Rory loves trivia. Oh, yeah. Oh, do he.
It's probably my favorite form of trash entertainment. It teaches me something from time to time, but only if I can't help it. Otherwise, it's endless strings of useless information, in one eye and out the other.
When you're dying of the influenza, like me, it is the finest entertainment a brain inside an old, creaking body can enjoy. It also comes in handy if you're hungover, emerging from a short drug induced coma, or just bored.
One of the high points of my love came when I found a reference to my very self in one of these books. Although the title of the book is Oops: Twenty Life Lessons from the Fiascoes that Shaped America, the bit that involved me was quite positive. Something I had written was referenced as a very fine argument that highlights a huge mistake made by my former employer. It was awesome. I found the section by accident. When something about me shows up somewhere, I'm usually contacted about it. The accidental thing made me feel relevant. It was fodder for the black hold that is my ego.
Trivia doesn't always come in books, of course. The net and wikipedia are useful for finding random, useless "facts". A couple weeks ago, I started researching something about Venus, and wound up on a site teaching me how to pick up women with the fragrance of my armpit wiped on her upper lip. I tried it, and not only did it attract the attention of the woman, but also her boyfriend, who pounded me in the face with his forehead.
Singles life. I'll take what I can get.
This morning, I was reading a proper trivia book, and in it I found something that drove a chigger of fear deep into the skin of the beast of my anxiety.
Perpend.
Death by Potato
[FunFact learned very well by me from the international sensation that is Does Anything Eat Wasps?: And 101 Other Unsettling, Witty Answers to Questions You Never Thought You Wanted to Ask]
Potatoes are:
- Good.
- Deadly.
Potatoes belong to the same family of plants as Nightshade.
Deadly Nightshade.
Yes - the same. The Nightshade that is deadly. Not friendly, helpful, or jolly. Just deadly.
The poison is called solanine, and it belongs to the group saponin.
Solanine is described by my cute little Apple dictionary widget as:
A poisonous compound that is present in green potatoes and in related plants. It is a steroid glycoside of the saponin group.
That's right - you read it here first, unless you read the same book I did.
Solanine interferes with the activity of acetylcholine, which is all kinds of bad. Acetylcholine is a neurotransmitter you should value if you're into things like learning and not becoming paralyzed. If you chow down on too many potaters, you're so screwed.
The definition of saponin, the group to which solanine belongs, begins with this lovely sentence:
A toxic compound that is present in soapwort and makes foam when shaken with water.
Without even understanding what's so awful about saponin, we can already pick up on a few danger words:
- Toxic - This is kind of a "duh" when it comes to danger words. If you require a deeper example of why toxic things are bad, then go make yourself a Clorox milkshake and drink it. Notice the discomfort which follows.
- Soapwort - I don't know what it is, but I hate words that end in -wort. These words should all be relegated to use only in Harry Potter books. That way, I'll never encounter them.
- Foam - No good can come of this.
The primary tateral sources of the offending compound are:
- Green potaters - The toxins which are the subject of this discussion appear in greater and greater quantities as the tater turns green from being left in the sun. The basic idea is that any hungry topside animals who encounter the sun-warmed tuber will become very dead after consuming the thing, thereby teaching the tuber thief a valuable lesson about the opposite of living. Never eat a green potater. Washing it won't help you, either, unless your goal is to clean the dirt off the poison.
- Potaters that have sprouted - These things have been exposed to the sun, and so suffer the same increase in poison as the green taters of death. You might think it's cute that your countertop pomme de terre is becoming a tree, but this tree means you harm. It's not like The Giving Tree, which is a book by Shel Silverstein about a nice tree; a giving tree, one might say. Also, I don't think potatoes come from trees, but that's not going to stop me from telling you that they do.
- Taters that have black streaks from "late blight" - These are to be avoided for roughly the same reasons as the previous two forms. The word "blight" doesn't help things, either. If you go into a market that has marked a section of 'tatoes on sale because of "a touch of the blight," don't buy them. DAD - are you getting this? You picking up what I'm putting down? I know how attracted you are to a good sale, but saving money is not to be valued over your own life. I've noticed a proportional increase in the interest to save money by way of coupons each year as a man advances down his road, so you will have to steel yourself against the greater temptation which awaits you. You need to be around to meet your grandchildren who, at the rate I've been emotionally maturing, should enter the world and achieve sentience by the time you're about 70. Be here so that I don't have to tell them that their grandfather died of great savings.
These toxins, by the by, are mostly present in the skin of the potato. We all know that the skin tastes fabulous. We all also know that a bit of cyanide on your muffins makes them all the sweeter. Don't eat the skins of the potato. If you're reading this, then you're a potential customer for my first book. I need you. Like a bushman of the Kalahari needs water.
Don't be fooled by "organic" potatoes. Whenever I have dinner at my mom's house, she provides potaters with the meal. There are usually four people present, and the others consume the skin without hesitation. Perhaps owing to my superior intelligence, I don't start chomping on the skin with the others. I ask questions. The questions are actually the same question, and that question, repeated to annoyance, is: Is this safe?
They assure me that tater skins are safe. Mom tells me that she only buys "organic" potatoes. To me, organic means two things. It should only mean one thing, but food hippies have annexed the word and perverted it beyond imagination.
The meanings are:
- Carbon based - 'Tatoes are, like you 'n me, carbon based life forms.
- Grown without pesticides or potato hormones or whatever - That's cool. Now the only toxins I have to worry about are the ones growing naturally in the potato.
Eat enough of those skins, and no amount of dancing-in-the-mud hippery is going to save your ass.
All these circumstances aside, you can also die of potato when there is nothing outwardly wrong with the thing. By only consuming a few pounds of potaters, you can achieve death. It sounds silly, but just Super Size your "fry" and Coke, and you'll be dead within the hour (provided you go back for seconds, thirds, fourths, and twenty-ninths).
I'll be back soon with more FunFacts. I have information on another common substance that, upon misuse, will totally send your life packing and return your wreck of a body to the earth whence it came.
Anticipate.