The Naked Truth

I surfaced today after a week of ball busting, number crunching, endless work of helping to get a bid together for my company, so I wanted to see what’s going on in the world.

I went to BBC’s website and saw a fascinating story about human fish. These are people in Lagos, Nigeria who swim to the bottom of the sea and bring up buckets of sand. It was hard to tell how many people where doing this because heads were popping out of the water everywhere like that kids’ amusement hall game with gophers coming up that you bonk back into their hole with a mallort. I don’t know how long they were on the bottom filling the baskets with sand with their hands and hauling the heavy things up to the surface, but it seemed like hard work. They dumped the basket in a boat and went back down, hour after hour.

It reminded me of chasing pennies in the deep end at the swimming pool, except a penny weighs nothing and we were only under the water exactly long enough to swim like tadpoles to the 10 foot bottom, snatch the coin, surface gasping for air, swim to the side, and rest for awhile before throwing the penny again. While we were down there for those few seconds, it felt like someone was ramming their thumbs in our ears – I guess from the water pressure. These Lagos guys must truly be part fish.

As interesting as that was, my curiosity was piqued by another title. “Can people unlearn their naked shame?” It’s loading right now – excuse me while I watch.

Well, that was certainly educational – and I’m saying this sarcastically – thought I’d tell you since you can’t actually hear my voice. They brought in 15 men and asked them to take their shirts off. Then a doctor photographed them. Then they shaved the guys’ backs and chests and took another photograph. They probably went through a lot of razors because a couple of those guys looked like orangutans. Then the good doctor assembled some studious looking men and women and had them rate the photos on the slide show according to attractiveness. The finding? That some hair was okay on a certain physique, but overall both men and women prefer a guy who has little to no hair.

Like a whole lot of “scientific” research, I could have told them the outcome of this one before those guys got shaved and have to itch for months while the hair grows back. Nobody desires a wooly mammoth, though all kinds of people fall in love with the person inside all that hair. The certain physique I mentioned above was one in which the guy’s breasts were not the biggest part of his chest. Turn out people like a lean, mean, hairless machine.

One final video was Dame Joan Bakewell giving tips on growing old. Or so they claimed, but this is not what she did at all. She simply answered five minutes worth of questions and said that, at age 76, she misses her memory but she’s doing pretty good. She looked darned good, too. Many people my age don’t look that good, including me first thing this morning. So she has inspired me to continue living a full life even when I reach her age, which will be awhile, I hope.

Meantime, I’m not going to trust two-thirds of the headlines I read on the BBC’s website. Though I do love the BBC. They have such a sense of humor about their news. Oh my gosh, I just scrolled down and saw there was also an article about the naked shame that shows naked men (from the back) and must talk about their naked bodies. What am I doing writing this blog? I’ve got some scientific research to do. See ya tomorrow.