Fish for Friday

Edited by Morris Dean

[Anonymous selections from recent correspondence]

Mysteries of the Human Body:
    It’s possible for your body to survive without large fractions of its internal organs. Even if you lose your stomach, your spleen, 75% of your liver, 80% of your intestines, one kidney, one lung, and virtually every organ from your pelvic and groin area, you wouldn’t be very healthy, but you would live.
    During your lifetime, you will produce enough saliva to fill two swimming pools. Actually, saliva is more important than you realize. If your saliva can not dissolve something, you cannot taste it.
    The largest cell in the human body is the female egg and the smallest is the male sperm. The egg is actually the only cell in the body that is visible by the naked eye.
    The strongest muscle in the human body is the tongue and the hardest bone is the jawbone.
    Human feet have 52 bones, accounting for one quarter of all the human body’s bones. Feet have 500,000 sweat glands and can produce more than a pint of sweat a day.

And they say their is no black Santa Claus! "Alajuelita celebrates Cristo El Negro."

They have taken [our aunt] to the hospital (ICU).
    I will keep you informed of any news I hear. If you believe in prayer, please say a prayer for her.
    A personal note to Morris [so, The Rest of You Receiving This Note, DO NOT READ the following], I’m just letting you know the fact that she is in the hospital, no negative response about prayer is needed.

About that 2-part article "Annals of Extinction: The Lost World" in the December 16 and December 23 & 30 issues of The New Yorker,

as far as the environment goes, I figure our grandchildren (or grandnieces and nephews) are probably going to witness horrors. There may be massive flooding, extinctions of half the world’s species, etc. If a fragment of man survives, we will be a humbled and hopefully wiser race. Perhaps that is what is needed to cure us of war and religion and greed and all our other inhumanities. If we don’t survive, then hopefully our counterparts on other planets are being wiser. Ants are intellectually insignificant as individuals, but rather brilliant as a tribe. Humans, alas, are usually the opposite. Perhaps some other species of advanced consciousness is more like ants.
    Or maybe we’ll be hit by a giant asteroid. Or maybe solar flares will wipe out technology (I’m rooting for that one). See, there are lots of options to brighten our day.
    I do accept the theory of evolution. And it appears (a dangerous word) that evolution is biased towards consciousness. Thus, there may one day be a theory of evolution of consciousness that states that consciousness is the end toward which the entire universe is headed. Earth, for all its beauty and promise, is so tiny. But so are diamonds, and they are considered the most precious of substances. I think the human evolution towards consciousness is vastly important to the universe, and that it will not, in the end, be a failed experiment.
    There, that’s all the comfort you’re getting out of me today. Stop reading The New Yorker and get yourself The Enquirer. Excerpt:

...[H]umans are so radically refashioning the planet—leveling so many forests, eliminating so many creatures that once occupied those forests, transporting so many other creatures around the globe, and burning through such vast quantities of fossil fuels to keep the whole enterprise going—that we may well end up producing a catastrophe comparable in scale to the one that laid waste to the graptolites. Already...the geology of the planet has been permanently altered....
    In recent years, a number of names have been proposed for the new age that humans have ushered in....
    The word "Anthropocene" was put into circulation by Paul Crutzen, a Dutch chemist who, in 1995, shared a Nobel Prize for discovering the effects of ozone-depleting compounds....

The University has issued an Emergency Warning and activated the sirens because the National Weather Service has issued a TORNADO WARNING for Chapel Hill and Carrboro.
    If you are outside, seek shelter in a sturdy building immediately.
    If you are already inside, move to an interior room on the lowest floor.
Avoid windows.
    If no shelter is available, lie down in a low-lying area.
    Protect yourself from flying debris.
    The sirens are activated when there is a significant emergency or immediate health or safety threat to the campus community.
    A tornado warning means that a tornado has been spotted, or that radar indicates a thunderstorm circulation that can spawn a tornado, according to the National Weather Service.

You’ve got a friend in me:

Street art in Poland

I was about to put three frozen home-made biscuits into the convection oven for a post-breakfast treat (with Tupelo honey, of course). Mom said, "But I was going to make biscuits this evening. If you have those now, I’ll have to make them tomorrow." I said, "Go ahead and make them today. This’ll be a big biscuit celebration day for the 49ers win over the Panthers."

49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick imitating
Panthers quarterback Cam Newton after scoring a touchdown

Limerick of the Week:

And if the 49ers don’t beat their Panther foe,
will his wife still mix and roll the biscuit dough,
    even though her hubby
    won’t feel very clubby?
Eating biscuits would be like eating crow.^*

* San Francisco did win, 23-10 over Carolina, and will face the Seahawks on Sunday in Seattle for the National Football Conference Championship and a trip to Super Bowl XLVIII on February 2.
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Copyright © 2014 by Morris Dean

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