* But nothing compared to crow droppings. According to Harper, the traditional purification ritual for the Brahmin polluted by crow feces is “a thousand and one baths.” This has been rendered less onerous by the invention of the showerhead and the crafty religious loophole. “The water coming through each hole counts as a separate bath.”
* Or, as of 2007, an adult. Egyptian scholar Ezzat Attiya issued a fatwa, or religious opinion, extending breast-milk-son status to anyone a woman has “symbolically breastfed.” For convenience’s sake, drivers and deliverymen could, by drinking five glasses of a woman’s breast milk, be permitted to spend time alone with her. In the ensuing ruckus, another scholar insisted the man would have to drink directly from the woman’s breast. Which is crazier: that Saudi courts, in 2009, sentenced a woman to forty lashes and four months in prison for allowing a bread deliveryman inside her home, or the notion that she might have avoided punishment by letting him suckle from her breast? The woman was seventy-five, if that helps you with your answer.
* But not its bubbles. Frothiness is a hallmark of proteins in general; saliva has more than a thousand kinds. Proteins bind to air. When you whip cream or beat eggs, you are exposing maximum numbers of proteins to air, which is then pulled into the liquid, forming bubbles. That disturbing white foam on the cheeks and necks of racehorses is saliva whisked by the bit. (The whisking of semen is complicated by its coagulating factor. Should you wish to know more, I direct you to the mucilaginous strands of the World Wide Web.) * Literally. The coating is real silver. That’s why the label says “For Decorative Use Only.” Like everyone else, environmental lawyer Mark Pollock didn’t realize you weren’t supposed to eat them. In 2005, Pollock sued PastryWiz, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, Dean & DeLuca, and a half-dozen other purveyors of silver dragees, as they are known in the business. Pollock succeeded in getting the product off store shelves in California. Fear not, holiday bakers, silver dragees are available in abundance from online sellers, along with gold dragees, mini dragees, multicolored pastel dragees. And dragee tweezers. (With cupped ends “to easily grab individual dragees.”) ? As does this: Claims made by makers of mouthwash to kill 99 percent of oral bacteria are misleading. Silletti says half the species can’t be cultured in a lab; they grow only in the mouth. Or on other bacteria. “When you ask the companies for claim support, they will show you the statistics for the kinds they can culture.” How many others there are, or what mouthwash does to them, is unknown.
* In 1973, inquisitive cold researchers from the University of Virginia School of Medicine investigated “the frequency of exposure of nasal . . . mucosa to contact with the finger under natural conditions”—plainly said, how frequently people pick their nose. Under the guise of jotting notes, an observer sat at the front of a hospital ampitheater during grand rounds. Over the course of seven 30-to 50-minute observation periods, a group of 124 physicians and medical students picked their collective noses twenty-nine times. Adult Sunday school students were observed to pick at a slightly lower rate, not because religious people have better manners than medical personnel, but, the researchers speculated, because their chairs were arranged in a circle. In a separate phase of the study, the researchers contaminated the picking finger of seven subjects with cold virus particles and then had them pick their nose. Two of seven came down with colds. In case you needed a reason to stop picking your nose.
* Fear the fight bite: it can cause septic arthritis. In one study, 18 of 100 cases ended in amputation of a finger. Hopefully the middle one. In the aggressive patient, a missing middle finger may be good preventive medicine.
* The zookeepers, however, got very, very quiet. “So maybe,” said Bronstein in an e-mail, “the dragon spit some of its quietness spray on them.” I am almost 100 percent sure that that is not a reference to Sharon Stone.
? The term quack derives from quacksalber, German for “quicksilver” (mercury’s nickname). It took a while for medicine to see the light. As late as 1899, the Merck Manual suggests mercury as an antisyphilitic, to “produce salivation.” Syphilitics weren’t the only ones salivating over mercury. Merck was, at the time, reaping profits from eighteen different “medicinal” mercuries.
* Not to be confused with the Nutter D. Marvel Museum of horsedrawn carriages or the Butter Museum, a working farm that “showcases all things butter, from various styles of butter dishes to the history of butter through the ages,” perhaps turning away briefly during butter’s history-making 1972 role in Last Tango in Paris.
7
A Bolus of Cherries
LIFE AT THE ORAL PROCESSING LAB