other chimps started doing the same thing.

Julie died in 2013, but the trend didn’t die with her. A new study was commissioned around 2023 and into 2024 and revealed that two of the original seven copycat chimps (not to mix metaphors) were still festooning their ears with stalks of grass.

But wait! There’s more. Sometime prior to 2025, a different group of chimps who had never seen the other group, picked up the grass-blade-in-the-auditory-canal trick. And some other out-of-the-box chimp thinkers used small sticks instead of blades of grass.

Remember that these two groups of chimps had never overlapped. However, what they did have in common was that they had been exposed to the same caretakers who had been in the habit of sometimes using blades of grass or match sticks to clean their ears when working at the sanctuary. The chimps evidently mimicked what they saw.

Anybody got a Q-tip? I think I have a tick in my left ear.

Now enter Juma The Innovator, a male chimp who took a notion to insert a blade of grass into his NBA, aka Nethermost Bodily Aperture, and leave it there. Apparently this Anal Probing Propensity (APP for short) spread rapidly to other members of the group. Who knows where Juma got that idea? I doubt that the caretakers were wandering around with blades of grass sticking out of their butts but you never know.

Primatologist Julie Teichroeb at the University of Toronto (Motto: We need more Primatologists) made this observation regarding the grass blade insertions: “It just looks like an earring, you know, like a fashionable way to present yourself.”

If so, those are the weirdest earrings I’ve ever seen. More like antennae if you ask me.

Teichroeb then moved on to the NBA insertions and opined that it’s possible that the chimps were doing it to make themselves more attractive to potential mates. (Chimps spend a lot of time peering at each other’s backsides.) She noted that females, in particular, display a swelling on their rear ends to indicate when they’re receptive to a little hanky panky. Sort of like the neon “OPEN” signs you see in store windows.

Professor Teichroeb says that because the Chimfunshi chimps are fed by humans, they may have more free time to develop social trends. 

“We think of, like silly, little pointless cultural ideas like auto theft, returning stuff to Work Wearhouse three years after it was purchased, and wearing a pineapple on your head, that spread amongst people,” she said.

“Learning that animals have these kinds of same, pointless little behaviours that become fads and become viral, I think it really shows how closely related we are to them, how much kinship we actually share. Or it may be that there are a lot of aliens disguised as runway models among us. Time will tell.”

Disturbingly, Jake Brooker, a psychologist and great ape researcher at Durham University in England said that the chimpanzee behaviour reminded him of the behaviour of orcas (aka Killer Whales) first spotted in the 1980’s wearing salmon on their heads like hats. This behaviour has resurfaced-no pun intended- and scientists are still scratching their heads about what it all means.

The director of the University of British Columbia’s Marine Mammal Research Unit, Andrew Trites, saw no obvious reason for the behaviour and speculated that it might be to impress other pod members or “maybe they just like the smell of dead fish.”

Blog posts, like dead fish, shouldn’t linger on so I’m winding this up but I’ll leave you with this old adage: “He who weareth a pineapple on his head shalt not frequenteth the chimpanzee enclosure.”

Posted in zany, offbeat humor

Curiosity Doesn’t Always Kill The Cat

Posted on by George Gillson

Recently, an article drifted into the Inbox here at The Department of Wondering About All Kinds Of Stuff. The article, penned by Makai Allbert, was about curiosity. This was the intro:

“Leonardo da Vinci’s to-do lists were like no one else’s.

His journals reveal an impressive range of ideas, from sketches of hearts and how blood circulates to questions about a woodpecker’s tongue and also how to make liquid soap. Nothing was beneath his attention. For da Vinci, curiosity did not wait for permission. It is what made him “the most relentlessly curious man in history,” as described by art historian Kenneth (We don’t need any more art critics thank you very much) Clark.

We’re all born with that same drive. No other species asks ‘why’ the way we do. The more researchers look, the more they find that this mental itch is more than just a childish phase or a taste for the unfamiliar. Curiosity supercharges your memory, slows down the aging process, and even makes hostile relationships harmonious.”

Overall it’s a fascinating article but I don’t think there’s much mystery surrounding the fact that no other species ask ‘why’ the way we do. Hello? It’s because they can’t talk.

Nevertheless, although they can’t talk, lots of critters besides we humans demonstrate that they are pretty darned curious. Take goats for example. Say you just bought a new pickup truck. The first thing that your goat will do is climb up and stand on the roof of that truck, to check out the view. And it will tell its friends to join in.

