I like to imagine that there are normal families in the world where the children wake up their mother with sweet words like, "Good morning! What are we having for breakfast? Can we have pancakes?" I do not live in that world. This is how my kid woke me up this morning: "My friend Elias doesn't think that two-headed people exist. They do, right?" I said yes. He then wanted to know how many there are. When I was a child, our parents would have just said, "I don't know" and that would have been the end of it. You would have resigned yourself to never knowing. However, kids today are smart and know about Google at an early age. For my son, "I don't know" is never an acceptable answer. Which is why seconds after waking up this morning I was googling the question "How many two-headed people are there in the world?". If someone had taken a photo of my son and me this morning, it would have looked cozy as the two of us snuggled in bed while looking at my iPad. Little would they know we were looking at photos of two-headed people. I found a website that had a gallery of photos and at first they were kind of unusual, yet interesting, showing people with two heads on separate necks. Then we started seeing specimens showing a second head growing out of the TOP of a head or behind a head. Then we saw two-headed skeletons and two-headed babies preserved in jars. My son asked, "How did they get those babies in the jar?" and I told him that they would have been placed there AFTER dying, not before. Finally I had to stop, because although I had intended this to be a sort of educational lesson, it turned into the stuff of nightmares. Hell, I'm afraid I'LL have nightmares tonight. What has been seen can never be unseen. I never did find out the exact number of two-headed people in the world but I can live with that.
This next story may only be amusing to Russian speakers. First, let me give you a quick Russian vocabulary lesson. The Russian word for toilet (meaning the actual toilet bowl or commode) is "unitaz". When you say it out loud I think you can argue that it sounds like "unitas" (emphasis on the last syllable). While we were out driving yesterday my Russian husband noticed this license plate:
This next story may only be amusing to Russian speakers. First, let me give you a quick Russian vocabulary lesson. The Russian word for toilet (meaning the actual toilet bowl or commode) is "unitaz". When you say it out loud I think you can argue that it sounds like "unitas" (emphasis on the last syllable). While we were out driving yesterday my Russian husband noticed this license plate:
I was driving; he said to me, "Look at that license plate!" and laughed. We both agreed it was a really odd choice for a personalized plate. Then it dawned on me, "Wait-- there's a famous football player named Johnny Unitas. Maybe this guy is a fan." Since we are in the United States and not Russia, it seems like my explanation is the more likely one. However, people are weird and nothing surprises me anymore, so who's to say? "COMMODE" may have too many letters for a personalized plate; in Russian it fits.