The itch you can't scratch?
July 30th 2008 09:09
Way back in December, 2006, I wrote a short post on my Random Notes blog about what it might be like to have athlete’s fingers, rather than athlete’s foot. Curiously enough, this particular post has turned up in search results on Google and other places with great frequency. I’m not sure that anyone really can get athlete’s fingers, or athlete’s hands, and the idea of having such an irritation isn’t pleasant, but people seem to go looking for information on it all the same.
Humans are a pretty itchy lot at the best of times, and apart from the very common itchy back we get itches in all sorts of other places, some of which probably ought not to be scratched in public. Well, not in the sort of public where people are likely to look askance at you.
There was an ad on TV for a while, using the idea that certain real men’s men (the sort that go off to the rugby on a Saturday, or fart in front of their family, or would never be seen dead wearing certain colours) might actually be different if we saw them in other circumstances. The last shot of the bloke, after he’s just raided the fridge and is eating whatever it is he’s got without using a plate, is of him casually scratching his bum. (You get the impression that if his wife had seen him doing it, his life insurance rates might have gone through the roof. ) Perhaps it was an attempt on the ad-maker’s part to make bum-scratching a little more respectable.
Scratching ourselves is one of those things we share with the animal kingdom – it’s the sort of thing that makes evolutionists proudly proclaim that we’re really just glorified animals after all. And in regard to scratching, it might be said that we are.
You’d think, if you put ‘scratch’ and ‘Internet’ into Google, you’d come up with a fair amount of focus on how we get rid of itches. In fact, you get all sorts of other things, which is rather amusing.
Scratched glass boosting data speeds. Scratching a developer’s personal itch (which isn’t about physical scratching). Scratch-off nears its twenty-year milestone (presumably it’s some kind of Lotto). Acting as a kind of impromptu DJ by: getting “yourself one (or two) of Art Lebedev's new Plastinkus scratch pads, which supposedly sound just like you're scratching the real thing. While that claim may be somewhat dubious, at about four bucks apiece they're certainly at least worth taking a chance on, and you can even get 'em in no less than forty different color combinations. Now, if we could only get our business cards printed on them.”
Fixing a scratched CD. Cats scratching trees, furniture, poles. A small ‘scratch’ that makes the Internet 60 times faster. Starting a business from scratch.
Hold on: where’s the stuff about scratching the places we shouldn’t scratch? Way down the list, apparently!
Humans are a pretty itchy lot at the best of times, and apart from the very common itchy back we get itches in all sorts of other places, some of which probably ought not to be scratched in public. Well, not in the sort of public where people are likely to look askance at you.
There was an ad on TV for a while, using the idea that certain real men’s men (the sort that go off to the rugby on a Saturday, or fart in front of their family, or would never be seen dead wearing certain colours) might actually be different if we saw them in other circumstances. The last shot of the bloke, after he’s just raided the fridge and is eating whatever it is he’s got without using a plate, is of him casually scratching his bum. (You get the impression that if his wife had seen him doing it, his life insurance rates might have gone through the roof. ) Perhaps it was an attempt on the ad-maker’s part to make bum-scratching a little more respectable.
Photo by Jason O'Halloran
Scratching ourselves is one of those things we share with the animal kingdom – it’s the sort of thing that makes evolutionists proudly proclaim that we’re really just glorified animals after all. And in regard to scratching, it might be said that we are.
You’d think, if you put ‘scratch’ and ‘Internet’ into Google, you’d come up with a fair amount of focus on how we get rid of itches. In fact, you get all sorts of other things, which is rather amusing.
Scratched glass boosting data speeds. Scratching a developer’s personal itch (which isn’t about physical scratching). Scratch-off nears its twenty-year milestone (presumably it’s some kind of Lotto). Acting as a kind of impromptu DJ by: getting “yourself one (or two) of Art Lebedev's new Plastinkus scratch pads, which supposedly sound just like you're scratching the real thing. While that claim may be somewhat dubious, at about four bucks apiece they're certainly at least worth taking a chance on, and you can even get 'em in no less than forty different color combinations. Now, if we could only get our business cards printed on them.”
Fixing a scratched CD. Cats scratching trees, furniture, poles. A small ‘scratch’ that makes the Internet 60 times faster. Starting a business from scratch.
Hold on: where’s the stuff about scratching the places we shouldn’t scratch? Way down the list, apparently!
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