Read Online Dave Barry Is Not Taking This Sitting Down by Dave Barry - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Dave Barry
Ads: Link
C’mon! Wooooooeeee! C’mon!”) in an increasingly frantic but generally futile effort to get the dog to do whatever trick it was supposed to do, while the dog either looked on with mild interest, or attempted to get off the stage and mate with the next contestant. My personal favorite in the Trick Dog category went to a very small, very excited poodle named Bunny whose trick, as far as I could tell, consisted entirely of jumping up and down and making weewee on a towel.
As you can imagine, it was not easy serving as a judge with so many strong contestants, both on the stage and hiding under the judges’ table. Nevertheless, when it was all over, approximately 43 hours after it started, we had to pick one dog as Best in Show. It was a big decision, and although there was a strong and objective push for Peggy, we decided, after agonizing for close to three-tenths of a second, to give the top prize to Sam, the old, totally motionless, sleeping Chihuahua dressed as a butterfly to match his owner, Frank. Frank got quite emotional when he accepted the trophy, and we judges were touched, although we did ask Frank to make Sam move his paw so we could see that he was, in fact, sleeping, and not actually deceased. Because you have to have standards.
The Nose Knows
O f all the human senses—sight, hearing, touch, taste, and the feeling that a huge man with a barbecue fork is lurking in the closet—perhaps the least appreciated, yet most important, is our sense of smell.
How does our sense of smell work? The simplest way to explain it without doing any research is as follows: Every living thing—animals, plants, cheese, magazine advertisements, etc.—is constantly giving off tiny invisible pieces of itself, which scientists call “smell particles.” Suppose that you have just entered a room that contains a fudge brownie. As you approach the brownie, your nose snorks up smell particles from it and passes them along into the Olfactory Canal, which was completed in 1825 and goes to Albany, New York.
No, sorry, wrong canal. The Olfactory Canal takes the particles to your brain, which is actually a fabulously complex computer, which means that on January 1, 2000, it will stop working and your body will flop around like a recently caught perch. But until then, your brain is able to detect the presence of the brownie particles, and, after analyzing them via a subtle electrochemical process involving billions of tiny neural circuits performing highly sophisticated, lightning-fast calculations, produce the following thought: “Yum!”
Your brain then transmits a signal to your hand, telling it to go ahead and put the brownie into your mouth; almost instantaneously,your hand responds with the signal informing your brain that you ate the brownie several minutes earlier, because your hand and your mouth agreed many years ago that, as far as chocolate is concerned, there is no need to involve your brain.
Thus we see that our sense of smell is not as important as it seemed to be back at the start of this article. In fact, our sense of smell can actually be dangerous, because it stands to reason that if our nose inhales too many particles into our brains, eventually a dense particle wad will form inside us, and our heads will explode, sending compressed brownie chunks hurling outward fast enough to pass through a brick wall. Fortunately, according to a recent study by the American Medical Association, the chances that this will ever happen to you are “less than one in four” provided that “you do not breathe too much.”
But the question remains: Why do we have a sense of smell in the first place? The answer is that smell once played a vital role in the survival of the human race, back when we were primitive beings who ran around naked. No, I am not talking about the ’60s; I am talking about prehistoric times, when primitive men had to hunt for food to feed their families. They’d creep along naked through the underbrush, and
As you can imagine, it was not easy serving as a judge with so many strong contestants, both on the stage and hiding under the judges’ table. Nevertheless, when it was all over, approximately 43 hours after it started, we had to pick one dog as Best in Show. It was a big decision, and although there was a strong and objective push for Peggy, we decided, after agonizing for close to three-tenths of a second, to give the top prize to Sam, the old, totally motionless, sleeping Chihuahua dressed as a butterfly to match his owner, Frank. Frank got quite emotional when he accepted the trophy, and we judges were touched, although we did ask Frank to make Sam move his paw so we could see that he was, in fact, sleeping, and not actually deceased. Because you have to have standards.
The Nose Knows
O f all the human senses—sight, hearing, touch, taste, and the feeling that a huge man with a barbecue fork is lurking in the closet—perhaps the least appreciated, yet most important, is our sense of smell.
How does our sense of smell work? The simplest way to explain it without doing any research is as follows: Every living thing—animals, plants, cheese, magazine advertisements, etc.—is constantly giving off tiny invisible pieces of itself, which scientists call “smell particles.” Suppose that you have just entered a room that contains a fudge brownie. As you approach the brownie, your nose snorks up smell particles from it and passes them along into the Olfactory Canal, which was completed in 1825 and goes to Albany, New York.
No, sorry, wrong canal. The Olfactory Canal takes the particles to your brain, which is actually a fabulously complex computer, which means that on January 1, 2000, it will stop working and your body will flop around like a recently caught perch. But until then, your brain is able to detect the presence of the brownie particles, and, after analyzing them via a subtle electrochemical process involving billions of tiny neural circuits performing highly sophisticated, lightning-fast calculations, produce the following thought: “Yum!”
Your brain then transmits a signal to your hand, telling it to go ahead and put the brownie into your mouth; almost instantaneously,your hand responds with the signal informing your brain that you ate the brownie several minutes earlier, because your hand and your mouth agreed many years ago that, as far as chocolate is concerned, there is no need to involve your brain.
Thus we see that our sense of smell is not as important as it seemed to be back at the start of this article. In fact, our sense of smell can actually be dangerous, because it stands to reason that if our nose inhales too many particles into our brains, eventually a dense particle wad will form inside us, and our heads will explode, sending compressed brownie chunks hurling outward fast enough to pass through a brick wall. Fortunately, according to a recent study by the American Medical Association, the chances that this will ever happen to you are “less than one in four” provided that “you do not breathe too much.”
But the question remains: Why do we have a sense of smell in the first place? The answer is that smell once played a vital role in the survival of the human race, back when we were primitive beings who ran around naked. No, I am not talking about the ’60s; I am talking about prehistoric times, when primitive men had to hunt for food to feed their families. They’d creep along naked through the underbrush, and
Similar Books
