Scatter Brained

C H A P T E R   2

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40
S C A T T E R B R A I N E D
The Truth:
  He  only  chopped  off  the 
bottom half
 of his left 
ear—somewhere between a Tyson–Holyfi eld fi ght and a full-
fl edged ear-ectomy. And he didn’t mail it to a prostitute. 
Some claim he 
gave
 it to a prostitute named Rachel (hey, we 
never said he was well adjusted), but he never 
mailed
 any-
thing. Given his complete fi nancial distress (in his lifetime, 
he only sold one painting), Vincent could hardly aff ord the 
postage.
✖  ✖  ✖
The Lie:
 Hair grows back thicker and darker after you shave it.
The Truth:
  Sadly,  it  does  not—although  balding  men  surely 
wish it did. Hair may seem to grow back thicker because short 
hairs tend to feel and look dark and coarse, but it’s an illusion. 
Nor does your hair keep growing after you die. Nor does 100 
strokes with the brush before bedtime improve the health of 
your hair. Nor can any fancy-pants shampoo repair your split 
ends (someone had to say it).
✖  ✖  ✖
The Lie:
 You only use 10 percent of your brain.
The Truth:
 You, beloved and brilliant 
mental
_fl oss
 reader, 
use 
all
 of your brain. And so does everyone else. PET and MRI 
scans of the brain show that while you don’t use all of your 
brain all the time, you use all of it some of the time. Frankly, 
we’re off ended on your behalf that anyone would 
ever
 say that 
your well-fl ossed, knowledge trap of a brain was only func-
tioning at 10 percent capacity! Maybe those idiots think Van 
Gogh mailed his ear to a hooker, but not you! Again, even 
those idiots use all their brains as well, but we’re on a roll 
here. It’s just total bull! Incidentally, if you’ve ever wondered 
why we say “bull” rather than “cow” or “hog” or “three-toed 
possum” . . .

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41
05
 Bulls: 
From Chicago to Pamplona
Watch us get through this without cursing: 
Bull,
 as in 
baloney,
 is 
not short for BS. Believe it or not, the Middle English word 
bull,
 
meaning not a male cow, but “false talk or fraud,” entered the 
lexicon about 800 years before BS did. Th
 e word 
bull
 is as unre-
lated to the animal as the word 
bear
 (as in “grin and bear it”) is 
to a grizzly. Witness, for instance, the Middle English epic poem 
Cursor Mundi:
 “Said Christ to the hypocrites, you are all full of 
wickedness, treason, and bull.” Although it might be more fun 
if Christ were telling the hypocrites they were full of . . . you 
know, they were actually just full of meaningless talk.
✖  ✖  ✖
If you’ve never heard of the Chicago Zephyrs (founded 1962) or 
the Chicago Stags (founded 1946), that’s because they just 
weren’t very good basketball teams. Of course, from 1966 to 
1983 the Chicago Bulls weren’t very good, either. But their luck 
changed when, in 1984, they scored the third pick of the NBA 
draft and picked up a 21-year-old shooting guard named Mi-
chael Jordan. Under the command of the man that Larry Bird 
called “God disguised as Michael Jordan,” the Bulls won their 
fi rst, second, third, fourth, fi fth, and sixth (i.e., last) NBA 
championships. Since his departure (his retirement, then his 
move to the Washington Wizards, and then his retirement 
again), the Bulls have gone back to being Zephyr-esque.
✖  ✖  ✖
Th
  e animal commonly known as the bull, not to mention 
the cow and the ox, descended from the aurochs, a now-ex-
tinct species that lived in Europe until the 15th century.