What was the biggest lesson Rock Rosner learned from travelling during the holidays, and how did the experience shape his views on health risks in crowded spaces?

In this candid and wide-ranging exchange, Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner discuss the hazards of long-haul flights during peak travel season and the importance of taking illness seriously in confined spaces. Rosner recounts returning from England on an 11-hour flight that evolved from silent to symphonic coughing, with his wife later contracting COVID. He reflects on masking, asking for seat changes, and the timing of travel near holidays. The conversation then shifts—from European toilet mechanics to the risks of penile enlargement procedures—showing Rosner’s mix of medical curiosity, humour, and personal experience with health anxieties, aging, and travel.

London and Flights

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How are you? How was London? How was the flight?

Rick Rosner: London was good. Dulverton was good. That is where the in-laws live. It is this little town, a couple of hours west of London. On the flight back, did you ever see World War Z?

Jacobsen: No.

Rosner: It was not comforting. Nobody was coughing at the beginning of the flight. It was an 11-hour flight. By the end of the flight, dozens of people were coughing. I know COVID numbers are down compared to this time of year in the previous years we have had COVID. I was thinking it was mostly flu or RSV (respiratory syncytial virus) on the plane. I do not know what the fuck it was, but Carol now has COVID. I am wearing a mask. She is wearing a mask. She is reluctantly taking Paxlovid, which can give you a terrible taste in your mouth. A lot of people get diarrhea, but in people at higher risk, it can shorten the time that you have COVID and reduce the risk of severe illness and complications. I am urging her to finish the course of treatment. There you go. I think she wants to stay around with an intact brain to see what happens with our daughter for the next 15 or 20 years.

Jacobsen: What was your big lesson from this trip?

Rosner: The lady behind me was coughing a lot. I finally turned around and gave her a mask. I think that is the way to go, because I wasn’t direct with the kid coughing next to me on the last flight I took, and I got fucking COVID. You want to shut that shit down if you can. This time, before I gave her the mask, I asked the flight attendant if I could change seats, and she found me a different seat away from all the coughing. That was six hours in—five hours in—and over the next four hours, everybody started fucking coughing. The lesson is: that was December 23rd. Do not fly that close to Christmas. The plane will be full, and the holiday contagion will be underway.

We flew to London on December 9th, and that flight was good. It was a midweek flight. It was not too busy. We could stretch out. We had lots of seats around us. By flying there and back before Christmas, Carol says we saved $1,500.

If you are taking a long-ass flight, or even a shorter one, fly midweek. A Tuesday will be less crowded than a Saturday or Sunday. You might get extra seats, which can help you stretch out, and fewer people to infect you with shit. Do not fly close to a major holiday when people like to travel, because you are going to have a full plane and sick people—rotten tomatoes.

We can talk about sitting in England. How many flush buttons do Canadian toilets have?

Toilets in the West

Jacobsen: One. A quarter-turn lever.

Rosner: Same as most American toilets.

Jacobsen: Yours is the same.

Rosner: Yes. European toilets have two buttons. One is bigger than the other, and they generally overlap. I assume one is for pee and one is for solid waste. I think that if you press one button, you get a light flush just for pee, and if you press both buttons at once—because they touch—you get a heavier flush for solid waste, but I never fully figured it out.

I know it is simple technology, but I never really took the time. On the other hand, I was not too bothered about not knowing exactly how it worked. What is bothersome is that many European toilets do not drop waste directly into the water. It lands on a dry surface, then slides into the water, leaving a skid mark that isn’t washed away when you flush, even with the bigger flush. You have to scrub out the toilet. It is not as comfortable for me as American toilets.

I used to assume Japanese toilets were even less comfortable, with squatting over holes in some places. Maybe that is wrong now, because Japan is known for high-tech toilets—such as heated seats, bidet functions, sensors, and health-monitoring features. So perhaps not Japan. But there are places in East Asia—Vietnam comes to mind—where traditional squat toilets are still standard.

I do not know. My wife once took me along on a business trip when she was working for Giorgio Beverly Hills across East Asia: Hong Kong, Bangkok, and three other cities. All the places we stayed were designed for Westerners, with regular toilets, so I do not really know firsthand. Anyway, I like my house.

Worst Trave Experiences

Jacobsen: What is the worst travel experience you have had? After you answer that, my question will be: what was the worst travel experience you have had?

Rosner: Worst travel experience?

Jacobsen: Actually, in two parts. One, something went wrong with your body. Two, something went wrong with the trip. They can be separate or the same.

Rosner: I do not know. I have been lucky not to get seriously sick while travelling, although the last trip before this one was for my nephew’s wedding in Providence, Rhode Island. There is no direct flight from Providence to L.A., so we had to change planes in Chicago. On the Chicago-to-L.A. leg, I was sitting next to a kid who coughed for four hours, and then I got COVID. That is the sickest I have ever been related to a trip. I did not like that.

