The other day two colleagues, Adolfo Marvin-Gallo and Roy Hirose, and I were discussing this man-thing about ear hair. We discovered that each hair in a man's ear has a unique function. Before you protest that our work is fraught with male chauvinism, I must explain that, much as we tried, we were unable to gain the cooperation of any ladies in the office in this enterprise. Our initial research was rudimentary and to be discarded as empirical and untrustworthy. Allow me to skip lightly over it and progress to our final polished version. We now designate ear hairs by site and number. Thus L1 is the first hair in the left ear and R 9 is the ninth hair in the right ear.

Our first discovery was that if you pull on R1 the left knee jerks up violently. Allow me to demonstrate... Similarly L1 causes the right knee to jerk. Thus... So we found there is a cross-over which parallels the cross-over of nerve and brain functions. We were encouraged by our coworkers to carry on our research despite some strange looks from supervisors.

Next we found that either R2 or L2 when yanked make you sit down suddenly. R3 makes you kick up your left leg and L3 your right leg. We immediately embarked on documenting our work for future publication in the “The Lancet.” If rejected, we planned on submitting our thesis to Popular Mechanics instead and, if they didn't want it, surely the National Enquirer would snap it up.

Our work continued hair-by-hair without complication until I discovered that R9 made you pucker-up. As the holiday season approached, I gathered my colleagues around me, Adolfo Marvin-Gallo on the left and Roy Hirose on the right, and we practiced our synchronized ear pulling leg-kicking routine. We were confident of being the life of the office party. I was demonstrating R9 puckering and we were debating whether to include it as a kind of finale vis-à-vis the chronologically difficult consecutive L10 spins on our right heels.

We will never know now who actually came upon it first. We must simply put it down to collective intelligence. But our great discovery was this: we were networked!

Just as two computers can share a single program, so we could share the effects of one ear hair pull. We became as adept at chorus line kicks as the Radio City Rockettes. We could, with the single sharp tug on Roy Hirose's L12 simultaneously complete back-flips.

Inevitably some frivolity crept into our work. Spotting Adolfo talking to the branch chief, a man completely absent of humor, I jerked violently on L1 and his right leg narrowly missed the chief's left shoulder. But retaliation was not far behind. I found myself uncontrollably raising my right hand during a meeting to discuss the apparent death of two 500-pound elk in a cottage garden in Humboldt County, when asked, "What was the cause of their demise?" I answered "Oh! Rhubarb!" just as I spotted Roy twiddling his left ear. Fortunately for my career it was the correct answer and ever since I have been considered the leading expert on elk deaths in Humboldt County. Obviously, we need the federal government to pass an ear hair act as soon as it finishes with the more trivial matters it is currently considering.

You are the very first people to hear about this, our latest discovery. We have proven by diligent, persistent and even obsessive research that L13 and R13, which incidentally are very short hairs, have been shown to be the long sought after Viagra hairs. Indiscriminate and idle ear hair twiddling in boring, bureaucratic meetings could lead to embarrassing results. Adolfo is currently in the depths of darkest Utah working on his theory of networked ear hairs among the polygamists of that state.

Summing up, let me share with you some of the directions we see future research taking. It is a well-known fact that nose hair-tweaking causes tearing in the eyes. We plan on turning our finely tuned scientific minds to sniff out the precise function of each nose hair and to discern whether they are also networked. I recently received a long missive from my brother in Australia telling that he will visit doctors in the States to find a cure for his sudden onslaught of heel kicking and puckering that has Australian doctors baffled. I believe I can save him the expense of that trip. The ear hair Internet is surely worldwide and can a book by Al Gore be far behind.

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