Black and Blue and White All Over?

 

 

 

Think you are seeing two llamas of differing heights?  Think again.  While we're not saying one llama is blue and one is white...or one is gold and one is black...like that dress...what we are saying is that both llamas are exactly the same size.

"It's an optical illusion" stated Dr. Rafe McPherson of Wills Eye Hospital in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  "It's like when our cones and rods can't distinguish what colour that godawful looking dress is which is making the rounds on the Internet.  Whatever colour it is, you can rest assured it's still an ugly dress.  The llamas, on the other hand, are quite the opthalmological enigma.  They look different in size because of the perspective of the camera.  They are, pretty much, give or take an inch or two, the exact same size."

Black or White or Gold or What?

(Llamas - exactly the same height.)

"Our eyes are trained, from an early age, to see things the way the brain wants to perceive them," Todd Renquist of Royal Victorian Eye and Ear Hospital in Melbourne, Australia, stated.  "Sometimes they are completely wonky and it takes a good whack on the head or a bit of Photoshopping to make one...well, see the light...perspectively speaking."

It is refreshing to know in a world quick to make something go viral that not all things are easily passed around.  The photo known to a select few as "Bob Inhales His Own Phlegm" has been such a secret on the Internet that a Google search doesn't even turn anything up. 

"'Bob Inhales His Own Phlegm' is one of the best kept secrets of both eye specialists and photography, I'm talking serious photography buffs, for about three decades now," Nathan Roberts of the Rotterdam Eye Hospital in the Netherlands, said.  "It's mesmerizing in its own way.  I have a gelfotograf of it in my office and my colleagues often bring by their newest interns to see it.  It's a marvel to behold.  I can't really say anything other than that about it - you really have to SEE it to believe it.  It defies explanation."

So, while the world ponders if it's black or blue or white or gold, keep in mind that phlegm has been every single colour of the rainbow, and then some.

Day 15: My ears are ringing

"My ears are ringing" is the prompt for "Day 15" over at "We Work for Cheese" -- please click on the link and check out the other bloggers who are diligently trying to master a blog a day for the month of February.

 

For the life of me...I don't know why my temperature is always 97.something.  Sometimes it's even 96.something which causes me to think I'm probably dead...because only dead people have temperatures below 97.0.

 

But, that's not why I posted a picture of that thing.  It's a digital thermometer by ReliOn...and runs for about ten bucks.  The LED numbers, as you can see, are clearly shown and in a mere nine seconds...or until it beeps...you'll have your readout. 

 

Pretty nifty, huh?

 

Yeah...until you get old like me and the frequency range of things like stealth-like high frequency cell phones and mosquitoes start to go out.  And, apparently, the exact frequency that this thermometer emits.

 

It's very quiet...like 3 decibels at the most...and that's a good thing...because heaven knows you don't want to wake your kid up by the thing beeping as loudly as a garbage truck going backwards...when you shove this thing in their bottom.

 

The bad part is...no one my age can hear it.  Plus, let's pretend I could hear it...I can't hear it because I have tinnitus.  Tinnitus, for those who don't know, is an aggravating thing.  My ears are ringing.  Constantly.  It never stops.  Along with the high-pitched tea kettle sounds...are a lower frequency drone.  Sure, it's nice sometimes, as it drowns out the neighbourhood dogs barking at nite...but, it gets awfully annoying the rest of the time.

 

After a while you get used to it...but sometimes it changes pitch in my head and I pay attention to it again...and I have to constantly ask people to repeat themselves and I sometimes have to put the closed captioning thingy on the television.  I hate that because I end up watching the words and not the picture...plus they have to put it right smack on the screen...not low-like...and most times that channel logo will partially cover the words.  Plus the font is THE ugliest font in human history...and if two people are talking at once you'll get garbled nonsense with numbers in it.  I have to admit, I do find it fun when it says "EMOTIONAL MUSIC PLAYING" or it tells me who is singing the song, like "ROLLING STONES' SINGING SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL" - and I sit here and think...if I'm deaf...how the hell am I going to know what that song sounds like?

 

Anyway...it's time I get back to watching the Olympics -- altho I took a break from cross country skiing to watch Mae West in "She Done Him Wrong".  I'm just about to Google Cary Grant's teeth...because they must have been replaced early on in his career as they didn't look like this later on.

 

Ugh...I seriously need to get a life as I haven't yet gone to bed.  And, if that wasn't bad enough, the birds are now chirping outside...and in a range I can actually hear.



(Speaking of birds...for what it's worth, I blame my hearing loss/tinnitus on my attending a concert at JFK Stadium in Philadelphia where "A Flock of Seagulls" played.  There were a ton of bands...so don't mock me just yet.  But they came out and played a super loud noise for what seemed like ten minutes straight...whereupon everyone started holding their hands over their ears and yelling for them to stop.  I have actually Google'd this -- and some people online actually have implicated them as well...same concert.  I really think they screwed up a lot of peoples' hearing that day...and I will always believe that.)