I have been nervous about something else: the dentist wants to pull a tooth, and I like having it. It is far enough back that if they pull it, they will leave a space. Even if I wanted to replace it, I had another tooth replaced once after it cracked. To replace a tooth, they remove the bad one and fill the socket with donor bone material. Somebody donates their body to science, and among the things that can happen is that their bone is used for grafting.

A surprising thing about donating your body to science is that your skin can also be used in penile enlargement procedures. They remove the cells and keep the extracellular matrix—the structural framework—because your body would reject the donor cells, but it accepts the matrix. It is kind of like a chain-link fence or the mesh that holds oranges together: an intercellular scaffold. They take a piece of that—probably from the thigh or back—wash out the cells, keep the matrix, and use it as graft material.

If somebody wants a girthier penis, they can slice it lengthwise, remove the internal tissue, wrap the extracellular matrix around the inside a few times, put it back into its covering, sew it up, and if everything goes well, the body grows connective tissue and skin around the matrix. So instead of having a penis with a circumference of about one and a half inches, now it has a disturbingly girthy circumference of, say, two and a half inches.

Unless there is a mishap, when I worked on The Man Show, we reported on penis enlargement, and the surgeon—or someone familiar with the procedure—said that sometimes the matrix collapses like a worn-out sock and bunches up at the end of the penis, leaving you with a dumbbell-shaped result. That is not good.

But we were talking about what happens when you donate your body to science. For surgical use, another thing they can do is take your bone, grind it up, and pack it into your jaw where the tooth socket is, filling the socket. Then they give it a couple of months, and your body grows bone around the particulate graft. It takes the material that is packed in there and incorporates it into solid bone. After that, they drill a hole into it, insert a screw, affix a porcelain tooth to the screw, and then cap it with more porcelain. The whole process takes about 6 months and costs about $3,000.

So I want to keep this tooth, even though it is cracked. The dentist always wants to pull it, saying it could go bad at any time. Sometimes it sends sharp twinges, and I am always afraid it will fail on a trip, where I would have to find a dentist in London or Belgium—but so far that has not happened.

I can tell you about other ways people try to make their penis longer, and some lunatics do all of them. The easiest method targets the suspensory ligament—the tendon that, especially in younger people, makes an erection point upward at a healthy angle of about forty-five degrees. As you get older, the angle lowers. The visible portion of the penis protrudes outward from the body, supported by that ligament, but there is also internal penile length: if five or six inches protrude externally during an erection, there may be several additional inches inside the body. The whole structure does not start exactly where the penis exits the body. For good leverage, part of the erectile structure is inside the body, and it is held in place by the suspensory ligament—a tendon that runs from the pubic bone down to the top of the penis. It anchors and elevates the external portion of the penis. The ligament provides a cantilever effect: it pulls the penis upward using the leverage of the internal section of the erectile tissue against the pubic bone.

The simplest way to make the penis appear longer is to cut that tendon. You will never have an erection that points upward again because there is no ligament to hold it up. You get a downward erection. It becomes longer because some of the internal portion drops outward when the ligament is cut. The main visual benefit is when it is flaccid—locker-room length, basically. When erect, it may also look longer because more of the internal shaft has descended outside the body, but at the cost of elevation. They snip a tendon, and you get extra visible length, at the expense of angle.

Another thing people do is attach weights to the penis. They try to sleep with the weights attached in a pulley system while lying on their back: weights connected to the end of the penis, the rope going over the foot of the bed, giving ten pounds or so of tension for eight hours. If you train yourself, you can do that, and if you do it night after night for months, the penis is supposed to stretch. That is a lot of work. Again, we covered all this on The Man Show in a report about different enlargement methods. People actually do this stuff.

There is also a method where you masturbate for hours every day, distending the penis repeatedly and manipulating it in ways meant to maintain the expansion. That is called jelqing. People do that.

I would guess the most effective non-surgical method—though I have not personally researched outcomes—is the vacuum pump. And you do not want to put your penis in a household vacuum cleaner because you will end up in the emergency room. There is too much suction, the tube is the wrong size, and you can cause serious injury.

But there are hand-operated vacuum pumps you see advertised in porn circles. I am guessing those might actually work, and that they do so by causing controlled micro-injury. You create a vacuum. It pulls your penis into the cylinder. It ruptures and tears tiny portions of the tunica albuginea—the fibrous chamber that fills with blood—because an erection is essentially a hydraulic system. The penis fills with blood, and a valve-like mechanism compresses the veins to trap the blood inside. That is what makes an erection firm.

If you use a vacuum pump over a period of months, creating tiny tears in the tunica—the fibrous structure that holds blood during an erection—the tissue stretches as it heals. You are stretching and slightly tearing it, and when the tears heal, it gets a little bigger. I assume that after doing that for months, you end up with a bigger penis. That is everything I know about that method.

Is there another procedure where they add a length of your own skin to make it longer? I think so. I forget. The report on enlargement we did was about twenty-five years ago. But that also sounds like a ticket to a lot of pain, months without sex, which defeats the point of wanting a bigger penis. Anyway, that is everything I know about penises.

