The Hole Truth & Nothing Butt

Things seem to have taken on a serious and surprising cheerless mood around here. Sorry for the downer posts. I really didn't mean to sound preachy either. To be honest, I watch The Soup on E! almost every week. But the celebrity worship does bother me. And the stuff with BS and ANS and the media was bumming me out. And that lady on the bridge freaked me out...a lot. It wasn't the first time I've had to deal with that scenario either. It was the first time not knowing anything about the person though. It was the first time since becoming a father as well. I really do look at life differently now. But I'd like to stay away from sermonising here. At least until we're closer to Nov. 2008.

I need to get back to the important stuff, e.g. Everest, cake decorating and cow farts. I was going to mention something about Al Gore's Nashville mansion using 20x more electricity and natural gas than the standard American household. Apparently this type of info is public and the Gore home paid over $30K in power bills last year. They used more energy in the month of Aug. than your average family uses in a year. But something more interesting happened last night, so you can look that up yourself.

I was returning to the living room when my wife reached out her hand to drop something in mine. "Lovely, she's sending me 'kisses'" I thought. Nope. Instead, she dropped a grayish-blue pellet of fluff, entwined with a pair of tell-tale hairs, into my palm. (No, not those hairs you dirty bird.) "Look what Paige just picked up off the floor and handed me," she said with a look of peevishness. I knew what it was at once; a ball of lint. Well, more precisely, a pill of belly button lint that had somehow escaped my own navel. Obviously, my wife has seen my little button bunnies enough to know what it was herself. She wasn't exactly charmed by the find.

I have a huge belly button. I'm not kidding. It's cavernous really. But I am not ashamed. That's just how it is. I have the Bat Cave on my tummy. Of course you couldn't actually park the Batmobile there. But I could probably position a Matchbox sized PT Cruiser inside if I really tried. Regardless, it's the stuff that often emerges from the depths of my umbilical scar that got me thinking: where does it all come from? I was astonished to find the array of research that's been done on the subject. The most comprehensive of which, was done in 2001, by Dr. Karl Kruszelnicki of the U of Sydney. Here's the lowdown on lint:

• Belly Button Lint (BBL) is made up of stray clothing fibers mixed with dead skin and strands of body hair.
• Contrary to popular belief, BBL migrates up from underwear, rather than down from tops. This is a result of the frictional drag of body hair on underwear, which is upwards.
• Women find less BBL because of their finer, shorter body hair. Older men experience it more because of their coarser and more numerous hairs.
• Navel lint's characteristic blue-gray tint is the averaging of the colors of fibres present in clothing. Often the same color of lint you find in your dryer trap.
• Pierced navels rarely harbor BBL.
• Your "Happy Trail" does have something to do with BBL levels.

More importantly, these little accumulations happen to most everyone, are entirely harmless and require no corrective action. Whew! My research also led me to the site of Graham Barker, the Guinness World Record holder for the largest collection of navel lint. All his own and gathered daily for the past 23 years. Impressive. Check out the sample pictures. I also learned about the art of Omphaloskepsis: contemplating one's own navel in aid to meditation. And, apparently, becoming its own religious movement. Not as impressive.

So there you have it. The ins and outs of belly button lint; with a little extra fluff.