Posted on 08/24/2005 10:06:07 PM PDT by LibWhacker
2nd toe: slightly longer than big toe..
True, though the eeew factor helps to reduce some of the schkooshing in good. As I said in another one of my posts, I wore shoes to swim in mucky bottom lakes. ;o)
Actually, all joking aside, the best reason to wear substantial shoes is to prevent injury and possible fatal infection.
You are correct.
If people with little toes and delicate feet wore shoes, they may have reduced their chances of dying of complications from a relatively minor foot injury and selectively survived better to pass on their genetic traits.
Strong toes would also get this benefit. Shoes enter a population & puts weak toes on equal footing with strong toes.
My friend could do it just as easily with her mouth open & I wouldn't describe it as a flip. Flipping is another skill. Can you lay the tip of your tongue on your tongue at the the back of your mouth, almost down to your throat? I can do it with about the first half inch of my tongue, which is not what I'm talking about. There was no part of the top of my friend's tongue visible when she did it. I looked for pictures, but couldn't find any. Instead, I found out some people can also make a "U" or "cloverleaf" curl.
I inherited a tongue thrust, which means I swallow "wrong" & have a lisp. Speech recognition software has pushed me to work on my lisp again, because some programs can't understand me when I say yes. My mom & I both had years of speech therapy in school. My granny never did & her lisp was always quite noticeable.
Renfield, how bout you & the rest of your family? You know y'all can do it, cuz you opened your mouths & showed each other, right? When you say everyone, are you including both of your parents?
Mirror writing is associated with being truly ambidextrous. The wiring in your brain has some of your activities being mirrored in your brain hemispheres. I believe you have a rehab advantage if you ever suffer a brain injury, such as a stroke. In the not too distant past, left handed children were forced to favor their right hands, so they seemed to be ambidextrous, though their brains weren't wired for it. They should be able to write equally well with either hand, but they won't be able to do the mirror writing.
At most family gatherings, the left handed member gets put at the end of the table, so they don't bump elbows with a right handed person sitting next to them. Use of a knife is where the elbow bumping happens enough to matter. My family was the opposite. As the only righty, I was the one put on the end. I had to learn how to use a lefty scissors, cuz that's all we had in the house. My granny was one of those forced to be ambidextrous. My ma writes with her paper up side down, which is something more often associated with lefties.
We start with a topic about shoes & here we are with odd face tricks. lol Winking (I can with one eye, but not both), raising a single eyebrow (I can't), wiggling ears (nother thing I can't do).
I'm starting to smell grant money! lol
Hun,
I think they are Gorgeous!
You can't have too many cute shoes.
Here's one for you..
I can consciously raise the temperature of my hands.. ( increase bloodflow )
It requires some concentration on my part, and a couple of minutes, but I can make them "feverish"..
Once sat quietly in a room with 2 cats, and "purred" with them.. ( I have never been able to duplicate this feat, and have always wanted to be able to do it "at will".. )
Why do elephants wear tennies?
Because nine-ies are too small and elevenies are too big!!
There are two kinds of "mirror" writing. One way has both hands writing the exact same characters at the same time. True mirror will create mirror images of all characters. Since your left is your dominant hand, natural writing with your right hand would "want" to be backwards, so you'd have to make a small conscious push to form letters properly when you write with your right hand.
My mom couldn't comfortably write without the paper upside down & she didn't have the typical lefty wrist bend. Lefties bend their wrists, so they can see what they've written as they go along. It's a symptom of our writing going left to right. If our text was right to left, you'd prolly see hand, wrist positions reversed, though cultures with text reading right to left have another hand position, where the hand is held below the writing in process. Our culture has a heavy bias against lefties.
I think reading upside down is a skill people can learn, as I can read upside down too. I could be wrong though, as I also have an aptitude for recognizing patterns & conceptualizing what things look like when they're rotated.
Can fold tongue, flip tongue, strangle myself with tongue.. can touch base of nose, but not the tip..
Most of us can't do any or many of those things. If you took a class where this topic was part of the curriculum, your teacher would love to have you in their class, as you'd be able to demonstrate things a lot of people have never seen. I think my friend's teacher asked her if she'd come back to show her skill to another class he was teaching. lol
Rolling "R's" is related to language learning. Babies babble in the language they hear, meaning they practice all of the sounds in their native language, before they ever say their first word. My lisp may have been learned, not hardwired, though I have that improper swallow too, which argues against it, as does my brother's lack of the same problem. My area has a strong "Low German" lean in it's American English, which means most of us have no problem doing the German "SCHL" sound combination. People from other areas will pronounce it as "SL". Because Low German predominates here, we don't learn the High German "CH" sound. The Low German pronunciation for "Ich" (means I, as in I did blah, blah, blah) is like "ISH" & High German "Ich" is in a sound I can't describe using any English word. Anyways, you were exposed to enough of that rolled R when you were an infant to have had it added to your baby babble. The rolled "R" is present in other languages, but less pronounced, which is prolly where & how you acquired it.
Raising temperature in the hands is a holistic treatment for migraine headaches & can be taught. Biofeedback is involved & has to do with intentionally changing your internal blood flow enough to offer some relief for the headache. It may work through the placebo affect, though the biofeedback for migraines should also be beneficial for all other kinds of headaches if that was the case & I've never seen it advocated as a strategy for them.
