The Endocrine Rosary

August 27th, 2010, 3 Comments »

This is either funny, banal or rude. Or all three.

I was reading this Slate article, discussing whether or not children were entering puberty earlier than they used to, when I encountered this paragraph:

With no objective blood test or scan, most experts consider breast budding and testicular growth the hallmarks of puberty’s beginning. Unfortunately, those measures are very subjective—particularly for male children. Pediatricians guess the size of a boy’s testicles by touch and comparison to a rosary-like string of balls called an orchidometer, which is not very accurate.

How about that–not only does this sound like a medical device for measuring flowers, but it also looks like a rosary. To Google Image Search! You can tell me why there’s a hockey team listed among all those rosaries. Here’s what a set looks like:

I searched Flickr for pictures as well. All I found was this photo of sheepish Danish veterinarian, wearing a faux elephant orchidometer.

Wikipedia indicates that it was invented by an Austrian doctor in the 60′s, and “doctors sometimes informally refer to them as ‘Prader’s balls’ (after the inventor), ‘the medical worry beads’, or the ‘endocrine rosary.’”

I was curious about the origin of the term ‘orchidometer’. According to a couple of dictionaries, orchid comes from the Latin orchis, which refers to a, uh, tuberous root. That term in turn derives from the Greek orkhis, which literally means testicle.

And now your Friday is complete. If I’d known about the orchidometer a few years ago, when I was writing a play about balls, I might have included it.

3 Comments »

Weirdest Email Exchange of the Month

May 23rd, 2007, 7 Comments »

SHEREEF: hello and how are you doing this is Mr Agdar [name changed] and i would like to order some flowers from your shop to my company in West Africa and can you tell me the types of flowers you have and their prices each so that i can make my selections. hope to hear from you asap..

ME: I’m afraid you have the wrong email address–I don’t sell flowers.
Best of luck.

SHEREEF: Ohh Okay What do you sell?

ME: Nothing, really, we do services work.

SHEREEF: Dont you know any shop there so tht you give me their address so that i buy some of their goods?

This guy wants to buy anything wholesale and re-sell it. Where should I sent him?

I’m sure this happens to everybody, but certain Google users have a mentality about their search results. It goes like this:

“Because your site is ranked highly in Google, you must be an expert in my search terms. Furthermore, you must sell them for a living.”

He no doubt found me because of Flowers For Al and Don. If he’d asked for something other than flowers, I would have thought it was just a variation on Nigerian spam.

Another recent example is horse soccer balls. If you Google “horse soccer ball”, my site is the fourth result. The first result is a site which actually sells horse soccer balls (the excerpted text in the search results even implies this).

And yet I’ve received more than one call from people wanting to buy just such a ball. Odd, eh?

7 Comments »