Maybe you don’t have a goat. Doesn’t matter. Your neighbour’s goat will eventually wander over to check things out.

Octopi are just as curious as goats. Maybe more so. If you leave your guitar unattended anywhere in the house, you can bet that your octopus will find it and will be strumming away on the thing sooner or later. I hope you like The Beatles.

Octopus practicing the chords for “Octopuse’s Garden”

Dogs aren’t necessarily noted for their curiosity but it’s clear that this dog is wondering what the heck that owl is doing in the drainpipe. And for its part, the owl was probably investigating the pipe and got stuck in it.

This brings us to cats. If an empty cardboard box is left undefended anywhere in your house, a cat will get inside it. Even if it’s not your cat.

Our cat, Zoe, as a kitten

I knew just by looking at Zoe, that she was going to be trouble. She was way too innocent-looking. Later in life she somehow got into the cold air return duct in the ceiling of the furnace room and we subsequently had to extract her from a return duct opening on the first floor after hearing plaintive meowing emanating from the walls. We thought the place was haunted.

Zoe would also wander across the street to visit our neighbors, probably looking to see if they had any cardboard boxes to explore.

Here she is, 12 years later, looking innocent as always but I know she is going to attempt to try to get up under that newly-arrived fern and she will probably knock the thing over, eventually. Cats are notorious for investigating things but also pushing these same things off a table, a countertop or other flat surface, just to see what will happen.

Cat and Fern: Trouble Brewing

The good news is that people (and cats) continue to be curious as they age. And research shows that curiosity is very beneficial. We should continue to “follow our noses”, keep on reading, socialize, meet new people, ask them probing questions, play Mah Jong frequently, learn a few languages, spy on our neighbors and take up new hobbies such as tunnelling, investigative journalism, beekeeping and the like. This will benefit our brains by boosting our dopamine, increasing activity in the nucleus accumbens-whatever that is- and the substantia nigra/ventral tegmental area (located near Area 51). Our memory may improve, and we may reduce our risk of dementia and also our tendency to write run-on sentences.

What’s not to like?

I’m going to wrap this up now because I suddenly became curious about why certain types of metal files are called “flat bastards”, “mill bastards” and “round bastards” and I want to go find out.

I hope I can pique your curiosity too, by leaving you with two things: a vignette and a photo of a graphic T-shirt.

Here’s the vignette:

My Dad’s non-Grecian mother lived in a cozy apartment on the third floor of our old house. I was a frequent visitor up there before Grade 1 started. We’d play cards, have tea and my “upstairs” Grandma would pump me for information about what was going on below-decks. (My other grandparents were Greek. They lived on the first floor of our house and hence a continual stream of Greeks was coming and going all the time. There was a lot to keep tabs on down there.)

Anyway, one morning, during an information-gathering session on the third floor, I inquired, “Grandma, how come you’re so snoopy?”

She replied, “If you don’t ask, you’ll never find out.”

So true.

Here’s the T-shirt:

Note raised eyebrow

P.S. In case you are curious, curiosity only has one “u”. Check it out.

Posted in zany, offbeat humor

Going, Going, Gone

Posted on by George Gillson

Recently, my wife and I emerged from a renovation at our house and we’re now confronted by all the stuff we kept over the course of twenty years but wish we hadn’t. (If that in any way reminds you of certain Lume full body deodorant commercial tag lines, don’t even go there. I repeat, do not even think about those commercials.)

Instead, listen to “Drugs In My Pocket”, a 1979 song by The Monks. If you were a teenager in the late 1970’s and already know this song, its lyrics and its cadence, I still think you should listen to it anyway. (BTW, if you ever listened to the Strawbs band-initially known as The Strawberry Hill Boys back in 1964 -you might be interested to know that three of the Strawbs went on to start The Monks.)

I couldn’t help it. That song just popped into my head when I sat down to write about getting rid of all our old stuff:

to find out where i’m going with this, keep reading…
Posted in zany, offbeat humor

Information Gathering

Posted on by George Gillson

So.

