Rush Limbaugh was caught on national TV picking his nose at the Super Bowl last year and his ratings didn’t take a nosedive (due to that). Fellow conservative Frank Zappa was never shy of his habit. His band The Mothers of Invention sang “Let’s Make the Water Turn Black” – a song about a friend who displayed his collection of boogers like trophies on the panes of his bedroom window. More recently, an Austrian doctor (Dr. Friedrich Bischinger, a lung specialist) went on record to say nose picking and eating (the quarry) is good for you. Those who do are “healthy, happier and probably better in tune with their bodies” than those who don’t. “And eating the dry remains of what you pull out is a great way of strengthening the body’s immune system.”
As with any unchecked habit, there are dangers. A few years ago The Telegraph reported: “Man dies from picking his nose.” True, he died from a nose-bleed consistent with nose-picking but he also suffered from a brain hemorrhage and dementia brought on by alcoholism–which probably played a greater role in his death. There is also the matter of relationships: we could find no record of nose-picking having ever enhanced a romance. And nose-picking during one’s first dinner with a girlfriend’s parents has a sketchy history of success. Yet we know there is something for everyone in this world.