March 24, 2008

I have been reading this book for awhile now. It’s called “The Book of General Ignorance .. Everything You Think You Know is Wrong“. As I started thumbing through it I was perplexed by all the misinformation that we are given. Thank goodness for this book; I can now put all those fallacies to sleep.For instance, have you noticed that all the pictures of Atlas show him carrying a world on his shoulders? And that the saying “carrying the world on your shoulders” came from that? It’s all a farce … he didn’t carry the world on his shoulders, he carried the heavens. A little bit bigger. Geez, give the man some credit please.

Oh, and get this one. This one will make you realize why you met an unfortunate, unhappily ever after, ending when you said this as a young person in love. Cloud Nine? Nope, not the best cloud to be on. Actually if you say you are on Cloud Zero, then you’re at the top. Cloud Nine is the “massive, brooding thunder cloud”. Kind of makes sense now doesn’t it?

Some of the stuff in this book we all knew, like cockroaches can live for a week with their heads cut off, that camels don’t store water in their humps, that there are really only 46 states in the US, that Thomas Crapper wasn’t the inventor of the toilet, but there are some real anomalies in this book.

I’ll leave you with this last one. And this is for all you guys out there.

If you think you got it going on, you might want to reconsider. Did you know that the barnacles (you know those little urchin things you step on at the beach?), umm, more private part, is seven times the length of its body? And that the earwig has two of them? And holy cow, don’t forget the freaking blue whale who could provide protein shakes for a month in one rendezvous.

Yeah, reading is a dangerous thing … it elicits all kinds of thoughts and makes you relook a whole lot of things. I know my life has personally been changed for the better as a result of this particular book.

I’ll be down at the beach if you need me.

(Originally posted back in December at my myspace blog.)

If you enjoyed this story, please subscribe to the full RSS feed. You can also have it delivered straight to your mailbox. For something different, mosey over to eScapes and check out dKaye's take on life through photos.

|  Printable version | Posted in reflections, that which amuses me | Tags: ponder, reflections, that which amuses me.