Here at the Department of Pulling Random Blog Post Topics Out Of Thin Air, this post is about a week overdue. Sometimes I have a topic at hand but sometimes I don’t have the first clue what I’m going to write about. When this happens, I usually turn to Dave Barry’s blog for inspiration. He has a legion of followers and every day they send Dave links to unusual events. Dave then dutifully posts them. Invariably, one of the links will catch my attention and suddenly an idea swirls up from the murky depths of my subconscious, like a bubble of gas that suddenly rises from the decaying plant material that lies at the bottom of a swamp. Today was no exception.

swamp
It’s not raining; those are gas bubbles aka “Swamp Farts”. Come to think of it, that might be a good name for a band.

Check this out: California serial butt sniffer Calese Carron Crowder arrested again

If you didn’t bother to follow the link, I’m quoting from it. Nobody could make this up:

“California resident Calese Carron Crowder, 36, was arrested Tuesday after he was captured on security cams crouching near a woman and sniffing her rear end in the women’s section of the Burbank Empire Center department store, according to the Burbank Police Department.…Crowder made national headlines in August 2023 after a viral TikTok video showed him sneaking up behind women at a Burbank Barnes & Noble and sniffing their derrières.

He was also arrested later that month for peeping into a family home in Glendale — and then released. Crowder has been arrested numerous times for this behaviour and has also made himself a nuisance at local dog parks.”

I may be lying about the dog parks but it wouldn’t surprise me if it’s true. I’m a serial dog owner and both of my male dogs immediately sniffed the nether regions of every dog they happened to encounter, male or female.

Why do they do this?

I reckon it’s information gathering. Plain and simple. Dogs reputedly can smell thousands of times better than humans. Who knows what kind of information they’re gathering from their canine acquaintances?

Information about food? Is there a dead badger in the vicinity? What was for dinner last night? The badger? Can I have some?

Dead badgers aside, there’s little doubt that this canine bum-sniffing is providing information on reproductive status. Open for business? Closed until next Tuesday? Chapter 11 aka permanently closed thanks to the vet? Does this dog I’m sniffing have a headache?

dog investigating other dog's bum
“Hello, I love you, can you tell me your name? Hello, I love you, can I junp in your game?”

So many questions…

The other thing that my dog, Sarge, likes to do is lick and sniff inside the ears of all the dogs he runs into.

dog probing another dog's ear
Hello? Hello? Anybody home? I think I see a tick in here.

I’m pretty sure I know what’s up with the ear-probing; Sarge is gathering more information on the overall health of the probee. (I might have made that word up.)

It turns out that the nethermost bodily aperture aka NBA isn’t the only source of information that is available. I swear on the medical license of famous Canadian Internist, spelunker and part-time welder, Sir William Osler MD RIP, that I am not making up the following newsflash. (I checked and omitting a period after each letter in acronyms like RIP is OK.) Not that I’m nitpicking. Or being anally-retentive.

Nitpicking and anal retentiveness aside, let’s hear what cardiologist Mauricio Waingarten MD PhD has to say. (I checked and it’s OK to not hyphenate nitpicking, again, not that I’m nitpicking.)

Editor’s Note: You have to watch these MD PhD types. Most of them are nitpicky and anally retentive, not to mention borderline crazy.

Dang it! I keep digressing. Here’s an interesting tip pertaining to earwax: or maybe a Q-tip. (Sorry. I couldn’t resist.)

Never try to put anything smaller than the point of your elbow into your ear-unless you are double-jointed.

A small sample of earwax/aka cerumen can provide valuable insights into health. A novel assay called the cerumenogram has been developed to measure trace amounts of volatile molecules given off by the sample. This facilitates the detection of various conditions, including cancer, a tendency toward early voting in Federal Elections, neurologic diseases, habitual use of Particle Face Cream For Men and other metabolic disorders such as diabetes, refusing to put ice cubes in your drinking water and peppering your prose with blatant falsehoods.

Who knew?

Anyway, time to wrap this up. All this business about gathering information makes me think of the old proverb:

“The man who tooteth not his own horn, that same horn shall remain untooted. The dog who smelleth not his neighbour’s bum, nor probeth not his neighbour’s ear canals, that same dog shall remain untutored. The woman who stayeth the hell out of California, stayeth the hell out of Nordstrom’s and giveth Barnes and Noble a wide berth, that same woman’s derriere shall remain unsniffed.”

