In one episode Sheldon asked, "Do you know what the appendix is for?" (or something like that) and when the answer he received was, "No" he said, "I do." And the scene ended there.
Hilarious!
Later, it occurred to me that I did not know (or had forgotten if I once knew) what the appendix actually does in the human body.
Wikipedia informed me:
The human appendix is a vestigial structure. A vestigial structure is a structure that has lost all or most of its original function through the process of evolution. The vermiform appendage is the shrunken remainder of the cecum that was found in a remote ancestor of humans. Ceca, which are found in the digestive tracts of many extant herbivores, house mutualistic bacteria which help animals digest the cellulose molecules that are found in plants. As the human appendix no longer houses a significant amount of these bacteria, and humans are no longer capable of digesting more than a minimal amount of cellulose per day, the human appendix is considered a vestigial structure.
Aha! So that's why I can't survive by only eating wood.
Wikipedia goes on to say that the appendix may have some other uses not known at this time.
_____
Geez Louise! Surely I can find something more interesting than human biology to write about.
_____
On this morning's TV news the reporter on location spoke of receiving credentials that admitted her into the room wherein the Republican candidates were to be interviewed. She said that she had been credentialized. I'd never heard that term before, and thought she must have meant she had been credentialed, or given credentials.
I did a bit of Google research and found that the word credentialized does exist, but its meaning is not synonymous with credentialed. According to the Urban Dictionary, the meaning of credentialized is:
credentialized -- the artificial self-enhancement that people seem to precive themselves to have while they are wearing an official laminated credential on a sponsored lanyard. Such as, for example: She got all credentialized when she went back stage at the concert with her all access pass, living in the fictional world that she is actually apart of the group in concert.
Note: the incorrect spelling of perceive and the use of the word apart instead of a part in the above passage are not my mistakes -- the definition was cut and pasted from the Urban Dictionary.
_____
While reading a compendium of supposedly humorous sentences lifted from published novels I paused at the following figure of speech describing copulation:
"And then he was fully socketed to her, like a pipe wrench in a crock of warm chili."
I paused because, to me, this seemed to be a metaphor ("socketed to her") enhanced by a following simile ("like a pipe wrench...") -- That's not really why I paused... I did so because I thought the figure of speech was funny as hell. I thought about it being a curious figure of speech a little later.
In that same blog entry I read: "How does a kid from Huntington beach wind up castrating cows in South Texas?" and I wondered about that, since castrating means cutting off the testicles of bulls, not cows which are of course, female.
__________
I have never read a novel written by Danielle Steel (and I probably never will) but several of her sentences were included in a blog dedicated to revealing horrible sentences taken from published books written by famous authors. Here is one of those sentences:
"You look very pretty today," he said casually, and she stiffened imperceptibly, but he didn't see it.
---Danielle Steel,
(Malice)
No comments:
Post a Comment