ODDLY COMPELLING
THE NEFF ZONE -- BY JIM NEFF
CADILLAC NEWS -- SEPTEMBER 7, 2024
Sometimes you come across items in the news that make you want to wince. These oddities run the gamut from yucky to painful to strange. You want to bypass these, but you can't because they are oddly compelling.
For example, something in Texas right now is all three of these categories in one package. “Texans now have a new thing to be on the lookout for when they head to the shore. Your worst nightmares are washing up right now. The appearance of poisonous fireworms.”
These little beauties, which look like caterpillars on steroids, are not something you want to encounter. “They're called fireworms due to the pain they inflict on anyone that dares to touch them; it literally feels like fire for about three hours. Your skin can feel sensitive in the sting site for weeks. The creatures release a neurotoxin through their minuscule white bristles, which extend when threatened and break off when touched.” (https://www.newser.com/story/355362/texas-meet-your-worst-nightmare.html)
You don't have to tangle with a fireworm to experience a discomfort that drives you to distraction. The common paper cut can do this. “Paper cuts occur through the handling of paper products. In addition to the nuisance factor due to the sudden flow of blood, there is also often a great deal of pain involved.”
Researchers in Denmark have identified the types of paper most likely to inflict damage to your digits. Avoid paper that is neither too thick nor too thin. The top culprits are printer paper, Post-It notes, and printed magazines. (https://phys.org/news/2024-08-paper-likelihood.html)
Cigarette butts littering the ground are a bit yucky, but researchers in another Scandinavian country may have a found a way to keep things cleaner. “As part of a new anti-litter initiative, a Swedish city is using some fine-feathered friends to help clean cigarette butts off of its streets. It employs crows (voluntarily, of course).”
Why crows? Well, they are pretty smart. “They perform as well on certain reasoning tasks as five to seven-year-old children. They pick up cigarette butts and drop them into a special machine. For each cigarette butt a crow places into the machine, the crow gets a small piece of food.” The crows save the city seventy-five percent of its overall anti-litter budget. (https://www.thecooldown.com/outdoors/corvid-cleaning-cigarette-butts-litter-streets/)
While crows are doing something constructive, humans are setting records that have a lesser benefit to humanity. A semi-yucky but decidedly ouchy example is the guy in Germany who holds the record for the most toilet seats broken by the head in one minute. “Kevin Shelley shattered a staggering forty-six toilet seats with his forehead over the course of just sixty seconds.”
This was quite an athletic feat, but probably not the next Olympic sport. “According to Shelley, it wasn’t the forehead smashing that exhausted him most, but rather running down the line of toilet seats to accomplish the record as quickly as possible.” (https://interestingfacts.com/weird-guinness-records/)
On the more useful side of the coin, strangely enough your consumption of grilled cheese sandwiches may be contributing to the world's power grid. “Albertville, France, is most famous for hosting the 1992 Winter Olympics. It’s also known for being the site of an untraditional power station that uses cheese to produce electricity.”
Here's how it works. “This unusual process relies on whey, a yellowish liquid byproduct that comes from the cheesemaking process. Experts realized they could ferment the whey to create methane gas, which could then be used to heat water and produce electricity. The cheese-based power plant produces 2.8 million kilowatt-hours each year — enough to power a community of 1,500 people.”
This strange technology cold be in your future. “There are more than twenty of these small cheese-fueled power plants located throughout Europe and Canada.” Who knows where this will go? As for me, I hope they develop a car that runs on mac 'n' cheddar. (https://interestingfacts.com/fact/the-worlds-hardest-cheese-can-be-chewed-like-gum-for-hours/)
By the way, covering your tater tots with cheese is a common practice, but did you know the tots were not originally intended to be eaten by humans? “Two brothers, Golden and Francis Nephi Grigg, invented the potato composites to reduce the amount of food waste produced at their frozen foods plant. Initially, the Griggs sold the vegetable byproducts to farmers as livestock feed.”
Then they had a better idea. “They began experimenting with chopping up the potato scraps, mixing them with flour and spices, then shaping the result into a rectangle with the help of a simple, homemade plywood mold.”
The first Tater Tots debuted in 1956, but they were not an instant hit. “Shoppers seemed skeptical of the inexpensive scrap-based snack, but after prices were raised slightly to suggest an air of sophistication, Tater Tots quickly found a permanent home in frozen food aisles, where they continue to reign today.” (https://interestingfacts.com/fact/tater-tots-were-invented-to-reduce-waste/)
Finally, it's sort of an emotional ouch when someone calls you a fathead. However, while this may be perceived as a slight, it's actually an anatomical reality. “By the time most of us reach age twenty or so, the bones in our body are pretty much done growing. However, there are a few bones that buck this biological trend. Skulls, for example, never fully stop growing.”
This may explain why your hat size changes as you age. “Researchers determined that as we grow older, the forehead moves forward, while cheek bones tend to move backward.” (https://interestingfacts.com/fact/the-human-skull-never-fully-stops-growing/)
I have an unscientific personal theory that adds to this phenomenon. Those of us with more miles on our personal odometers need the extra space because we've accumulated huge amounts of knowledge and wisdom.
Jim Neff is a local columnist. Read Neff Zone columns online at CadillacNews.com and NeffZone.com/cadillacnews.
