(Notes on your blood shed)
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While reading a great book this past week, I learned something interesting. If you were to line up all your blood vessels and capillaries, end to end, you would die.

Actually, to be fair to the book, the ‘die’ part was my own conclusion. What the book actually states is that an average human body contains some twenty-five thousand miles of blood-hauling byways. What this means, of course, is that if you wanted to drive from your heel to your heart, you would immediately get stuck behind an Eastern European immigrant who is taking her first driving lesson, so they haven’t yet gotten to that chapter discussing “the slow lane.”

Also, your car would be packed. According to one estimate, a single drop of blood may contain four thousand different types of molecules, each carrying its own little secret about you, as if all your blood cells worked for Google.

The book, by the way, is yet another outstanding effort by author Bill Bryson, titled “The Body.” This is the fourteenth of Bryson’s books that I’ve read, and when I mentioned that in a very positive online review, some alleged female asked, “So you like that author?”

Whew…

See, behavior like that helps explain why it’s difficult for me to completely buy into that “survival of the fittest” scheme. Any self-respecting evolution committee would long ago have ferreted out that specimen for culling.

Bryson’s well-researched and mostly-internal tour of the human body has something for everyone who still reads without staring at a little screen while walking into stuff. For instance, I learned that non-mammals (birds, fish, reptiles, Republicans) can see more colors than we can, although the Republicans could just be saying that. The average human eye has three cones, which divide the world up into three colors: red and blue (political parties) and green (your money). Orange cones result from a mix of the three colors, as evidenced when the political parties, red and blue, spend your green on pet highway projects.

On average, your eye is constantly “darting” and will take four snapshots every single second. These rapid darts are, mostly, not noticeable, unless you’re a teenager lying to your parents.

The book even manages to make your tears interesting. I didn’t realize that there are three kinds of tears: basal – which provide lubrication; reflex – a response to, say, smoke, sliced onions, or particularly inspired flatulence; and emotional – which are created for obvious reasons, but are also unique … apparently, humans are the only creatures who cry from feeling, except for the Cowardly Lion.

As it works out, your ability to hear stuff is also exceptionally complex, like taxes, though at first glance seemingly simple, like fudging your taxes. To hear a whisper, or a symphony, or a faucet or spouse complaining in another room, we’re provided with a minimal, unlikely suite of raw materials: a thin membrane, a few nerves, some wisps of muscle, and the three tiniest bones in your bone collection. All these tools collaborate with your brain’s temporal lobe to tell you that a dog is barking, or a Seattle grunge band is singing, which is the same thing.

Viruses. Not quite living, but not quite dead – they’re basically microbial reruns of Friends. They don’t eat or breathe, much like American guys after a Thanksgiving meal. They have no means of locomotion and have to be carried from place to place, as if they were your kids in a soccer league. Lethargic, yes…when on their own. But let a virus get inside a living cell and it starts reproducing as furiously as Charlie Chaplin on box office payday.

Viruses are, to use the accepted medical term, “like, really small and stuff.” They’re even smaller than bacteria, and a bacterium once beat up Jerry Nadler. (Of course, when he came to, Nadler ate the bacteria’s family. And the microscope.) According to a representative from People Who Make Analogies For A Living, if you blew one virus up to the size of a tennis ball, a human would be five hundred miles high, and Jerry Nadler would be ten feet tall.

But they’re also, apparently, everywhere. An average quart of seawater contains up to 100 billion viruses, and that’s before all those Cub Scouts showed up for Labor Day weekend.

In closing, here are a few more random interestings from Bryson’s book:

• The average human touches his face sixteen times an hour. But you’ll need to find a fairly abnormal human who’s willing to sit around and count that.
• A severed human head can keep living for several seconds, or even longer if the head writes network TV comedy.
• If you tried to fit your three ear bones on a shirt button, they would all fit, and you would be deaf.
• There is a fungus named coccidioidomycosis, but it is rarely discussed, since no one can pronounce it, at least not with a straight face.
• The average human has 900 different microbes in their nose. At last count, Michael Jackson had six.
• Vitamins are things humans can no longer generate themselves, like mix tapes, or personal responsibility.
• Scientifically, people who are completely color-blind are called achromatopes. Lately, people who are not color-blind are called racists.
• Over your lifetime, you will eat about sixty tons of food. If you’re a single guy, forty of those tons will be Chinese food, tacos, or Pringles.
• The white part of your eye is called the “sclera” (from the Greek word for “hard”). This discovery led to the formation of “sclera rock” bands like Kiss, and Led Zeppelin.
• People in France eat more cheese and drink more wine than anybody else, and yet have very low rates of heart disease. Many scientists attribute this to systemic surrendering.
• E. coli can reproduce seventy-two times a day, as if Charlie Chaplin had hooked up with two Kardashians.
• Smiling involves between ten and forty-odd muscles, depending on if you’re happy, nervous, or lying.
• Oysters can get herpes.

Sorry, oysters, but this is what can happen when you spend your whole life in bed, sporting pearls.