I got an e-mail from a friend this morning asking me what I was going to write about today. I replied with “To be honest, I don’t have dick“. I don’t usually talk that way; this was an old friend who never seems to understand what I’m talking about unless I punctuate every sentence with an f-bomb or reference to bodily functions or the more personal aspects of human anatomy. A few minutes later he sent me a link to this interactive map of penis sizes around the world (there’s another one that correlates the data with IQ if you’re interested). This made me realize that although I’d written about Dick a lot over the last couple years, I hadn’t written about penis since July 2008, and in that instance, it was a rather historically important penis. At this point I’d like to point out that I’m still not writing about penises, I’m writing about not writing about penises. And I have to say that in spite of this extended abstinence from penis (I mean, as a topic) and even after combing Dickipedia, I still came up with dick. So have I finally become just another example of The Peter Principle? Have I risen to my level of incompetence with my own web site? Or is it possible that I just don’t find penises that exciting? Once I started pondering the topic though, I couldn’t help noticing that I couldn’t recall the last time a friend – male or female – had brought up penises in casual conversation. Which seems a little odd. I mean, about half the human race has one, and on a basic level, human life is nearly impossible without them. All the same, I’m personally still okay not talking about them. Although I did learn today that there’s a Wikipedia page (SFW, if the word “penis” is safe where you work) devoted to penis size, and that there’s such a thing as a (NSFW, and frankly, not safe for much of anything) Micropenis. And I also ran across an amusing anecdote. Apparently, when trade was first opening up between the US and the USSR in the 80′s, one of the first exports from the US to Russia was from the condom industry. The Russians insisted that the condoms had to fit a penis of 11 inches in length, and repeated this requirement when the Americans checked,  just to make sure that there wasn’t a mistake in translation. So, the Americans sent the condoms of the specified dimension.  In boxes labeled “???????? ???????” . Which is where a lot of penis talk seems to end up, in jokes about size. So what do you think? Does the world need more penis talk?