A few years ago, when I had this night job at UPS, I worked with a cool African guy named Cosmos. One day I remarked that he had an unusual name, and he replied, "Yes. Many people tell me this. Did you know the name Cosmos is also the name of a flower?"

"Really?" I said. "I didn't know that." And I didn't. I had never, not in my entire life, heard of the cosmos flower.

The very next day, when I went to my day job, one of the old ladies who worked in the office was wearing a sweatshirt screen-printed with various flowers: the rose, the sunflower, the columbine... and the cosmos. I soon ran across more references to the cosmos flower -- in a magazine, overheard conversation in a coffee shop, on some nature program while flipping channels. It took me twenty-six years to learn of the cosmos flower's existence, and two weeks later I was ready to give university lectures on the thing.

This sort of thing happens from time to time. Recently I caught part of the excellent movie Frailty on cable, and in one scene, Bill Paxton sits down at the dinner table with his son and pops a can of Hamm's beer. I barely noticed this. I had heard of Hamm's before, I suppose, but when was the last time I thought of it? Hell, when was the last time you thought of Hamm's beer?

Two days later I went to my friend D's house to play poker. He offered me a new kind of beer he'd been trying. "Is it good?" I asked.

"It's not good," he said. "It tastes like Hamm's."

I'm not suggesting that there's anything mystical or important going on here. I just find it weird and fascinating. So, because we here at Chaotic Not Random are all about advancing the boundaries of scientific knowledge, I'll be performing an experiment on myself. I picked a book I had never read at random from a friend's bookshelf and flipped through it until I found a word that barely ever impinges on my consciousness.

The word is AARDVARK.

I'll keep track of how many AARDVARK references I run across in the next few weeks, and I'll give a full report in a future post. You are welcome to join me if you have nothing better to do and need something to divert your mind from that attractive member of the opposite sex who said he or she would call, and probably will call, because he or she looked really sincere when he or she said it, and smiled when he or she took the slip of paper with your number on it, and, you know, he or she didn't just smile politely, but in a kind of a flirtatious fashion, and you watched surreptitiously as he or she walked away, and he or she didn't just crumple the slip of paper up and toss it in a trash can, but tucked it carefully into his wallet or her purse, and even if that was several days ago he or she probably just doesn't want to appear desperate and anyway he or she had specifically mentioned that he or she was very busy these days.

AARDVARK!

+posted by Lawrence @ 9/23/2003 11:12:00 PM