Tagged for Tidbits

So my good friend Tom Chatt has "tagged" me to reveal five little-known facts about myself. Since this sounds like a fun challenge (and since I'm woefully overdue for a post here), I'll give it a try. Here goes:

1. I have only two joints in my index fingers. Where the tip joint would normally be, I've just got solid bone. Now, before you get too grossed-out, let me add it's really no big deal - useful as fodder for exercises such as this one, but otherwise completely unimportant. It's a quirk of genetics that I inherited from my mother, who had a number of subtle oddities in the morphology of her hands. Evidently, my grandmother was furious with my grandfather when, upon the birth of their daughter, she realized that the deformities in his hands were not (as he had told her) the result of some accident, but rather a genetic trait which had obviously been passed to my mother. Luckily, this hiccup in my maternal gene pool is slight, causing no noticeable impediment in the use of either my or my mother's hands. Except for her wedding ring, she never wore hand jewelry, so as to avoid drawing attention to them. It seems this trait may be recessive, as in the past two generations, it's manifested itself in gradually less-evident ways. In fact, much like my sister, my son has perfectly normal hands. Now, if I could only get rid of that hump on my left shoulder...
2. I've eaten sperm whale sushi. I was in Tokyo on business and our Japanese sales manager had taken me to a sushi bar lost somewhere in a bewildering labyrinth of tiny streets, shops and residences. This was very much "off the beaten path" and I'm sure I'd never have gotten out of there without his help. After an excellent array of offerings, many of which I'd never sampled before or since, he asked me if I wanted to try something really special. It was very dark, very oily and rich, but not unpleasant. Evidently, it's quite a delicacy and, with modern moratoriums on whaling, very rare. It was odd, but I was honored to have been offered it.
3. My first kiss was on stage. I was playing Prince Charming in a community theatre production of Sleeping Beauty and I couldn't have been more than six or seven years old. More than the quick peck I gave my co-star at the appointed time, I remember vividly the panic I had managed to create in my mind over many days in anticipation of that moment. Ahhh... If all life's traumas could be so simple and so fleeting!
4. I'm color "challenged". Like nearly 7% of the male population, I have trouble distinguishing various hues of red and green. Not really a "blindness" (i.e. an inability to see at all), it's more a lack of sensitivity to specific colors. For example, I can easily tell that a stop sign is red and grass is green, but distinguishing light shades of green from white can be difficult and very light pinks sometimes look gray. In all cases, if the color sample is very small, I have more trouble distinguishing color than if it's large. This has really posed no difficulties in my life, except on my vision test for my aviation medical certificate. I always fail the color tests, but since I've managed to demonstrate to the FAA that I can, in fact, distinguish real-world signals at night, they've granted me a waiver to fly after dark.
   
5. I learned to scuba dive before I learned to drive. When I was in junior high school, my parents decided the whole family - the two of them, my younger sister and I - would learn to dive. My older brother was a Navy diver and knew a good instructor, so we arranged for lessons in our own pool. We were all good swimmers, but I remember the whole experience was a bit daunting - a fair amount of stuff to learn out of the water, as well as in the water. And no amount of diving in a pool really prepares you for the ocean, even under the best of conditions. It's like going into the wilderness, one that's beautiful but very foreign, almost alien, with a hint of danger. I was seriously freaked on the day of our check-out dive. Somehow, I managed to put that aside, get in the water, swim to the bottom and complete the check-out procedures. Overcoming those fears and getting the job done was an experience I'll never forget.

Well, coming up with 5 obscure but (hopefully) interesting facts was harder than I thought. Harder still is producing five others to tag in turn. I don't know many bloggers well, but I suspect Mike Weasner may have interesting tidbits to share with us.