THE WHATCHAMA COLUMN: You Don't Know Everything...

     Everybody you ever meet knows something you don't!
     It was Bill Nye who said that some years ago in Men's Journal. He said a cab driver had told him that 30 years earlier and he was reminded of it every day. I've realized it even longer than that and have, in fact, counted on it being true, since I'm a writer and a writer needs news to write. Recently these are the people I've come across who knew something I didn't.
     Kelsey Kloss, in Reader's Digest, reported Dutch researchers tracked how kissing affected the oral bacteria of 21 couples. They had one person in each couple drink a probiotic yogurt (with specific bacterial strains, so as to track the spread of germs), then share a 10-second kiss with his/her partner. The finding? The average kiss transferred as many as 90 million bacteria!
     A non-credited Associated Press writer reports that Malaysian police detained four Westerners accused of posing naked for photos on a Malaysian mountain peak, an act blamed for causing the 5.9-magnitude earthquake that killed 18 climbers on Mount Kinabalu. (A special ritual was performed to "appease the mountain's spirit".)
     Elizabeth Royte, in analyzing waste disposal in 192 coastal countries for Smithsonian Magazine, writes that so much plastic is discarded around the world that 8.8 million tons end up in the ocean every year. And, if trends continue, it's predicted the toll worldwide, by 2025, will be about 100 million pounds per day.
     A United Nations report predicts 40% of the world's water needs won't be able to be met by 2030 unless global policies on water usage change now. This would lead to economic upheavals and national conflicts.
     Chris Jordan, in Silent Spring, depicts 163,000 birds -- which, not incidentally, is the estimated number of birds that die in the United States every day from exposure to agricultural pesticides.
     The World Health Organization Tobacco Atlas, 2012, reports the number of cigarettes smoked per year for every man, woman and child on the planet to be 1,000. (The annual cost - 2014 - of smoking-related health care in the United States is $76,000,000,000.) The number of annual deaths in the United States
due to smoking and secondhand smoke is 480,327, according to the Centers for Disease Control and  Prevention, 2014.
     As you can see, it is not always fun to find out the things other people know that you don't.