It’s time for another topic from Lore Fitzgerald Sjöberg’s book: The Book of Ratings: Opinions, Grades, & Assessments of Everything Worth Thinking About. (BUY THIS BOOK! I mean it! IT’S HILARIOUS! You’ll laugh your SPLEEN off!) Today’s topic: Internal Organs!

Internal Organs

  • Heart
    The ancient-but-silly Greeks believed that the heart was the seat of intelligence and emotion, because it beats faster when you feel strong emotion and because you die when a ninja rips it out of your chest. Of course, now we’re much more enlightened and we know that the heart serves only as a handy storage area for saturated fats and as something for people to grab at in feigned astonishment. C
  • Lungs
    I know that it’s become all the rage for antismoking demonstrations to include a diseased lung being slapped on the table, but let’s be honest with ourselves: A healthy lung ain’t exactly Renoir, either. In fact, slap pretty much any random hunk of disembodied flesh on the table and say, “See? This is what will happen to you if you start smoking: a perfectly healthy goat kidney!” and get the same effect. B
  • Stomach
    My intensive studies of the stomach have determined that it is perfectly smooth, almost cartoonish, and that it appreciates having computer-generated fluorescent liquid being introduced into it, so much so, in fact, that it will often glow an angry red if it doesn’t get these liquids. Thanks again, television commercials! C
  • Brain
    The most important thing about the brain is that you become much, much more intelligent if it’s showing. If you can arrange to have it encased in a transparent dome, or to have it imprinting itself on a soft membrane that you have in place of a skull, you’re pretty much ready to create elaborate laser cannons and mindless zombie slave creatures. Remember that the next time you have to take a test and have access to a band saw. A
  • Spleen
    I’m not going to point out the actual function of the spleen, because its major appeal is in the low-level mystery created by the fact that most people don’t really care about it one way or the other. It’s just this floppy mass of tissue that’s fun to say and lives within each one of us, kind of like a guardian angel made of Silly Putty. A-