TED WILSON REVIEWS THE WORLD: EINSTEIN’S HEART

★★★★☆ (4 out of 5)

Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of the world. Today I am reviewing Einstein’s heart.

Everyone is always talking about Albert Einstein’s brain because of how smart he was, but that wasn’t his only organ. He had all the same organs as dumb people.

Einstein’s heart was the key to his amazing brain. Without it pumping any blood to his brain, his brain never would have been able to do all those math problems. He would have been dumber than a million people combined.

Now I’ve never seen his heart personally — partly because it’s illegal to go digging up corpses and partly because I don’t know where he’s buried. “Grave robbing” is an awful sounding phrase, but “grave borrowing” sounds much more gentle and accurate and that’s all I would like to do for the purposes of this review.

Anyway, everything I know about Einstein’s heart is stuff I guessed or surmised by looking at the heart of a possum I found dead on the side of a road. I named that little possum Einstein in honor of the late mathematician, and because he was wearing a collar that said “Einstein” on it. He may have been a dog now that I think about it.

Like most hearts, Einstein’s was a goopy mess. Not the kind of thing you want to touch without gloves on. When not attached to him, it would probably have been impossible to tell who it belonged to, unless he was nearby, turning blue, and simultaneously grasping at the open wound in his chest with one hand and reaching out for his heart with the other.

The point I’m making is hearts are weird and ugly looking and it’s no wonder they decided to make the classic heart icon look nothing like the real thing. Yuck.

To try and better understand the nature of Einstein’s heart, I wrote this poem.

Einstein’s heart
Plump and red
Pumping blood
Pump, pump, pump
Look at it go!
Never for infinity
Always ’til the end
His heart, your heart, my heart
All the same

That was a pretty good poem, wasn’t it? For a poem about an organ I mean. I’ve read better poems, but no better poems about human organs.

UPDATE: I spoke with a local grammar school student who did a book report on Einstein and claims Einstein was cremated, in which case his heart will forever remain a mystery. That is unless somewhere in his works Einstein invented time travel and someone reading this can go back in time and vivisect him and report back to me.

BEST FEATURE: It only stopped working once.
WORST FEATURE: It would have been swell if it had its own brain, the way some dinosaurs had extra brains for their tails.

Please join me next week when I’ll be reviewing pudding.