2003-04-18 - 12:29 a.m.

I was trolling news headlines a couple of years ago, and I read a headline something like Texas man pays $100,000 for 1,300 year old block of cheese, but I didn�t have time to read the article.

Every now and then, though, I think about it. Did he eat it? Can you eat cheese that old? Was it good? Did he get to try a tiny piece before buying it? Perhaps he owned a restaurant and planned on making a really expensive entree with it? If he couldn�t eat it, why on earth would he want it? What does it look like? Where did it come from? How do they know it�s really that old? What type of cheese was it? Cheddar? Did they know how to make cheddar back then, or did they just make cheese? How do you make cheese?

If I had just read the goddamn article all those years ago, I�d be done with it. I most likely would never have thought about it again. Or maybe the trivia would have stuck with me, like how I know that our appendixes were designed to digest tree bark, from when we were still figuring out what we could and couldn�t eat, but that they don�t work anymore. I told someone that fact today, and he didn�t believe me--he thought I had made it up. And then all of a sudden, I couldn�t remember where I had heard it, or if it was really true. And then I got a little nervous �cause, over time, I had told more than one person about the appendix thing, and I did a google search and it turned out that I was right, but still.

But that stupid ancient cheese headline--I didn�t read the article, I couldn�t find it on google, and I�ll be stuck wondering about it, once a month at the very least, for the rest of my life.

Weird. And now you�re stuck with it. A-ha.