Go Ask Daddy About Bendy Glass, Ghost Bullies and Freaky Fish

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Psh. Teenagers.

Does anyone else remember bootie socks?

I advised a girl in practice Thursday night to wear bootie socks under her soccer socks to keep from getting blisters from her new cleats. Laughter erupted. You’d have thought I’d said something indecent. I explained myself and my generation.

You know, way back in the 1990s.

Once upon a time, bootie meant something else. I felt like Beaver Cleaver for a minute. I had to tell them about when a Coke was just a Coke.

My boy Tim McGraw says it best.

Yeah. I miss back when, too.

Let’s see what the kids are asking these days.

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1. Is there such a thing as flexible glass?

Yes – Corning showed off a version of its Gorilla Glass at the last Consumer Electronics Show, business-card-thin and able to bend better than Beckham.

It’ll be all the rage for HDTVs and smartphones and anything else that’ll look really cool with a bendy screen. It’s nothing to lose your head over. Or is it?

Legend has it Roman emperor Tiberius Caesar had a craftsman beheaded in the early A.D.s because he invented a flexible glass bowl that didn’t shatter when dropped. It dented, and the craftsman fixed it with a small hammer. Tiberius worried this flexible glass would send gold and silver prices plunging.

I know. What a glasshole.

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2. Are there islands no one’s been to?

I believe we’ve found them all. But there are some you wouldn’t want to spend much time with, even if you were Captain Jack Sparrow.

Geologists saw Sandy Island in the Pacific Ocean on Google maps, but when they go there, they found nothing.  Okunoshima Island off the Japanese coast, home of no humans, scores of friendly rabbits, and the Okunoshima Poisonous Gas Museum.

But those aren’t the freakiest isles.

That goes to North Brother Island in New York City.

Riverside Hospital opened on the island in 1885 became a quarantine center decades later. It housed the infamous Typhoid Mary, the first healthy carrier of Typhoid fever in the U.S.

She remained there for nearly 30 years against her will and died there in isolation. If this place isn’t haunted …

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3. Has a ghost ever hurt someone?

Not even on North Brother Island. I think.

According to the Long Island Paranormal Investigators, no evidence exists a ghost can cause you physical harm. Message boards all over the web document scratchings and burnings, people falling down the stairs and getting clocked by objects a ghost supposedly chucked at them.

Someone named Katbug posted on a board that they had ribs shattered after a ghostly encounter.

Interestingly, I could find no Pew Institute studies about ghost bullies, nor any Wall Street Journal accounts.

Which makes it impossible to prove or disprove, kind of like Barry Bonds’ innocence or whether Richard Sherman really is the best cornerback to roam God’s earth.

Did you hear about the woman who wanted to marry a ghost?

I don’t know what possessed her.

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4. Who are those brothers on the radio who tell you what’s wrong with your car when you make the same noises the car does?

Those are the Tappet Brothers. Tom and Ray. Their Saturday radio show Car Talk is a hit among that influential NPR yuppy/hipster/academic with auto problems demographic. Click and Clack, as they’re known, have a propensity to diagnose car trouble.

They can do that in any make and model, usually, just by noises callers make to replicate the noises their 1997 Chevy Malibu makes when the driver turned right on a steep incline in weather colder than 37 degrees Fahrenheit.

Unless a young lady with a lively voice calls in, for which Tom and Ray will spend 17 minutes waxing poetic over, delving nostalgic into her hometown, and browbeating her love interest before they even hear what kind of noises her car makes.

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5. What are those fish called in the deep sea, with the thing on their head?

Glasshole trout.

No, actually, that’s an angler fish. They live in the depths of the Atlantic and Antarctic oceans, as far as a mile deep.

They can be as big as 3 feet long. There’s a thin, finlike protrusion on their foreheads that lights up to attract fish.

When fish are drawn to the light, whammo! Dinner’s served.

Only the female angler fish has this special angler apparatus. The males just try to latch onto the mighty girl fisherman angler fish – then presumably whine about it on their daddy blogs.