The bored man with the magnetic nose

People did some crazy things alone in their room during the lockdown

One day at age 7, I chanced upon my father having a deep conversation with the man in the mirror about whether he should retain the villain-style moustache he had grown the previous week. My father was for the moustache; the man in the mirror apparently was not.

He made menacing faces, at the other guy, who remained unmoved.

They say it is what you do when you believe no one is watching that reveals the real you. That's when your inner douchebag slinks out to take a stretch.

That's when you feel empowered to sniff your armpits, take selfies of yourself and delete them, pee in the shower, and assert your right to pass gas making no attempt to disguise the origin, sound or lethality of the emission.

You don't have to be polite or civilised. You are beyond criticism or judgement. You are free to break every rule, do something ewwww, check out your own deejay voice, use your cat to clean the carpet, or talk to the broom.

Your forefinger can ferret deep inside your nose, digging for buried treasure, while you helpfully contort your face.

Which makes me ask, what happens when you have no choice but to be alone? What if the isolation went on for days and weeks, then months? What if there was a pandemic and you had to be alone for two years?

What crazy things did people do alone in their rooms during the lockdown?

One woman spent hours and days trying to make a face mask out of her bra. "It's not going well," she wrote on Twitter.

Another fellow shot videos of himself lying on his bed lip syncing Harry Styles songs for three hours while his cat sat on his chest.

An Asian talked to himself in unsuccessful American and British accents as he went about his house.

But the weirdest has to be the story of Dr Daniel Reardon, 27, a bored astrophysicist studying pulsars and gravitational waves at Swinburne University in lovely Melbourne. His wide forehead hints at a hefty neocortex and maybe a gift for out-of-the-box thinking. Isolated in his home by the pandemic lockdown of March 2020, Dan's mind was navigating an unfamiliar universe. He normally studied ginormous stars but now he was homebound by things only nanometers wide.

He began studying Covid-19. He soon twigged on that these microscopic entities hopped onto the hands of people who touched things other people had touched such as doorknobs, handles and tabletops.

Once there, they hitched a ride to the person's nose and mouth when he or she next picked their nose, wiped ketchup off their lips or chewed their fingernails.

If only he could invent a wearable device that would make an alarming sound when a person's hand approached their face. His neocortex, asked if this was possible, replied, "Simple, Reardon. Use neodymium magnets."

Of course! Neodymium magnets! Excited, Dr Reardon set about designing a necklace containing a circuit that could detect magnetic fields. People would wear a magnetic wristband, and whenever their hand approached their face, the necklace would buzz continuously.

Unfortunately, he got his circuits ass-wise - the necklace buzzed continuously unless the person's hand was near their face. Rather than throwing good money after bad, Reardon gave up inventing and began playing with the magnets instead, fascinated by how they stuck to each other.

If he placed one on either side of his earlobes, they clamped together nicely, sandwiching the earlobe.

Delightful.

Each magnet was barely 7 mm across. Would they fit inside his nostrils? He slipped two inside one nostril and one in the other, with the division in between. They fit snugly. Bingo! A septum sandwich. Daniel's inner child was tickled pink.

How to get them out? Being rare earth magnets they were powerful and just pulling them didn't work; they were bonded too strongly. Realizing this could turn out to be a bit of a problem, he tried using pliers but they merely got magnetised themselves and attached to the magnets. He prised them off with difficulty.

He tried the source of all knowledge, Google, searching with "tips for getting magnets out of nose". Luck! A 11-year-old boy who'd done it suggested using a third magnet to pull out the ones lodged inside.

Excited, Daniel deployed his fourth and remaining magnet close to the first nostril, with the septum in between. For a moment it looked like it might work. Then he lost his grip - and the fourth magnet too snapped into his nostril.

Dr Reardon had three magnets inside one nose and one in the other when they took him to the OPD. The magnets were eventually removed, using advanced non-Google technology.

There's a lesson in this somewhere. It might be don't pick your nose during a pandemic.

Here, viewed from there. C Y Gopinath, in Bangkok, throws unique light and shadows on Mumbai, the city that raised him. You can reach him at cygopi@gmail.com

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The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper.