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Now available for preorder:
The San Francisco Panorama
.

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H E A R T S ,   V E S S E L S ,
D I A M O N D S .


BY AMY E. WIRTZ

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If you were to rip all of the arteries out of the human body, all in one fell swoop, so that they were still connected to one another, it would form something like a roadmap, except bloody, but don't focus on the bloody part.

It would appear as crazy little dirt roads all leading to the heart, or rather, more specifically, the aorta. When you go to rip out the arteries, you should probably start with the heart. It is easy to grasp, a heart, being shaped like your fist, and about the size of that, like a softball only softer.

It sounds difficult, but actually, it is much, much easier than, say, eating a lobster. That's hard. And not terribly fulfilling, overall.

I remember the first time I had a go at a lobster. There were egg-like things in it, like little opals, or really shiny glass beads from the hippie shop down the street. And I sat there, in my ridiculous plastic bib, feeling pretty foolish already, sort of in shock, and definitely confused, wondering what the beads were, and were they worth anything?

My "beads," it turns out, were diamonds. I was rich. And I floated on that thought, wondering what to do with all of that money, how I would give it away, and to whom, because I didn't really need money, now that I knew where to find diamonds in lobsters. They're somewhere around where the heart should be. You have to dig around a bit, past the digestive glands, but it's there, plain as day.

Arteries are found in all parts of the human body, except in the hairs, nails, epidermis, cartilage, and cornea. Diamonds are found in the abdomen of lobsters, never in its claws, or "chelipeds."

In 1999, in the state of Maine, a catch of 52,614,536 pounds of lobster brought in $181,538,232.00.

This figure does not take into consideration the diamonds.

 

 

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