The Friday Fillip

Well there’s no getting around the fact that the variously euphemized swine flu is among us, spreading and causing us all to have something of an attention span. It occurred to me that as a public service I might dedicate this fillip to the sneeze, that potent source of contagion. And what better way to begin than with this flu-shot video from Australia showing a number of handsome folks indulging in unconfined sternutation all lovingly captured in ultra slow motion. It’s enough to make you do the elbow thing with those 40,000 droplets. [Click on the image to see the video.]

The good old Library of Congress has a bit on sneezes, putting the kibosh on the idea that your heart stops when you sneeze, or that if you sneeze with your eyes open they’ll pop out. (Who comes up with these lovelies, anyway?!) Bright lights can make me and you — or, at least, something like 20% of the population — sneeze. These photic sneezes are the subject of a recent Scientific American article, from which I learn that “crossed wires in the brain are probably responsible.” (That explains a lot of things, my friend tells me…)

It’s generally considered wrong, even dangerous, to stop up a sneeze. The expelled air is moving pretty fast — 100 mph — and bottling it up inside your head can cause some difficulties. But if you catch the thing at the tickle stage, there are ways to stop the sneeze from becoming, well, full-blown. I learned from my doctor father that pressing up on the very tip of the nose can calm things down: a sneeze involves the trigeminal nerve, which has a branch that runs right to the end of your nose, and pressure there can disrupt the reflex. This and a whole host of other methods for derailing a sneeze can be found on WikiHow.

And because it would hardly be a fillip without a lead to a relevant online game, I point you to Sneeze, a game aimed at making people aware of how swine flu is transmitted by letting you sneeze in crowds and infect as many folks as you can.

Bless you.