Posted in zany, offbeat humor

Grooming for Men After 40

Posted on by George Gillson

In my last post, I mentioned that Dave Barry has a Substack and in his most recent offering he wrote about his lifelong battle with his hairstyle, which he says, at times resembles this coconut:

At least he still has his hair.

Thank you, Dave, for bringing this issue to my attention, as it opens the door to discuss men’s grooming issues in general. Men have been problematic for women for a long time. Most of the complaints undoubtedly revolved around bathing and routine maintenance and this has led to the invention of many things including shaving cream, soap, scissors, razor blades, deodorant, tweezers, nose hair trimmers, toenail clippers, dental floss and SAXX underwear.

Cro-magnon wife: “Pheee-ew. Honey you need a bath, a haircut and you have to do something about those eyebrows.”

Clearly, based on his expression, you can see that this guy is basically OK with how he looks.

Cro-magnon husband (inside voice): “I’m not listening. I’m not listening.”

Apparently, some men ARE listening though, because now “brow servicing” for men is a thing. Especially for men over forty.

Man over forty in salon: “Hello, I’m here for my bi-monthly eyebrow servicing. And pest spraying. The eyelash mite situation is getting out of control.”

This now brings us to our destination, which is the “Particle 6-In-One Face Cream for Men” commercial. This commercial has to be a serious contender for the list of the World’s top ten most annoying commercials. You should watch it now. Then we’ll talk.

Keep READING
Posted in zany, offbeat humor

Alien Abduction Checklist

Posted on by George Gillson

A few days ago I had nothing better to do so I went over my To-Do list which includes things like rearranging my sock drawer, trying to figure out witty comments to make about the posts that Dave Barry is putting up on his new Substack and last but not least, updating my Alien Abduction Checklist.

With the threatened disclosure of sealed UFO files from the 1950’s and also the discovery of things like ancient Mesopotamian Cylinder Seals, you can’t be too careful these days. Everyone needs to be aware of the possibility that you, your accountant or maybe even your Congressperson/Member of the Legislative Assembly has been the victim of an alien abduction.

Ancient Mesopotamian Cylinder Seal

See that creature to the right that looks like the love child of a praying mantis and a donkey? That is almost for sure an alien, getting ready to probe the unsuspecting Mesopotamians. Or it might just be another Mesopotamian standing on his/her/their head. How can anybody know for sure?

The Daily Mirror may know for sure because it recently featured an article listing six signs that might point to an alien abduction. The signs are: tiny bumps under the skin (possibly indicative of implantation of sensors), nosebleeds, strangely realistic memories such as being “probed” by reptilians, time gaps/lost time, and development of psychic powers such as the ability to know when your dog wants to go outside.

That’s all fine but I have my own list, which I feel is way more accurate than the Daily Mirror’s list-not that I’m biased. The key is to look for abrupt changes in behavior and the acquisition of new abilities other than mind-reading.

Here goes:

One of the most common indicators is when a SOAP (Survivor Of Alien Probing) abruptly ditches their pet for a new, more menacing, more alien-looking creature. One example would be swapping out a goldfish for an alligator gar. Clearly, the alligator gar (on right) did not originate on Planet Earth. It can be found in Texas, though. And Texas isn’t all that far from Nevada. (Note: these fish are disgusting, They can be 7 feet long, weigh over 200 lbs and will eat small mammals including unsuspecting toddlers. I’m probably lying about the toddlers.)

Anyway, Geography aside, another example of abrupt pet-upgrading would be ditching an innocent, normal-weight zebra finch for an imposing, underfed shoebill crane. Equally clearly, the shoebill is also not of Planet Earth. It is not found in Texas, either.

shoebill doing yoga

OK, enough about pets. Yet another behavioral clue is an abrupt change in handedness which can happen any time the person in question is under acute stress such as being in the middle of a sword fight. Jut don’t make the mistake of accusing someone who is ambidextrous of being a SOAP. Also, please watch The Princess Bride if you don’t know what the hell I am talking about.

What about food? Take cheese for example. There are many well-documented cases of sudden changes in cheese preference following an alien abduction, e.g. switching from Velveeta to Casu Marsu, a soft cheese which requires living cheese fly larvae (Piophila casei ) for its taste and liquidity . This cheese is banned on most planets but not California. Which explains a lot. If you need to throw up in your mouth, go ahead. I’ll wait…

SOAPs have also occasionally displayed a sudden hankering for a dessert featuring dried elephant dung. I swear on Julia Child’s gastroenterologist that I’m not feeding you B.S.