Day 6: Scatterbrained

Well, I had a good idea for a short story for We Work for Cheese's "Discouraging Writers Everywhere" aka "30 Minus 2 Days of Writing" challenge...but, as I didn't write it down when it first came to me while I was in the kitchen buttering my waffle, it, like so many of my other stunningly brilliant ideas...dissipated pretty much as soon as it came.

 

It kinda went something like this:

 

"Look, Tom, I'm not gonna do this shit again.  I'm tired of it.  You hear me?  I'm fucking serious as a heart attack, man...I'm sick and fucking tired of it!"

 

It was a really good idea.  It was.  It was going to rival "Pulp Fiction" - and Tarantino would have called me in a few days (not wanting to look too eager by emailing me for my phone number straight away) to firm up the details. Sure, he would have changed the guy's name from "Tom" to "Tommy" or something...just nothing stupid like "Jed" or "Lance"...altho, "Look, Lance..." with an air of Tarantino-ish snide sarcasm in the guy's voice, might have worked.  These are the things we would have talked about on the phone...and later on, in person.

 

And it would have been a great film, too.  It would have made some actors famous...who will now never know what it's like to schmooze and hobnob with Hollywood's "A-List" celebrities...all because I didn't have a pen and paper handy.  I always think I'm going to remember -- I keep repeating it in my head over and over...but...then, in a blink of an eye, or in this case, a swipe of a knife...and it's gone.

It's always the same...I even had one of these things given to me about eight years ago:

 

It's much, much more complicated than this thing...

 

 

...because it has side buttons on the left...

 

...and on the right...

 

 

 

The manual is also about as thick as the one they give to you when you learn to fly the Space Shuttle...and the Space Shuttle people never had to drive down a busy road when an idea...an awfully brilliant idea...popped into their heads.  Needless to say...I am alive (and so are countless other people) because I can't figure out how to operate it while I'm sitting in the confines of my house, let alone out in traffic when all my most viable ideas manifest themselves.

It is, for all intents and purposes...a very sexy looking white gadget which, for some odd reason, reminds me of those old Virginia Slims cigarette packs.  And who the hell wouldn't have wanted to smoke these things back then if you could've looked as hot as Kelly Emberg does is this 1980s advert? (I hope that's her - I think that's her...I'm almost fairly certain that's her.)

Which gets me thinking...Kelly Emberg...I wonder if they used to say she was "hot an ember"?  I bet they did.  I'm going to have look up if they even used the word "hot" to refer to women back then, you know, in the 1980s, when she was in every single Vogue magazine. 

 

I always wanted to look like her, too...and when I had my nose done in the 1980s I was hoping they'd give me her nose.  They didn't. 

 

Speaking of noses...she was in a long-time relationship with Rod Stewart, who I always thought oozed sex appeal.  They also have a child together: a daughter.  I sure hope she has her nose (well, not her nose...of course she has her nose - I meant Emberg's instead of Rod's)...but, I bet she (Emberg) had a nose job, tho...only she got a better nose than I did.

 

They used to do this procedure on the nose...where they'd actually take a bit of your cartilage and form it into a "V" shape and pop it into the tip of your nose, so you could have that "bone in the nose" look which was all the rage in the 1980s. 

 

Alas, my nose doctor, Julius Newman aka "Dr. Nose" (the doctor who invented liposuction, and who had a Rolls Royce with "DR NOSE" license plates)...didn't give me a V-tip.  I did, however, get cheekbones done as well.  I didn't know I didn't have cheekbones until he pointed it out to me in his swanky Philadelphia office.  Once I had them...I realized I must not have had 'em before...because the first time I washed my face...and you know how you lean over the sink? Well, you don't really realize you truly know the contours of your face until your face gets some cheekbones put in -- the first time I cupped my hands to splash the soap off...there they were!  There were now hollows where my eyes are...instead of just a flat surface.  Pretty nifty.  In case you didn't know, they shove cheek implants up through the inside of your mouth...so you have no visible scars - and then they anchor them with a looped piece of string that goes into the grooved portion around the implant...and that's what keeps them tethered in place until they yank the strings out of your face a few days later.  THAT was a weird sensation, I tell you.  I still remember it like it was only yesterday. 

 

Strange the things you remember...and the things you don't.  I guess some people are just scatterbrained that way...but in totally different way than how I was going to have brains scattered all over the place in my Tarantino movie.

 

Yeah...I think I really woulda liked that film.

 

 

 

(Another strange thing: I had decided, for some odd reason to Google "Julius Newman" one day...just out of the blue...and it just so happened to be the day after he died.  I had never Google'd him before, which made it all the more odd.  I was going to work that bit of info into this blog...but I thought it would have been way too convoluted to follow...so I tacked this on as an end note. I still think it's very strange.)

(Also, "buttering my waffle" is not a euphemism for masturbation...but, if it were, it would be an awesome one.)