There's something in my brain

...that's (nearly) not on the Internet!  Does this constitute an emergency? Is there someone I can call? Am I under some sort of obligation to begin a Wikipedia stub article? This has never happened to me before!  I mean, if a fact isn't found on the internet, does it really exist?  I reckon I'll blog about it, and at least then it will be crawled and cached by Google's friendly little bots*.

I am the proud conservator and curator of thousands, maybe even hundreds, of nearly-useless facts.  Were I to categorize these facts into broad areas, I might go with "the natural world," "cultural oddities," and "crap that will somehow never come in handy in a pub trivia quiz, but will bubble up in an irritating know-it-all fashion when talking with friends."  For example:

• The correct way to eat asparagus stalks at a fancy dinner is to pick them up with your fingers.
• The Masai people of Kenya get a good portion of their protein by bleeding their cows and mixing said blood with milk. 
• The Wrigley Load

Now, I bet you were nodding your head while reading the first two things.  Sure, the asparagus thing makes sense, and anyone who took Honors Geography at Fullerton High School knows more about the Masai than about their own family.  But the Wrigley Load? Oh no.  Not on the internet at all, save for one mention in what appears to be a fiction novel.

I was yammering at Chris the other day about something, and I brought up the Wrigley Load.  He had heard me mention it before, but finally called me out.  "I believe you, but I'm going to need some internet backup on this alleged Load," he said.  Always glad to be proven right, off I went to the computer.  And... nothing.  Just the aforementioned book mention, in Turn of the Century by Kurt Andersen.  Based on his description of the Load, which is crap, I'd recommend against the book as a whole. You've seen the Load all your life on TV ads -- it's how marketing people decided gum should be introduced to a mouth.  To Load properly, one grasps an unwrapped piece of gum at one end, opens one's mouth just wide enough to receive gum, touches the free end of gum to one's lower teeth, then continues to apply inward pressure with the gum-holding hand until it bends double and disappears inside the mouth.  One is then contractually obligated to make big TV eyes and smile irrepressibly.

Anyway, I've known this move to be called the Wrigley Load for years now.  I have no idea where I learned this fact, but I will remember it long after I've forgotten my child's name (I will just refer to him as "Danger") and the year the Cubs won the World Series (2035, with H. Arehart on shortstop).  I now present this Juicy Fruit commercial, which was ubiquitous in the 1980s.  It generously features the Load at :08, :17, and :22.  You will be humming this stupid song for the rest of the day.  You're welcome.


Juicy Fruit.  Available where you buy groceries.

*Who, in my mind, look like the Nanites from MST3K.

"La la la!"