E.S. maybe but not B.S.

I could go on with a few more random SOAP “tells” and in fact, I’m going to do that right now. It’s too late to turn back.

Abruptly gaining the ability to sort laundry to your spouse’s satisfaction will probably lead to this comment. “Who are you and what planet are you from, even?”

A sudden propensity to start wearing a curlew costume and then walking 53 miles is another dead giveaway. The 53 miles is very significant because the B-52s wrote a song called “53 Miles West of Venus.” Coincidence? I think not.

If you get the following message when you open a Fortune Cookie, it might also raise your index of suspicion that you yourself are a SOAP:

The “others” are deeply moved-read unsettled-because they probably feel kind of naked: they know you are reading their minds. And their dogs minds.

Lastly, finding a copy of an alien abduction insurance policy on the desk of a SOAP suspect at the office would pretty much clinch things in my book. But don’t take my word for it. Listen to broker Allan McNulty, commenting on a potential new offering by the Apollo on-line insurance company:

“Similar to key man or key woman life insurance coverages, if you lose an essential contributor to your organization — potentially to another galaxy — this could be disastrous for your business,” commented LeGear Pelling Agencies commercial & specialty markets broker Alan McNulty.

McNulty added that alien abduction coverage would bridge the “intergalactic personal risk gap challenge.”

Like I said at the start, you can’t be too careful these days.

With that admonition, I’ll wrap this post up. I have to go wipe my nose anyway. It just started bleeding for no reason. Plus I think my dog is telling me he wants to go outside.

Posted in zany, offbeat, somewhat silly humor

Continental Incontinence

Posted on by George Gillson

The other day I was leafing through the latest edition of Plate Tectonics magazine when I came across an interesting article.

Alert readers know that Plate Tectonics is not about dinnerware.

Plate Tectonics is the branch of science that concerns “the structure of the Earth’s crust and many associated phenomena resulting from the interaction of rigid lithospheric plates which move slowly over the underlying mantle, minding their own business most of the time, voting in favor of fiscal responsibility and fewer pronouns, when need arises, and occasionally crashing into each other, causing earthquakes, eruption of deep sea hydrothermal vents and last but not least, toilet paper shortages.”

Actually, I’m lying. First of all, there is no “Plate Tectonics” magazine. If there was, no one would read it. There’s a lot of stuff going on down below the Earth’s surface but most of it is happening extremely slowly. Reading a magazine devoted to Plate Tectonics would be like reading a magazine devoted to what you can learn by watching your toenails grow.

to find out what else i’m lying about, keep reading
Posted in zany, offbeat humor

Just Chew It (With Apologies to Nike)

Posted on by George Gillson

A couple of weeks ago, my oldest son Drew sent me a link to this article:

In his defense, Drew grew up on a steady diet (pun intended) of Dr. Seuss, Monty Python and The Princess Bride. Therefore, Drew is attuned to the silliness and the oddities of life, so he sends me this stuff. Truth be told, Drew’s sister and younger brother are also just as silly. The three of them must have gotten that from their mother.

Anyway, in light of all the uncertainty in Ottawa these days, all of us probably need to enhance our cognitive functioning and critical thinking in order to keep track of things, Chewing on hard materials such as diamond, shoe leather and stale bagels might help us get some answers to these pressing questions:

When is Trudeau stepping down? When will Carney take the reins? And for how long? What’s Freeland going to do for a living now? I’ll bet she’s not going into modeling. (OK, that was mean. Strike that from the record.)

Will Pierre Poilievre, leader of the Federal Conservative Party, be the next Prime Minister? Will people learn to pronounce his name properly? (Poy-lee-ev-ruh is the Parisian French pronunciation but if you’re not in France you can probably get by with Poy-lee-ev. Just don’t say Paw-lee-ver.)

It’s all so confusing.

And speaking of confusion, what person in full possession of their faculties would ever fork over $1800 for a French Fry? Even if it WAS shaped like the Nike Swoosh? And what would that person do with it? Put it in a special sealed display case pressurized with an inert gas like Argon, Xenon or maybe the political rhetoric that is venting on both sides of the 49th parallel?

I don’t know about you, but if I bought that French Fry I would for sure stick it in a time capsule somewhere…

First Archaeologist, opening time capsule in distant future: “Heaven’s to Betsy! What in tarnation is THIS?”

