Spongy brains don't mean diddly

Bertrand Russell, a long-dead British philosopher and social critic, once made an extraordinarily astute observation about what I'd like to discuss today. Unfortunately, I can't remember what it was, because he said lots of extraordinarily astute things - he was one of those eggheads with a brain the size of a monster truck tire - and I can't be expected to remember every one, no matter how much you browbeat me and call me a "half-wit".

I'll admit, I'm not as smart as, say, my older brother. He never retched on his school desk at the sight of a pop quiz, or had to recite "Righty-tighty, lefty-loosey," to himself every time he turned on a faucet. He was always the last man standing during a spelling bee, always the one to challenge me to a duel of the Periodic Table, always the one who laughed every time I pronounced Butte, Montana wrong. Once, I retaliated by calling him Mr. Stinky Armpits. He merely huffed with annoyance, invented a doubly-strong long-lasting deodorant, then went back to writing the thesis for his tenth Ph.D., which made me fantasize about whacking him silly with a heavy encyclopedia.

But I said I was going to discuss something, didn't I? That was the whole idea when I sat down to write this, until I got to thinking about that stupid Russell guy, who probably thought he was all that just because he was highly-educated and could spell rapscallion with one eye tied behind his back like I just did, but without first running to the dictionary like I just did. Guys like that bug me because they flaunt their smartness over guys like me, who could be just as intelligent as them if we hadn't lost about seven bazillion brain cells by drinking beer like normal college students instead of studying.

You take your way-above-average intellectual with his articulate speech and his fancy theorems about polarized geophysical quantums and random statistical isosceles anomalies, and his dry, flaking scalp (that isn't profiling, because most of their scalps really do flake) and people automatically assume he could easily find a cure for belly-button lint or even more uses for baking soda. I beg to differ, because a brainiac named Ignatius in my high school health class (if you called him "Iggie" he'd insult you in Latin) may have known more about triglycerides than anyone on the planet, but he couldn't name even one Burt Reynolds movie ("W.W. and the Dixie Dancekings" - hah!).

Brains are mostly water, anyway. I read that once in a trivia book chock full of facts I like to bore people with when I don't have anything more intelligent to say, which they tell me with very serious faces is way too often. Apparently, even though a brain is considered by scientists and Jeopardy! emcee Alex Trebek to be a very complex, sophisticated piece of machinery, if you held one in your hands it would leak all over and ruin your new sneakers with the built-in wheels that allow you to scratch up nice wooden floors. It makes you wonder if these so-called smarty pants have bigger brains only because theirs are spongier than dumber peoples'. Who's to say that if you squeezed one hard enough everything wouldn't come leaking out onto the floor with the extra water?

And if it did leak out, and someone used an extra-absorbent disposable diaper to mop it up, wouldn't that diaper then technically have an advanced college education, and qualify to conduct high-brow seminars on oceanography or Brad and Angelina?

The very fact that I can ruminate about something that scientific and still concentrate on the baloney-peanut butter-pickle sandwich I'm eating speaks volumes about me. It says that, although I may not know how a black hole works, or why dogs wait until you have company to lick themselves inappropriately, I don't exactly have linguini between my ears, either. (You'll notice I spelled linguini correctly.) It shows that just because you habitually use words like "duh" and expressions like "Gross me out!" in your speech, you can also have profound thoughts like that Russell guy, who probably enjoyed more than one baloney-peanut butter-pickle in his lifetime but was too snooty to admit it.

I suppose I could get back to that thing I was going to discuss, but, frankly, now I can't remember what it was. I also read in that trivia book that short-term memory can only hold about seven pieces of information at a time, and mine was already juggling several things including a recipe for Kung Pao chicken that has more than seven ingredients. And I'll bet even that Russell guy couldn't name all of them. (Chicken, soy sauce, brown sugar, chopped onions .... hah!)