Sometimes people get a checkup at the doctor's office and they're told their "heart is like a ticking time bomb", meaning they won't live much longer if they keep taking their health for granted.
But what does it mean when your ears audibly tick twice a second like a metronome?
If you're Sankey Flynn of Greensboro, North Carolina it means you have a strange condition that makes you a living timekeeper:
According to physicians, the noise came from the "spasmodic contraction of muscles in the roof of his mouth. This causes the eustachian tube, leading from the throat to the ears, to open and shut making the peculiar noise."
Here's a newspaper clipping about the "tick-tock man" from the Somerset Daily American, dated February 26th, 1951:
-Via Boing Boing