Trivia

I am currently reading a book called Adam's Navel: A Natural and Cultural History of the Human Form, by Michael Sims. It is a very interesting book, and I am learning all kinds of things.

Today, for example, I learned that the scientific name for earwax is cerumen, and that human beings can be divided into two types: those with sticky, brown, wet cerumen, and those with brittle, greyish or beige cerumen. The book says that in general, Africans and Europeans possess the former and Asians the latter. He writes that wet wax is a dominant trait and dry recessive. He also adds that scientists in Japan discovered that Japanese breast cancer rates are higher in women whose ceruminous glands produce sticky earwax.

Well. How about that, eh? I expect everybody who reads this to get out their cotton buds and investigate which section of humanity they belong to.

(The first section of this post was dedicated to Ms Mac, who never goes anywhere without her cotton buds.)

I also learned, from the same book, that the duck-billed platypus has more REM sleep than any other creature, at eight hours a day. This leads me to wonder what the duck-billed platypus dreams of. You could fit an awful lot of dreaming into eight hours.

(The second section of this post is dedicated to The Editter, who, in the comments of this post, invented the hog-nosed ratypus, a close cousin of the duck-billed platypus.)

This post may be a trivial one, but you have to admit you're just a little bit cleverer now than you were before you read it. Also, you have some new topics of conversation for those awkward moments at dinner parties.