Irrelevant Cheetah

No, not from here. Rather, I would like to be banned from a country.

Call it a new personal goal. It’s important to set goals for yourself that make you work harder and reach new heights of personal skill. You see, there is a juggler (you may have seen him on “America’s Got Talent”) that claims that a trick he performed – balancing a running lawnmower on his chin and having assistants throw heads of lettuce into it – got him banned from England, Scotland, and Ireland.

Yup – you guessed it – it got me thinking. First of all, the trick didn’t seem that impressive. No, I’m not about to go try it myself, but did it really get him banned? Secondly, I would think that it would be easier to get banned from some countries than from others. Some cultures are a little more uppity, like the French. Or perhaps don’t have a lot of tolerance for different cultures, like some of the Arab countries. I can definitely see being kicked out of France or Egypt without trying too hard.

But Scotland? The country that mooned the Brits in the middle of the battlefield? The country that invented golf, for chrissakes? Did they really ban somebody for a stupid lawnmower trick? Seems to me the only way to get kicked out of Scotland would be to not drink enough, or to insult the haggis, or to make disparaging remarks about your neighbor’s sheep.

So my new personal goal is to get kicked out of a country. Doesn’t matter which one. I would like to show up for my return flight (or be forcefully escorted to the airport,) have them stamp my passport for departure, and have the customs agent say sternly, “Mr. Donat, we would be most appreciative if you did not return.” I mean, how cool is that? That’s something you can brag about to your friends when you get home. “Bill got 86ed from O’Malley’s on Friday night? Hah! I got 86ed from Borneo! Beat that!”

You’d think that I’d be trying to make people like me, and here I am trying to be less popular. Well, like I said, it’s good to have goals. I have a few ideas, but I’m having trouble collecting all the ingredients and getting them overseas. I need a flamethrower, two mice and a bag of Fritos.

I’m still twitching.

Somehow, yesterday evening, in the surreal realm that is inhabited by my house, my testosterone was overcome by a wash of estrogen that left nothing but carnage in its wake. I’ll be perfectly honest by admitting that much of the surrealism in the house is directly attributable to me or my actions, but I disavow all knowledge and responsibility in this particular case.

I was parked on the couch, enjoying the latest episode of Mythbusters. I try not to watch too much TV, as I have heard that it rots the brain and lead to facial tics and high cholesterol. Besides, if I have time to watch TV, then I have time to write. Right? Write. But I cannot escape the lure of Mythbusters, where Jamie and Adam, on a weekly basis, are allowed to do all the things I am not, such as blowing up a cement truck or building a rocket ship that runs on salami. It’s also, if I may be so bold, a show that oozes testosterone. I’m sure there are plenty of female fans, but I would be willing to wager that most of the fan base has a Y chromosome.

At any rate, I was carefully taking notes on the construction of a steam-powered cannon when I realized that my wife and her sister were talking about homeopathic remedies for yeast infections while sitting not less than a meter from me. I believe I tuned in to what they were discussing about the time they mentioned that in the “olden times” women would – I kid you not – stuff cloves of garlic up their hoo-hoo.

I can’t make this stuff up. As you can probably imagine, my train of thought, previously headed toward a likely steam cannon explosion, took an immediate detour and then derailed as I struggled futilely to stay on course.

As a result of this interruption, I failed to pay attention to the results of the side myth they were investigating and so am now no wiser as to whether or not breakfast cereal is more nutritious than the box in which it is packaged. I do, however, know several different ways to cure a yeast infection without medicines.

Please don’t ask me what they are, however.

I think I’m beginning to settle quite nicely here in my little corner of cyberspace. When I get stressed or bored or have some ideas to play with, I’ll crouch here by the digital fire, toast some byte-sized marshmallows, and swap stories with whoever happens to wander by and sit for a spell. At first I was under the impression that I needed to have something important to say, but a few meaningless entries and the conversations they sparked have disabused me of that nonsensical notion.

