It's all (really weird) news to me

I consider myself to be a fairly educated guy. I keep up with the news and do a fair bit of reading, but I'm always amazed at the incredible amount of stuff that I just don't know. Every day I find new and fascinating information, facts and reports of strange and bizarre occurrences that are news to me.

For example, I just learned that, while the human heart has more endurance than any other muscle, there is active debate as to whether the tongue, the gluteus maximus or even the masseter muscle in the jaw is the strongest in the human body. Let's see, we're talking about the butt muscles and the mouth muscles ... it's an election year, so there's an obvious joke here, but I don't think even I can get away with this one. Some things are better left unsaid.

Other interesting things I learned this week include:

• A guy named Joey Chestnut set a new world record by eating 66 hot dogs in 12 minutes. It would be a bad year for me if I ate 66 hot dogs in 12 months. Seriously, somebody needs to find Joey a girlfriend.

• The University of Illinois has identified 172 different species of lawn weeds. It's only April, and I think I've got that number beat in my front yard alone.

• It is now illegal to perform "cosmetic castration" in Thailand. Apparently, a cosmetic castration is a partial sex-change operation that only involves the removal of the testicles. In the U.S., we call that process "divorce," and it's quite legal.

• A group of 9-year-olds in Georgia reportedly brought some handcuffs, some duct tape and a broken steak knife to school in a ill-conceived plot to abduct their teacher. Really ... 9-year-olds with handcuffs and knives? When I was 9, I got swats from my teacher for eating paste and talking in the lunch line. Things have changed.

• A new scientific study to be published in the May edition of the Journal of Sexual Medicine (not as highly regarded in matters of relationship studies as Cosmo, but reputable nonetheless) found that the optimum duration for a sexual encounter is between 3 and 13 minutes. On behalf of married guys everywhere, I would just like to say, "I told you so!" The study clearly states that foreplay was not included in the timing. On behalf of married guys everywhere, I would just like to say, "What the heck does that mean?"

• Another study released this week indicates that three out of 10 public school students in the U.S. will not graduate from high school. In large cities, the number drops down to one out of two actually graduating. Maybe that's what those third- graders in Georgia were ticked off about.

• It's illegal to have sex with your patio furniture in Ohio. Who knew? Toledo, Ohio, police arrested some loser named Arthur Price Jr. after receiving an anonymous tip, including three DVDs that clearly showed that Price was having sex with a picnic table in his back yard. Yikes! I don't know what surprises me more: that anybody would want to get intimate with a picnic table, that there would actually be a law against getting intimate with a picnic table or that there isn't a law against spending hours filling up three DVDs with video of somebody getting intimate with a picnic table!

I've learned a lot this week. I learned that if you eat 50 hot dogs, it will make you sick but it won't make you famous, that the number of weeds growing in your yard outnumbers the hours you have to pull them, and that fewer teenagers than I thought actually graduate from high school, but more third-graders are involved in felonious assault than I had previously estimated.

Finally, I learned that no matter how attractive your lawn furniture is, don't spend your 3 to 13 minutes of optimum physical intimacy with a picnic table (especially if you live in the Midwest), or you'll end up on YouTube and in jail.

- Rick Seley is a resident of Fallon.