Jug Ears?
Ever struck you what a strange part of the anatomy the ears are? I find them endlessly fascinating, particularly the terminology. External auditory meatus. Ossicle. Cochlea. Fossa. Tragus. Ear wax. Seriously alien stuff.
And then the way they look. Of all our various bodyparts, the ears seem like an afterthought. Somehow, they just don’t seem to fit the rest of the anatomy. All the whorls and ridges and bumps and lumps and lobes look more gremlin or troll.
Believe me, there’s nothing that exposes the ears like a nekkid head does. I was in a queue behind a skinhead the other day. His ears looked like they’d been stuck on in a hurry, at the last minute, and someone had given them a quick tweak just to check if they were glued on firmly. They were probably not quite done yet, so they remained sharply angled away from his head, at 90 degrees, sticking out like two windflaps. The image was surreal, with the overhead lighting filtering through his pinnae, rendering them translucent and very Shrek.
I have this theory. Maybe they actually belong to some other species on some other planet, and we’ve been selected to beta-test them? Maybe they’ll revoke this accessory one of these days, after the final trials are over? And then maybe we’ll need to start listening through our bellybuttons, or toenails, because earsRnotUs?