On that note, as I lay in bed last night contemplating the inside of my eyelids and listening to my dog snore (one of these days I’ll record it and upload an mp3 file so you both can understand what I go through) it struck me: Why do we not sneeze when we’re asleep?

Bear with me here. I have, like you, sneezed as I was falling asleep. Rare, but it happens. But sneezes are sparked by a histamine reaction to an allergen, normally. (I sneeze when I walk out into the sunlight, but that’s another story.) You would think that that reaction is involuntary and could happen whether you’re asleep or awake. But it seems that any stray allergens on the prowl seem to have the common decency to avoid my nasal passages whilst I slumber. Should I thank them? How? Maybe I should bake a cake. Anybody have any idea what kind of cake allergens prefer?

A side note: If I were to sneeze while I was asleep, would it be a snooze?

The other thing that has been running through my thought processes is an article I recently read about mortality rates in Tyrannosaruses. Tyrannosauri? Youngsters, obviously, had a pretty high death rate, since there were a lot of things wandering around that liked to eat them. It was not an easy childhood. After age two, however, they seemed to have much better luck at surviving. I’m thinking there probably weren’t too many things wandering around that wanted to take a crack at an adolescent T-Rex.

However, once they reached sexual maturity (twelve to thirteen years old, according to paleontologists) their mortality rates skyrocketed. Of course, the first thing that comes to mind is some snide comment about how the female of the species is the death of the male, but I’m not gonna go there. What actually happened, they theorize, is that they began competing with each other. Males began to fight over females, females began to fight over nesting areas, everyone fought over seating at the latest espresso bar, and so on. This, according to researchers, explains the lack of fossils of adolescents – they just didn’t die. On the other hand, skeletons of T-Rexes at that awkward, gangly, pimply-faced stage are a dime a dozen. Which is convenient: I know I would have preferred to be fossilized at that point in my life.

I wonder if there’s a way that these two trains of thought can be combined without derailing the whole mess. I’m allergic to T-Rex? T-Rexes were allergic to sleeping? Let me think on this for a while.

Today I was explaining to a co-worker that scientists have been conducting tests on geckos to measure their ‘sticking power,’ as it were. They have looked at their toes (the geckos’ toes, not the scientists’) under microscopes to see just how they do what they do. They have experimented with giving the geckos different materials on which to climb. One of the goals, of course, is to be able to imitate that incredible climbing ability and translate it to humans. One group is supposedly very close to inventing a glove that has the same properties as the geckos’ toes.

The end result of all of these tests is that there is only one substance on the planet to which geckos can’t stick: Teflon. They can’t do it. All their incredible sticking power avails them naught.

So this got me to thinking: what sort of tests did they conduct? How did they log the results? I mean, this would be a job I could do:

June 12, 1998: Used two 12” sauté pans and a 36” griddle, all surfaced with Teflon. Geckos still unable to stick. Will investigate further.

June 28, 1998: Geckos still unable to cling to Teflon. Have begun to notice a general feeling of discontent among the experimental population.

You see, I’m picturing these scientists tossing all these geckos at walls covered with Teflon and watching gecko after gecko fall to the floor, unable to stick. And I would think that it would eventually start to give the geckos a feeling of inadequacy – of impotence. “Yeah, Bob, today they tossed me on that infernal wall again, and I couldn’t stick again. What kind of gecko am I? What good am I?” And those feelings might begin to pervade all aspects of their lives.

The other side of the coin, of course, is this: What if one of the geckos experienced a sudden genetic mutation that allowed it to adhere to Teflon? First of all, it would definitely screw up their experimental results to have one super-gecko suddenly climbing to the roof. And secondly, they couldn’t very well let that one reproduce, could they? Because before you know it the world would be overrun with Teflon-climbing geckos, and I don’t think we’re ready for that.

This is the kind of thing that keeps me up nights.