IMPORTANT SCROTAL UPDATES

The human brain is a marvelous thing - from the amount of sheer information it can store, to the power with which it can process data while maintaining necessary body functions, your mind is a miraculous tool with enormous potential.

For the past twenty-four hours, mine has been busy trying to remember the children's book where a girl is subject to a classmate exposing himself, because I want to reference it in a blog post about the word 'scrotum'.

Sadly, after much reflection, an exhaustive search using Google Books, and a bizarre dream wherein I couldn't fully enjoy the commencement address delivered by Stephen Colbert, which had been organized by my college roommate Bill, because I had a two-inch laceration from the corner of my mouth to the middle of my cheek (not sure why or how), I've come up a little short. Google Books is quite a powerful program, but a search for the term "a stick or something" yielded no conclusive results. A variation on "a stick or something", "some kind of stick", yielded more pish-posh. I recalled that at the end of the paragraph, after the girl runs away, she says that she doesn't know why she said "a stick or something" because "I knew what that was". A search for that particular phrase brought up a surprising amount of LGBT literature, which, if that's what this book had been, would have been wholly inappropriate for classroom reading material in a middle school.

Thinking it was time to try another angle, as I didn't like where this Googling was taking me, especially at work during lunch, I tried to search for children's books about WWII and boats. And I found what I was looking for: Lois Lowry's (Newberry Medal-winning, I might add) Number the Stars, which does in fact tell a story about a young girl escaping WWII Europe in a boat. A Google Book search of the text for the phrase "a stick or something", or even the word "stick", came up with bumpkus. So, either Google does not have the entire book stored and searchable online, or I've permanently tarnished Lois Lowry's work with a reference that isn't actually there.

In other related news, I tried being a wise-ass on the New York Times website by leaving a comment on the 'scrotum story' story. A riff on what I previously posted here, I submitted my comment as "My sole objection is that readers in the target age are at an ideal height to punch me there." It seems that some silver-spoon web moderator in NYC didn't think my comment was on-topic enough to be added to the huge thread. There's a silver lining to every cloud though, because one of the funniest things I have EVER seen associated with the New York Times can be read in that thread here: the story makes me laugh not because of the word, but because this kid was so frank.

Anyhow, now we can sort of lay that one to rest. If you'll excuse me, I'm going to go to the bathroom because my scrotum is itchy, I need to scratch it, then wash my hands.