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Old Guy Bits Posting Date: Jul 28 2008 12:31AM Apparently, your ears keep growing throughout your life.
How stupid is that?
If ever there was an argument against both evolution and intelligent design (the newly-evolved name for “creationism”), this is it. Why would either a ruthless process like evolution or an omni-intelligent supreme being create the infinitely-growing ear? Putting ears that grow on octogenarians produces no advantage that I can discern … unless you count comedy as an advantage.
Let’s face it, disproportionately large body parts are funny. Disproportionately large ears are particularly comical. Apparently, all we have to do to become Robin Williams is to live long enough to have our earlobes reach our jaw lines. A consequence no one has considered in the never-ending quest for longer lives through medicine, homeopathy, exercise and watching Oprah, is that if we live an extra decade or two, so will our ears. Thank goodness lifespan trends are starting to turn around because if we kept living longer and longer, by the time the next millennium rolled around, all of our society’s two hundred year olds would need slings and trusses for their lobes.
And it’s not like the ears grow exclusively downward like fleshy stalagtites; ears keep growing in all directions. They get taller, beefier and increasingly bulbous. They also seem, in their growth, to create a correspondingly expanding field for the cultivation of hair. The more robust the ear, the more fertile the follicles. Some aged ears sprout farm-like expanses of fur even as the skull cap above them grows increasingly shiny and fallow. In fact, it’s like the ears become chubby sewers for the hair that was once on top of younger heads. One day, it’s on top with a little Brylcreem, Grecian Formula and an ambitious side-part. The next, it’s flushed into the delta of the aural canal where it regerminates as a stubbly tangle of trimability.
In our genetically-engineered future, when we are able to determine gender, hair colour, weight and height according to the scientific capacity and willingness of the day, I can see medical researchers heralding the breakthrough that allows us to curb the insatiable growth-lust of our ears. Like the advent of the pin-striped suit and death of the old-school toupé, the genetically-engineered ears of the future will ring in a new age of aesthetic quality as old men trundle around with the sides of their faces unobscured by anything less fleshy than a couple of pork chop sideburns.
But if we can do that, how marvelous would it be to have the ability to turn on and off, through the magic of science, the growth abilities of other body parts?
Don’t feel like clipping your toenails ever again? No problem. We can fix that for you and put pedicurists out of business in a flash. Feel like saving some bucks on haircuts? We can lock your locks in at a specified length and keep them there forever.
Of course, the big news won’t be about the things that we can stop from growing, it will be about the things that we can inspire to grow. All we have to do is take a little of that magic ear elixir that gives them growing powers and apply it to other body parts. We could make taller, longer-armed, longer-fingered people. You would have guys entering the NBA at forty-two as they finally reach seven feet in height. You could see stretchy-armed airborne enthusiasts hang gliding by holding onto two bed sheets.
But we all know what body part would be the most commonly engineered. I’m just not sure that the world is ready to deal with legions of septuagenarians with foot-long schlongs. Could happen. And if you think Viagra and Cialis are popular now, wait until the Little-Engine-That-Could is trying to lift some mammoth appendage. Erectile dysfunction drugs will start coming in horse pills (pun intended) in order to provide enough hydraulic oomph to marshal the engineered, but aged love warriors into formation.
Now that I think about it, I think prefer a world in which the old guys’ ears are large and their love pumps are not.
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