Blood is thicker than knowledge.
How does digestion work?
Have you already eaten? Good.
The next time you sit down to a nice meal, take a good look at your food. Notice how the chef made the different colors and textures blend well with each other. Maybe there’s a sprig of parsley to one side. Are the vegetables sliced into appealing shapes? Enjoy the appearance, because that’s the last time you’re going to want to see any of it.
Digestion is Nature’s way of turning cuisine into energy, cells, and poop.
As soon as you stick a forkful into your mouth, the process begins. Your teeth chomp the pieces into tiny morsels. Your saliva adds liquid and some chemicals to turn the contents to what scientists call “moosh.”
When this gourmet slurry is ready, it slides down the esophagus (Gk: ”gut tube”) to the stomach. There, industrial acids combine with heartburn to reduce the sludge to a prehistoric milkshake. Once the liquid is separated from the belch, it’s ready for the main stage, the small intestine (“semi-colon”).
In the small intestine, the body extracts everything worthwhile out of that fancy fish with the French name. Tiny octopus suckers pull out the good chemicals and send them to the rest of the body. While this is happening, your small intestine undulates like a python crawling over a washboard. The process takes awhile, so the “small” intestine is really pretty long. (In fact, if your small intestine were stretched out in a straight line on a football field — you’d be dead!) At this stage, think of yourself as a human sausage.
Eventually, the body has extorted all it can from your nice meal and nothing is left but fiber and stuff so useless scientists don’t even bother to name it.* Time for it to go into the colon (Sp. “Columbus.”) The colon is mainly a bigger snake that squeezes all the proto-poop to its final destination and gets it the heck out of your body!
So now you understand digestion.
Sometimes being hungry for knowledge can cost you your appetite.
* [BTW: Talk about useless! Most of us have an appendix (Greek: “boar teats”). Its only job is to tick like an unexploded bomb that may blow up anytime, say a holiday weekend, leading us to emergency surgery and maybe an old-fashioned death.]
What is the most distant place on the planet?
Here’s a chance to see how geographers define “distant.” (What else have they got to do?)
Days in transit: This is one of the most common ways to measure distance. How long does it take to make the journey if you’re really trying? Planes, ships, dog sleds, waiting out ice storms, etc. This is the National Geographic standard. So, maybe someplace like Antarctica wins here.
Time per mile. By this measure, “distant” may be the drive from work to home on the I-285 bypass at rush hour. Watch out for talk about “longer than usual” travel time because of an accident, especially if it’s usual to have an accident on the bypass every day.
Time from planning to completing the trip. In this case, it might be going to Uncle Floyd’s house. It’s only a 30-minute drive, when you actually get around to driving. But he can be so annoying, with his collection of shoehorns from around the world and the (same old) story about how his mutt Chancre ran off when he was six. Not to mention the mothball smell that makes your eyes water. So, the time between “You know, we really should visit” and climbing into the car can take months.
Total miles: What’s your guess: Katmandu? The Gobi Desert? Well, this is an actual exam question that has weeded out more than one would-be geographer. The answer is: “the house next door” – if you turn away from it and head the “wrong” way. If you think that’s a cheap trick, I’m with you. But you’re probably not nerdy enough to make it as a geographic scientist.
BTW: Have you ever noticed that the trip back always seems shorter than the trip over? That phenomenon leads us to the idea of “relativity.” But that’s a subject for another time. And another dad.
Image: OpenClipart-Vectors in Pixabay
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For digestion, I use “days in transit” and hopefully will never have to consider the content of BTW. I consider myself to be a bipedal, carbon-based juicer.
W.C. Fields was a carbon-based juicer too, so you’re in good company. Thanks for reading and playing along.