vituperation

June 25, 2004

Fred’s tips for a happy marriage, tip #742

Imagine you’re lying in bed with your lovely wife, discussing the day’s events. After a long and luxurious stretch, she turns to you and speaks.

“I sure do love laying in bed,” she says.

“Oh yeah?” you reply.

“Yeah. I think I’m going to become a bed person,” she tells you. “Why don’t you stop on the way home tomorrow and get a couple of boxes of Twinkies to get me started?”

If, men, you find yourself in this situation, and you turn to your wife with a huge grin and sing your own rendition of “They’ll Need a Crane” by They Might Be Giants that has these lyrics:

They’ll need a crane,
They’ll need a crane,
To lift your fat old ass out of the bed.
The medics hate,
That even eight
Guys couldn’t lift you when they strain.

If you do that, chances are good you won’t get laid that night.

I’m just sayin’.

Drew, if you, Wayne, Ryan, or Colin want me to make a guest appearance on your show to demonstrate my stunning ad-lib song abilities, email me.

Speaking of Whose Line, we watched it last night. Richard Simmons was guesting with the guys, and I have to say it was one of the best / funniest ones I’ve ever seen.

Ah, the life of the schistosome. What’s a schistosome, you ask? Why, it’s a tiny little parasitic flatworm, a purely fascinating little creature.

The schistosome begins its humble life hatching from an egg in water. After hatching, the baby schistosome (called a miracidium) swims around, looking for snails. During this swimming time, the miracidium doesn’t eat, and it only has enough energy to live for about 24 hours.

When the miracidium finds a snail, it enters the snail through its skin (the integument) or mouth, and elongates to form a reproductive sac called the sporocyst. The sporocyst will form a second generation, and then a third generation about a month later. That third generation is called the cercaria.

The cercaria burrows out of the snail and again becomes an aquatic thing, still swimming and still not eating. Only this time, instead of looking for snails, the cercaria is looking for a bird. When it finds one, it burrows right into the bird’s skin while the worm-infested water is evaporating, then migrates through several internal organs and eventually matures in the bird’s blood vessels.

At this point, the mature schistosome starts laying eggs, which travel through the bird’s body and ultimately get shat out. If the birdshit lands in water, the eggs hatch in about an hour and the whole process starts again.

Fascinating, no?

Occasionally, those tiny little flatworms — they’re only 1/80th of an inch long — make a mistake. They’re swimming around the lake, or maybe even someplace like, oh, I don’t know, a quarry, and they come across something else swimming in the water.

Something that isn’t a bird. Something a little bigger, though not always smarter.

And the little flatworm, thinking it’s found a host, burrows right into the skin of this thing that’s bigger but not always smarter than a bird and swimming in the place like, oh, I don’t know, a quarry, while the water is evaporating from the thing’s body.

Know what happens then?

The little schistosome dies. In most bigger-than-a-bird-but-not-always-smarter things that swim in places like, oh, I don’t know, a quarry, this is the end of it. But in about 30% of them, there’s a reaction. Itchy red bumps appear, generally on the backs of the bigger-than-a-bird-but-not-always-smarter thing’s legs.

When these itchy red bumps show up on the backs of the legs of the bigger-than-a-bird-but-not-always-smarter thing, it’s possible they’ll show up on the day after the bigger-than-a-bird-but-not-always-smarter thing went on a long hike during a picnic (where the bigger-than-a-bird-but-not-always-smarter thing had a wild encounter with a rattlesnake), leading the bigger-than-a-bird-but-not-always-smarter thing to conclude that he has poison oak, so that he continues to swim in the place that’s like, oh, I don’t know, a quarry.

Only the “poison oak” doesn’t heal, it just gets worse and worse while the thing keeps swimming daily in the place that’s like, oh, I don’t know, a quarry, leading the bigger-than-a-bird-but-not-always-smarter thing to start reading about things that cause itchy red bumps on the backs of legs, and an education on the life of the schistosome and something called “swimmer’s itch”. So the thing that’s bigger-than-a-bird-but-not-always-smarter stops going to swim at the place that’s like, oh, I don’t know, a quarry for several days, and something happens.

The itchy red bumps begin to heal, as if by magic.

And the bigger-than-a-bird-but-not-always-smarter thing is all ooked out by the thought of parasitic worms burrowing into his legs while he swims in the place that’s like, oh, I don’t know, a quarry. But that doesn’t stop him from planning to keep going back, now that he knows what he’s dealing with.

After all, even though he’s bigger than a bird, he’s not always as smart.