Things that make you go hmmm...

Back in the day, the Arsenio Hall show often featured a segment called "Things that make you go hmmmm?" It even became sewn into popular culture for a while, as the band C+C Music Factory managed to stitch together a hit song by the same name based upon the Arsenio concept. (Strangely enough, one of the most popular downloads on a legal music web service this week happened to be a track from that same group. Ahh memories of the early 90's...)

Today I had my own reflective moment. Actually there were two things that led to it. First, a brief column in one of the local dailies brought up the usual obsession that men and women seem to have regarding the size of various parts of their respective anatomies. Then, while walking to work, a man on the street reminded me of someone I typically pass - except that this person had two legs.

Now seeing a man with both legs may not seem unusual at first except that he looked quite similar to a fellow who often criss-crosses the neighbourhood with crutches due to lacking one of the aforementioned limbs.

What would have been truly surprising though is if these two men were actually one in the same person. Consider the man with one leg making an appointment to see Pamela Anderson's favourite surgeon and coming out with a shiny new silicon filled appendage - enabling him to toss his crutches to the trash heap before passing me on the street.

As I continued walking, I remembered back even earlier than the 90's to when I was six years old and first visited my friend Andrew's house. His father greeted me, to my shock and dismay, by offering a handshake.

Again you may assume this to be a normal and polite gesture; that is until you realized that in place of a hand, Andrew's dad had a hook! Had he been a "stranger", this might have represented a six year old's Peter Pan nightmare but, knowing him to be the father of my friend, I somehow took it in stride.

In addition to the hook, this man had some other extensions he could attach to his prosthetic device. One of these looked just like a pair of barbecue tongs. While the ability to have all the functionality of a multi-tool attached to your arm might seem intriguing, why can't someone just get this man a proper hand!

Seriously. I've known a few people with various simple prosthetics and often imagined the research projects that might exist to develop robotic or other functional limb replacements. Heck, Steve Austin (the $6 Million dollar man, not the wrestler) and Luke Skywalker both went through such surgeries thanks to the creative minds of writers some 30 years ago.

Just about anyone with a bit of cash these days can get bigger boobs, smaller hips, a square jaw bone, and a number of other cosmetic "fixes" that even include an entire switch of one's gender. But really useful things like a replacement hand for Andrew's dad are still just things of science fiction.

What's up with that?!?!

So to all the plastic surgeons out there I ask, shouldn't you have some things that make you go hmmmm too?