Other Archaeologist: “Well, it looks to me like a French Fry that has assumed the shape of a Nike Swoosh.”

First Archaeologist: “Knock me over with a feather! What in blazes is a Nike Swoosh? And what was WRONG with those people?”

Other Archaeologist: “A fair question but here’s an even fairer question: why are you using those archaic expressions?”

First Archaeologist: “It was that cache of DVDs I dug up a few weeks ago: the one containing all 14 seasons of Bonanza. I couldn’t stop watching them gol-durned Cartwight’s.”

Other Archaeologist: “Right. What’s a DVD?”

Inhabitants of the Cartwright Family’s Ponderosa Ranch strolling the streets of Virginia City, Nevada or possibly DOGE enforcers on the hunt in Washington, D.C.

Okay, moving right along here, it turns out that researchers have been intensively studying the relationship between chewing and cognitive function over the last couple of decades. A few sporadic papers on the topic appeared between the 50’s and late 80’s but then the number of papers started to rise exponentially.

I attribute this to the advent of smartphones in the early 2000’s. After that, instead of reading books or doing something productive, people of all ages began mindlessly scrolling their phones and sending memes to each other. Cognitive function was taking it on the chin so research on the effect of chewing and cognition accelerated.

Pub Med publication history for “cognition,chewing” search term.

It seems that chewing increases blood flow to the brain and per the citation above, brain antioxidant levels also increase. The harder your masseters, aka jaw muscles, have to work, the more blood flows to the brain. More oxygen to the brain: more antioxidants: more high octane thinking: more cognitive speed. Apparently cows are the exception in this.

I ran into a bit of a mental block at this point so I got up, fished out a pack of gum and started chewing away. Sarge, too, was looking a bit mopey and sluggish so I gave him a couple of beef rawhide sticks to give him a bit of a cognitive jump start. Here he is in mid-chew:

He’s not that big on chewing treats. It’s more like he swallows them mostly intact, kind of like a furry python. Anyway, it seemed to help: Sarge perked up and challenged me to a game of tic tac toe. Fortunately I won, although it was close. Sarge should’ve done more chewing and less engulfing.

Well, I could go on but it’s time to wrap this up: my gum is pretty much chewed out and it’s making me hungry. My masseters are also shagged so I’ll probably have to eat something soft.

French Fries might be a good option.

Posted in Boltzmann, Clausius-Clapeyron Equation, Statistical Mechanics, zany, offbeat, somewhat silly humor

Entropy, Cosmic Inflation, String Theory and other topics

Posted on by George Gillson

Things have been pretty busy here in The Department Of Teetering On The Edge Of Sanity For The Last Three Months Whilst Preparing A Complicated Biochem Talk That Took Every Spare Minute Of My Free Time And Practically Drove Me Bonkers.

(Jeanette, my better half, wasn’t all that stoked about it either.)

I finished the talk yesterday. Thank Heaven. Between the greeting card montages and the Biochem talk, you now realize why I haven’t been posting consistently these last few months. I hereby offer a proactive apology for this longish post.

Scientific inquiry can be hazardous. According to noted ancient sheep-herder and philosopher, Aristotle: “There is no great genius without a touch of madness.”

Take Ludwig Boltzmann for example. Boltzmann developed the dense forest of equations that founded the branch of Physics known as Statistical Mechanics. Here are a few of the trees from that forest:

These are very similar to the equations used by the IRS and the CRA to calculate the probability that the CRA, or worse yet the IRS, will audit you this year

The reason I know about Boltzmann’s fate is because a friend of mine whom I’ll call “Bob”, being the helpful soul that he is, sent me a meme a couple of days before I finished the Biochem talk. Bob knew that my foray into the depths of Biochemistry was driving me bat-shit crazy, not to put too fine a point on it.

This is part of the meme:

Boltzmann is one of these two intense-looking fellows. The probability that Boltzmann is the fellow on the right is exactly 50%. Boltzmann died in 1906, at the age of 62.

The other guy in the photo is Rudolf Clausius who recasted the First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics, building on Boltzmann’s work. He also invented the game of Clue AND the Clausius Clapeyron equation, which we all knew and loved back in our High School Chemistry days. Clausius died in 1888 after a lingering illness. Coincidentally, the probability that he is the fellow on the left photo is also exactly 50%.

