1/13/2014

Vacuum your brain, not your ear

Wake up an shake those darn cockroaches out of your ear! Set your priorities straight! Yes, there is something that should be done while the coffee is brewing during that long half hour after you take the darn thyroid pill.
Mr. Short Stack's Dirt Devil vac.
The first email of the day, the latest post from Jonathan Neal's intriguing "Living With Insects" blog, reports that using a vacuum cleaner is not the best method for getting a cockroach out of your ear. It seems cockroaches seek warm cracks and crevices when they aren't feeding, and your sleeping ear is just about perfect. "The doctor, no stranger to removing cockroaches from ears, remarked that was by far the largest one she had removed yet."

The second email is the New York Times headlines, and I can't resist the illustration for "Goodnight. Sleep Clean."  Inside the brain little janitors are sweeping and vacuuming the mental debris of the day. Otherwise your brain would resemble a fish tank with a broken filter. Great visual, if you could see it through the film of algae! The janitors and the working fish tank filter are, drumroll, sleep.

My brother had a tick in his ear once when we were kids. He also had a singing cricket in his cowboy boot when we were out trick-or-treating. I just had a moth fly up my bell-bottom jeans while I was driving.

Maybe the teeny tiny janitors in my brain will inspire me to do more housekeeping. I degreased the kitchen and removed the horror vacui accumulation of paper and magnets on the fridge. Went around knocking down cobwebs as big as hamsters.

On a sunshiny Sunday walk I found a praying mantis egg sack. Didn't mean for it to fall off the twig when I touched it, but since it did I brought it home. No, I didn't wake up with baby praying mantids in my ear. Thank you for your concern. Instead the egg sack went to school for show'n'tell. Tomorrow we will find a good spot for it on the playground. That's the sort of educational experience that makes us tick.

If you put a bug in someone's ear, you give him or her a reminder or suggestion relating to a future event.

If you put a flea in someone's ear it may mean you are planting a suspicion, or giving her a severe scolding.

If you find out what makes someone tick you have discovered what motivates him to behave a certain way.

A vacuum cleaner will not help if you wake up with a song stuck in your head. The earworm du jour:

Life's candy and the sun's a ball of butter.

Who knows what the teeny janitor was sweeping away, but you can watch it here with Spanish subtitles! Hey Mr. Arnstein, here I am.

© 2014 Nancy L. Ruder


4 comments:

Unknown said...

Don't tell me not to live, just sit an putter. ... Don't bring around a cloud to rain on my parade!

Don't tell me not to fly, I simply got to. If someone takes a spill, it's me and not you. Who told you you're allowed to rain on my parade.

What a fun song!

Don't need bugs of any sort in my ears ... or my dogs ears. They're not floppy and can move forward, sideways or nearly backward. Much more talented then mine that only capture some sound and hold up my eyeglasses.

seana graham said...

I am reading a book called Darwin's Armada, and one of the schooners was beleaguered with cockroaches. After efforts to smoke them out, catch them and poison them had all failed, the captain decided to scuttle the ship and drown them. When they dried the ship out again, they found five hundred gallons of dead roaches in the food holding area.

Collagemama said...

Thank heaven they didn't find five hundred gallons of roaches treading water.

seana graham said...

Natural selection may have changed all that since the mid 1800s, unfortunately.