11 random points and mysteries to ponder when you need a mental break

Things that you never bothered to think about - until now

Photo by Emily Morter on Unsplash

Here’s a few thoughts that have surfaced from the unseen pools of cognition hidden in my unconscious mind. If you’re stuck in a mental rut or need a temporary distraction, sometimes you need a better question. Failing that, you might come up with something like these thoughts to ponder:

1. In watching M*A*S*H reruns, starting with season 1, I’m currently wondering what a M*A*S*H unit in 1950s Korea must have smelled like. Between the surgical unit, the common areas, the latrines, the military equipment, the personnel who probably only bathed once/week… it must have been a horrid cornucopia of smells. Come to think of it, I think there was an episode when Hawkeye refused to bathe and everyone told him to get lost… maybe the 4077th wasn’t so bad after all?

2. Just for fun, do image searches on the words smell and odor. I am willing to bet that you will find more pictures with armpits in the first page of search results for odor than you will for smell. Clearly odor is one of the uncouth cousins in the smell family.

3. I bought a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse set a few months ago and I’m typing with the keyboard right now. Funny thing: it’s actually a French language keyboard and the key markings reflect that keyboard. So on my laptop I changed the keyboard’s default from French language to English language and it works well. But… the markings on the keys are wrong now. Thank goodness I took typing in high school and I’ve typed enough words that I don’t need to check the keys to know what to type. Phew. (update: but I couldn’t find the backslash (\) key…) How’s your keyboard?

4. I had to have a molar removed last year because it literally cracked and split in two. I spent more than 5 decades growing that tooth and I finally had to have it removed. Did I lose a part of myself when I lost that tooth? In a simple physical sense, yes, but it was a individual part which could be removed without a lot of damage to the rest of me. But did I really lose a part of ME? And what about baby teeth, they’re meant to be lost. And why the heck do we have baby teeth anyway?

5. I wish I could find my missing drumstick. I mean, it should stick out like a sore thumb, right? Are you also missing something that should be really easy to find but simply persists in not being found?

6. Do you ever worry that other people will discover your secret workplace and judge you harshly based on its appearance?

7. Did anyone else go though a phase where they really admired a person who got published a lot in a magazine like the New Yorker and eventually came to reject almost everything that person ever wrote?

8. Is context necessary? Why or why not? Does this question have sufficient context?

9. Blue, then Green, followed by Red and, very weakly, Yellow. See point 8 above.

10. Can the concept of building a ship in a bottle be applied elsewhere?

11. If a goldfish learned the secret of how to pole vault 50 feet into the air and land safely and had a path to reach a 100 foot pole vault, would this worry you? This is an AI question.

What are some of the weird questions or idea that you ponder when you get a chance?

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P.S. remember, I’m giving away two awesome notebooks (Leuchtuurn1917 and Dingbats*) to my subscribers to celebrate the one year anniversary of

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