Wait—more recently, I think there may be a way to use laser treatments to create localized damage that heals with additional tissue growth. I do not know. There are many ways to try to do it, and a lot of them are stupid, especially since what…

Jacobsen: Gen Z does not even care about sex anymore.

Rosner: That is so true.

Loss of Visual and Auditory Acuity

Rosner: How long are we going with this one? When did you start noticing your visual acuity was going down? When did you start noticing your auditory acuity was going down?

Jacobsen: My wife notices my auditory acuity for me. She has been complaining about it for at least five years, probably longer.

What happened—sorry, I lost the picture for a second. She finally made me get a hearing aid a few months ago, and it is a little helpful. It stopped working on the trip, so we are going to get it fixed. I worked in a lot of really loud bars for years, and I damaged my hearing with firecrackers as a kid. So it is not surprising that I have some hearing loss. Plus, people lose their hearing with age.

As for visual acuity, I have worn glasses since third grade. I have been nearsighted since then, and it has not gotten worse in about 30 years. I am lucky that way. My nearsightedness is roughly 3.25 to 3.5 diopters, which is not bad. I also developed astigmatism about twenty years ago.

Astigmatism, nearsightedness, and farsightedness each mean that the focal point—where the eye focuses light—is outside the correct range on the retina, the back of the eye where images are processed. No matter how the ciliary muscles try to adjust the lens, the focal point stays out of range. You need corrective lenses to bring that focal point into the correct zone.

Jacobsen: Some people, like my wife, kept getting more and more nearsighted for decades until she reached about eight diopters, which is severe. That level of nearsightedness usually means the eyeball is significantly elongated—not flattened—and that stretching increases the risk of retinal damage because it places more tension on the tissues at the back of the eye, including near the optic nerve.

If you are nearsighted, you may sometimes see a ring of light when you have a cold, cough, or sneeze, which is the elongated eyeball briefly tugging on the retina. If the tugging is severe enough, you can get a torn or detached retina, and surgeons have to go in and repair it—nowadays often with laser or cryotherapy, though “sewing” is a fair metaphor. That risk is much higher at eight diopters than at three. I am lucky that way.

Astigmatism is a distortion in the curvature of the cornea or lens. You no longer have a single focal point; the focal lines do not converge precisely, so a simple spherical lens cannot correct it fully. The optical correction needs to match the uneven curvature in your cornea with a cylindrical component in the lens to bring those stray rays back toward a point.

The good thing is, if you have a relatively low degree of nearsightedness and astigmatism, there are regions of your visual field that still come into focus. When you look at the moon with both nearsightedness and astigmatism, the central moon is still there, but you also see overlapping ghost images—multiple offset versions. But inside that blur, some fragments are sharp. The astigmatism gives you enough variation that you can extract detail. It is not one uniform blur; there are pockets of clarity.

If I had to, I could drive without corrected vision in an emergency. I know I could. I would not want to drive at night, where I would have to read street signs—that would be difficult—but in daylight I could manage. My vision has not gotten worse over the past 30 years, and in a few practical ways, it has gotten better.

Rick Rosner is an accomplished television writer with credits on shows like Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Crank Yankers, and The Man Show. Over his career, he has earned multiple Writers Guild Award nominations—winning one—and an Emmy nomination. Rosner holds a broad academic background, graduating with the equivalent of eight majors. Based in Los Angeles, he continues to write and develop ideas while spending time with his wife, daughter, and two dogs.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen is the publisher of In-Sight Publishing (ISBN: 978-1-0692343) and Editor-in-Chief of In-Sight: Interviews (ISSN: 2369-6885). He writes for The Good Men Project, International Policy Digest (ISSN: 2332–9416), The Humanist (Print: ISSN 0018-7399; Online: ISSN 2163-3576), Basic Income Earth Network (UK Registered Charity 1177066), A Further Inquiry, and other media. He is a member in good standing of numerous media organizations.

Photo by Fusion Medical Animation on Unsplash

Last updated May 3, 2025. These terms govern all In Sight Publishing content—past, present, and future—and supersede any prior notices. In Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons BY‑NC‑ND 4.0; © In Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen 2012–Present. All trademarks, performances, databases & branding are owned by their rights holders; no use without permission. Unauthorized copying, modification, framing or public communication is prohibited. External links are not endorsed. Cookies & tracking require consent, and data processing complies with PIPEDA & GDPR; no data from children < 13 (COPPA). Content meets WCAG 2.1 AA under the Accessible Canada Act & is preserved in open archival formats with backups. Excerpts & links require full credit & hyperlink; limited quoting under fair-dealing & fair-use. All content is informational; no liability for errors or omissions: Feedback welcome, and verified errors corrected promptly. For permissions or DMCA notices, email: scott.jacobsen2025@gmail.com. Site use is governed by BC laws; content is “as‑is,” liability limited, users indemnify us; moral, performers’ & database sui generis rights reserved.