I could never, ever pull off a purrr. I've read that cat's talk to each other in their prt language & their meow is for communicating with us.
"How can they tell how strong a toe was without having muscle tissue to examine? Bone size seems irrelevant. Europeans typically have larger bones in their feet than Asians do. So what?"
Bones respond to physical stress by getting bigger and denser. Even the ligament attachment points will get bigger and denser, and increase the surface area by becoming wavey. Stress from muscles action will do it. That is why you want to exerecise all your life to prevent osteoporosis and all the problems it causes.
I started out writing lefty upside down..
In my freshman year I taught myself to write with my hand below and perpendicular to the line of text... with the paper at a slight "lefty" angle..
Calligraphy is probably the most difficult for me, as the calligraphic tips are made for right-handed people.. ( there are lefty tips available, but they are clumsy and only frustrate me.. )
Reading:
I sat "across" from my mother when she read to me.. That was the way I learned the words.. upside down.. wasn't planned..
I actually had to re-learn right side up..
I could read before I entered school.. ( My snotty little sister, too.. she was always trying to out-do me.. )
( typical sibling rivalry.. )
I was reading something like 4th grade level in the 1st grade.. 8th grade level in the 4th grade..
By the time I was 12 I had read the entire Bible, twice, Bullfinch's Mythology, Ulysses, The Odyssey, Darwin's "Voyage of the Beagle", Everything I could find of Science Fiction writers like Van Vogt, Heinlein, Asimov, Norton, "Doc" Smith, Western Novels like "The Plainsman", and novels by Louis LaMore, The Cisco Kid, etc..
My father was a heavy reader, and we had the Harvard Collection in the house, as well as tons of science fiction..
I was so familiar with basic story line and plot I could read the first and last 3 or 4 pages of any book, and a half-dozen pages in the middle at random, and write a book report that would get me an "A".. ( most popular literature is trash.. but you probably know that.. LOL )
I thought I read somewhere that the rolling "r" was one of those things some can do and some can't.. May be mistaken..
As to possible ancestral influence, yes, a possibility.. ( Irish, English, Scots, German )
Scottish alone would contribute the linguistic history for the rolling "r"..
High german "ich".. Yeah.. no need to describe it.. I know what you mean.. it's in the back of the throat.. ( glottal stop? )
Biofeedback:
Science Fiction again.. Between that, (Witches of Karres ) and explanations from the father figure, I had a basic grasp of ESP, telepathy, teleportation, telekinesis, etc., by the time I was 10..
I had read accounts of supposed levitation, etc..( FATE magazine )
It was a simple matter to extrapolate from those accounts of mysticism, yogas, etc., to taking matters into my own hands and attempting to control my body..
That's including sitting out in the snow, lotus position, practically naked, to see if I could control my body temperature.. I eventually decided to start "small" and succeeded with changing hand temperature.. never managed to survive the night in a blizzard with nothing but a loin cloth..
Purring:
Like I said, I was never able to accomplish it again..
Paradise Lost..
I really do think that there is much ado about nothing, this feminist bashing of the so called "objects of torture": high heel shoes. Most women wear the wrong bra size, in turns subjecting the spine to a lot of pressure but I don't see a lot of activism about that. It's a question of choice, a question of common sense and moderation. There is absolutely nothing wrong with wearing a nice, slinky shoe while going out.
FINALLY a woman who uses her common sense. I was getting sick and tired reading all this righteous, preaching and feminist approach to high heels. I am glad you understand :)
FINALLY a woman who uses her common sense. I was getting sick and tired reading all this righteous, preaching and feminist approach to high heels. I am glad you understand :)
My first pair of shoes I bought when we moved to US out of my own allowance was a pair of Converse :)
"I believe you have a rehab advantage if you ever suffer a brain injury, such as a stroke."
Oddly enough, when I was 20, I suffered a massive head trauma and was comatose for 11 days.
My entire frontal lobe was basically pulverized by the concussive ricochetting of my brain against the sharp ridges of bone inside the front of the skull.
[where there was once an empty "hole" is now just scar tissue]
The right temporal lobe was also a battered mess and the back of my brain where the crack in my skull was widest was terribly swollen and damaged from bruising.
They told my parents that *if* I even lived at all, I'd be a vegetable for the rest of my life.
On the 11th day I sat up and asked for a cheeseburger and left the hospital that day.
I have only a balance problem, anosmia and short-term memory deficits to show for all of that so I reckon you're right....:)
I never had "rehab" of any kind, whatsoever.
Just to be contrary, I instead seemed to be better able to learn new and previously incomprehensible things than before.
I taught myself Greek to read the Greek NT, for instance.
I became interested in quantum physics and other such strange things.
[not too shabby for a vegetable, eh?]..;))
The neuro docs were perplexed to the point of actual anger because I continually defied their "prognosis", day after day until it became year after year.
Evidently my brain just "rewired" itself and went on its merry way.
Personally, I think I experienced a "miracle"...:)
Remember 'Red Ball' P.F. Flyers?....:)
: ). Sigh. So much has changed. I loved my childhood.
BLAH-nik is right. Stodgy shoes compared to my faves. :o)
Sexier and a lot less expensive. (I'm so darned practical. But when it comes to shoes I like 'em to have some Phutzpah!TM)
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