Ripping A New One

In a world proctically teeming with assholes, particularly in the seat of government, as it were, it's a breath of fresh air to find out about an animal that doesn't have an asshole at all. No, not the face mite this time. The one that doesn't poop until it dies and then disintegrates on your face along with a lifetime of backed-up poop? We were happier not knowing about that one.

This one is safely in the ocean, which is basically a giant toilet anyway. The warty comb jelly (a.k.a. Sea Walnut) isn't even packing, anus-wise. He just punches one through when he needs it. The rest of the time it's nowhere to be found. Perhaps this should not be surprising. The whole ocean is full of weird bloopy creatures that don't even know how to assemble a proper spine and it's no wonder their priorities are way out of whack.

Although, they might be on to something. Give them this: the standard ass is not always all it's cracked up to be. Generally speaking the rest of the animal kingdom makes do, as it were, with a hole and associated sphincters, but the sad truth is you can't absolutely count on the sphincters, especially as age creeps up and kicks you in the nethers. That's why, pharmaceutically speaking, there is such a thing as "anal seepage."

The warty comb jelly, on the other hand, takes in nutrition like everyone else and sends the extraneous bits down the gut, and then right before the grand exit, well: Houston? We have a problem. You'd think. But not for the wily warty comb jelly. He gets everything all lined up and then punches the poop canal into his outer envelope and suddenly there's a hole and everything is taken care of, and then it heals back up. That's as backed-up as he gets.

Fun extraneous fact though: the warty comb jelly has more than one exit plan. Everything comes in the front end and then there's a fork in the road, and he can load up one side or another. Whichever branch of his poop apparatus he cares to evacuate, that's the one he jams into his skin and rips himself a new one. He has not been observed, as yet, to operate both poop canals at once.

Which would be awesome. "Dropping a deuce" is just an expression with us, but what if Number Two really meant something?

But just because it hasn't been observed doesn't mean it never happens. In fact, that's the other thing that's interesting about this. People have looked at sea jellies before and drawn helpful pictures of them, and in all the pictures in the literature ("The Literature" is where Science is kept until it busts out), someone's drawn in a little dot where the asshole orter be. And it took this one guy to have himself a look and notice that, actually, it wasn't there. People see what they expect to see. And although most people never expect to see a warty comb jelly at all, at least in day-to-day life, when they do imagine the thing, they put a butthole on it. Which begs the question: what else don't we know?

That is why it pays to become a scientist. We don't know everything. Any one of us could have been the person to discover the warty comb jelly's posterior peculiarity, but we didn't. We're just too danged busy.

That's the lesson here. Don't believe everything you think. Next time some asshole comes along and tells you what a horror show Socialism is, for instance, just tell him he doesn't know everything, and ask him what he knows about warty comb jelly butts, and when he looks blank, say See? See? At least he'll go away.

Sit On My Face

As far as I know, the face mite is the only living animal that doesn't poop.

Ordinarily, I wouldn't trust an animal that never pinched off a loaf. It's just not healthy to keep too much to yourself. I'm willing to give the face mite a pass, though, because there's no arguing with them at this point. They're set in their ways. Also in your pores.

Face mites are very small spider relatives that sit on your face. They look like a worm that changed its mind at one end, jamming in eight legs in a bunch. The other end is where the anus orter be but ain't. This is what happens when you rush a project without proper planning.

So what the face mite does is store up an entire lifetime's worth of crap and then, predictably, drops dead. Fortunately, it only lives about two weeks, but still. That's backed-up. It does all of this--growing up, having sex, dying, rotting, and dropping off its old shit, on your face. Mostly in your hair follicles or pores, but it moves around at night, and at a pretty good clip, considering. The female lays a heart-shaped egg half her own size in one of your sebaceous glands, and that hatches into a six-legged larva, later tacks on an extra pair of legs when it remembers it's in the spider family, and then it continues to eat your face until it dies.

Under the circumstances I don't get too worked up about having face mite poop disintegrate on my face, since its food came from my face to begin with. I think about it as being more of a compost situation.

sealed nethers

This is the kind of thing that makes people itchy, though. There's a whole industry in cosmetic exfoliation because people can't even stand having their own personal dead skin cells on them, and they will polish their faces to a high gloss with scrubs and little Dremel tools so as to get down to the young juicy layers. They're faithless, though. They'll give that beautiful young skin no more than a day or two and grind it off again. And this is without even knowing about the mites.

Scientists knew about the mites relatively early. The face mite was first described in 1841 and called Acarus folliculorum. Nobody paid much attention. The next year someone called it Demodex folliculorum and everybody went Oh, sure, Demodex. We know all about that. They discovered there was a long form and a short form, just like taxes, and it was 1972 before it was finally confirmed, in a real groundbreaker, that they were two different species, in a report that also did not receive much attention.

Both of them sit on your face, to the degree they can sit, without a butt. They stick their heads into your sebaceous glands with their sealed nethers sticking out. Except when they're motoring around at night.

They don't bother me. When you've got enough years in your back pocket, you have a much better grasp of what isn't going to harm you (face mites and refugees) and what is (falling down and global warming).

So they're all welcome here. Tolerance and compassion are my goals. A face mite wants to drop an anchor larva on my eyelid, I say go ahead on. I'm a Democrat.