Consider the Worm...

 

This worm is a resident of the UK and yet just Look at the Size of it!  That person`s hand can hardly contain its folded-up Enormity - at 15in (40cm), it is three times the size of a common-or-garden specimen.

How can this be?  Global Warming… Aliens… No! – this worm lives on the beauteous Inner-Hebridean Isle of Rum where, abundant in wildlife though it be, the island has no moles, frogs, badgers… in fact hardly any evil-worm-eaters at all.

In this blissful otherworldly place, worms simply live long and prosper, becoming not only the biggest earthworms in the UK, but also the longest-living - up to ten years instead of two! 

Worms are modest creatures and yet Charles Darwin wrote, "Of all animals, few have contributed so much to the development of the world as we know it, as these lowly creatures." (Surely food for deep thought).

It doesn`t seem much of a life though… incessant chomping on any old soil and casting it out as Something Beautiful  (healthy and fertile); It has been estimated that nearly every particle of healthy top soil on earth has passed through earthworms at one stage or another. (earthwormsinfo.com). 
So tread delicately out there.

One (perhaps the?) benefit of being an earthworm is that they don`t catch any diseases, teeming as they are with good and Mighty bacteria. Sadly, they`re also protein-packed and toothless, hence their countless predators.

Agonised by such thoughts, I always reinter worms unearthed in my gardening efforts, but it only takes the patter of rain to bring them hurtling back out to Breathe. 

Or of a Fiendish Cunning seagull pretending...

(I thought he was just Happy when we first spotted him). 

One Day, Seagull, all worms will be Anaconda-Sized.

Has Anyone seen my Earworm?

Well never mind – there’ll be another one along in a minute. For at the moment, we seem bizarrely bombarded by earworms on radio and TV, in newspapers, indeed out of the very ether… not to mention the man at the Co-op checkout yesterday: 

"What’s that you’re humming?" said he.

"Hmm?" I rejoined appropriately but embarrassedly – people could hear me?!

Such is the puzzle of ‘earworms’. When I first heard it, this ugly word instantly conjured up an image from an ancient Star Trek episode, an image so terrifying and so utterly repellent that I shrink from linking it. 

(On vid anyway). But in the interests of space travel…
this is a Picture of the worm en route to Checkov’s ear, from where it will tunnel at leisure into his brain. (see The Wrath of Khan episode for gruesome details).

Anyway, the ‘earworm’ of today is a ludicrous term for a snatch of tune you just can’t get out of your head, so you evilly pass it on virus-like to anyone in your vicinity. As demonstrated perfectly by Daphne in the ‘High Crane Drifter’ episode of Frasier… (apologies for dreadful quality). 

In fact, I can't make the flaming thing work.  So -  just imagine Daphne gratuitously drubbing out a tuneless "Flesh is Burning NaNaNaNaNaNa", followed (Later That Afternoon), by everyone in the appartment mindlessly moaning the same tunelessness as they go about their everday stuff...  

But Why the sudden earworm obsession? Surely this earth-shattering phenomenon is not new… 
Hasn’t everyone been humming Bernard Cribbins’ Hole in the Ground since first it was dug?…   or The splendid Kinks' Thank You for the Days... and my personal constant, Lee Marvin’s merry rendering of I Was Born under a Wandering Star...

All unforgettable and tenacious snippets of joy.

(Though perhaps not for those on the receiving end). George insists my own musical scraps could do without the excess bars of doodlydiddly: "…Little old lady got mutilated late last night//Werewolves of London again..."  '(Diddelly diddelly again)'. 
(sadly-departed Warren Zevon’s fabulous Werewolves of London).  

Simple pleasure… but we’re now being told there is More to earworms than meets the… more than one could have imagined; that they might have a ‘Role to play’!  Psychologists and musical experts have been requesting earworm submissions... TV programmes have delved into the ‘function’ of earworms! 

Must they have a Function? – they just Are, aren’t they?   Like our cats… (incontinent little tinkers). 

You can actually buy earworms on the Net – something to do with Language-Learning, I think – and that reminds one of a Very famous  Babelfish:-

How jolly useful that would be if you stuck it in your ear!
 
Which takes us back to poor old Checkov, and shows that there are many ways to consider the earworm...

In conclusion, perhaps if one Took This Seriously and studied in depth the astonishing Mass of available info, one might learn something to one's advantage… 
And certainly to the advantage of all those within earshot