Statistics is full of surprises.

Surely not everybody loved the Clausius Clapeyron equation-along with Kung-Fu fighting

The other part of the meme was lifted out of the introduction section in the book: States of Matter written by former Physics/Applied Physics Professor David Goodstein. Dr. Goodstein passed away peacefully in April 2024 at the age of 85. He earned many accolades and wrote many papers: he was well-respected and well-loved.

Here’s the book and the introduction:

Per the last sentence, I forgot to mention that Goodstein also had a penchant for understatement.

So here we have four brilliant scientists who were deep in the weeds of fundamental physics. Two died peacefully and the other two took their own lives. Looks like Aristotle’s assessment was on target, or as the Greeks would say: “στο στόχο”.

(I forgot to mention that in addition to card montages and Biochem talks, I’ve been learning Greek for the last year or so.)

Note: Boltzmann and Ehrenfest were suffering from Bipolar Affective Disorder (BPA). BPA engenders wildly creative out-of-the-box thinking necessary for breaking new ground in any scientific endeavor but brings with it bouts of crippling depression. BPA is a devastating illness and I am in no way belittling people who suffer from it. My point is that unrelenting attempts to understand and codify the Universe can take their toll. There are things we just aren’t meant to understand, no matter how hard we try.

Moving right along here, and to lighten things up, I need to point out that even though Physics has an undeserved reputation as being too inaccessible and arcane, it’s still relevant for Earthlings.

For example, Statistical Mechanics, a branch of Physics, can deal with difficult questions such as, “What is the probability that you will bump into your wife in the kitchen when she doesn’t want you to be there?”

Then there’s this Physics/Cosmology theory called Inflation which posits that the Universe, starting from an infinitesimally-small point, expanded in diameter by a factor of 1026 and in volume by a factor of 1078. Supposedly it only took 10-32 seconds.

This is very relevant to daily living because 10-32 seconds is roughly the time it takes for an initial estimate of the cost of a kitchen reno to cosmically inflate to what you will ultimately be paying. (It’s also comparable to the time it takes for newly-elected Calgary City Councillors to vote themselves large raises. Not that I’m bitter.)

This leaves us with Entropy, the Second Law of Thermodynamics and String Theory. The Second Law basically says that, left to itself, the mess on your desktop will spontaneously go from bad to worse. (Increased Entropy.)

String Theory postulates that many elementary particles consist of tiny vibrating strings that are even smaller than the screws that hold the arms on to your glasses: or maybe smaller than the little filaments inside the Flintstones-era incandescent Christmas tree light bulb strings.

Here’s a real-world example of Entropy and String Theory:

It’s early in January. You finally get around to packing up your old pre-lit Christmas tree. Every light bulb works fine. Fast-forward to December. You take the three tree segments out of the box and plug in the base segment. It lights up just dandy. Then you socket the middle segment to the base and this is what you get:

Then you socket the apex segment into the middle segment and again, this is what you get:

Now you have a small black hole, spanning two tree segments, lurking right there in your living room !!

Clearly, things spontaneously went from bad to worse while the light filaments were minding their own business inside their box for eleven months. Damn that Second Law!

My best guess is that the tiny elementary particles inside the bulb filaments actually ARE vibrating strings. They vibrated so much that the the filaments broke apart while nobody was watching.

Being an inveterate tinker-arounder with electricity and electronics since the age of 12 and also possessing medical expertise – or at least having done Surgical Rotations in Clerkship and Internship – you set to work mapping the wiring diagram and discover that there are two dead fifty-bulb loops inside the black hole.

Clearly, you have an Electrosurgical Emergency on your hands.

You carefully unwrap the dead loops from the tree but don’t excise them. Yet. Now you’re faced with the artificial Christmas tree version of two infarcted loops of small intestine right in your living room.

You prepare the surgical field, being careful to also mark the excision sites with colored tape. After all, nobody wants to put a new hip joint in somebody’s right hip when the left hip is the one with the problem.

Now you excise the offending loops, find the offending bulbs, replace them, temporarily wire the loops back into the tree’s nervous system with clip leads, lay the loop(s) on the sofa for testing, remove the clip leads, cauterize the splices then re-wrap the loops back amongst the branches.

Voila!

See.

Physics isn’t so bad after all.