I do the biting the inside of my mouth and my tongue bit. It’s good for freaking people out.
I love M&M’s in strong, unsweetened iced tea.
I collect both books and music by Richard Farina and Julian Lloyd Webber. These two people fascinate me.
I do make bizarre lists! Usually I do it if I need to get a bunch of things done before I go out. The funny thing is I allot too much time for an activity (like doing dishes). So, I get to be “ahead of schedule” on my list of things to do and feel really self-satisfied. Hmm… I’ve posted to this topic a bunch of times so either I’m a complete freak or I’m surrounded by kindred spirits. 
Post 8 - lieu - I too often automatically complete someone’s remark by turning it into the phrase from a movie.
Post 11 - TellMeI’mNotCrazy - I listen to a new CD for days or a couple of weeks before moving on. And I enjoy that time in the morning when you wake up and can enjoy being asleep but awake enough to enjoy it.
Post 20 - I love the old 50’s-60’s musicals and I sing along with them. A favorite is “Flower Drum Song”. I sing along to all of it, including “I enjoy being a girl.” “On a Clear Day, You Can See Forever” is a particular favoriate. (even though it’s from 1970). I love catching the old references in WWII cartoons. Remember when Bugs was spiraling down to the ground in the plane and just before it crashed, the plane sputtered and stopped inches above the ground. Bugs, thumbs the window saying, “Heh, A-card.”? And I watched all of the Andy Hardy movies.
#42 - Qwisp - I love the symmetry of geometric patterns. On a cruise I noticed the 2 inch bathroom tiles were layed out so precisely that they never had to cut one to abut it against a wall or doorway. The shower opening was at 45 degrees and those tiles were cut exactly on the diagonal exactly in the center. Ahhhhhh.
#50 - elfkin477 - You HAVE to mop floors breafoot. There’s just no other way. What’s unusual about that? I also rarely name stuffed animals. How can I? They have their own names and they haven’t told me what they are.
#54 - Silver Serpentine - I eat a pile of colored candies by 1) arranging them by color 2) eating them them down to equal amounts of each color, 3) then eating the groups down to preserve equal amounts of each color.
#67 - Craneop2 - While I don’t think of the soloar system as an atom, in current string theory the scales are such that the “Solar System is to the size of an atom (or a tree depending upon your source)” as “an atom is to the size of a string”. Getting my mind around that is daunting and exciting.
#129 - Zoe - As I lay on my pillow I start to hear music being played - muffled and as if it’s next door. I have surmised that with one ear covered and the other exposed, my brain is trying to assimilate the ambient sounds of blood flow, wind, trees, creaks, etc. and it turns it all into music.
And for myself:
A) I always notice cockeyed pictures and have an impulse to straighten them.
B) I love the time between 11PM and 1AM - I know it when it happens - when the world seems to stop for a couple of minutes. The day is done and the next day hasb’t started yet. Time is frozen and eternal.
C) I clasp my hands together, fingers interlaced, with all of the right fingers and the thumb on top of the left fingers and thumb, respectively. Being right-handed, I though I remembered someone saying this is unusual.
D) I number the generic counting terms: couple is 2, of course, but few is 3, many is 5, and several is 7.
E) I each a sandwich a particular way. I build it with mated bread slices, not just any two. The edges have to match up - top to top, etc. Imagining the sandwich from the face, top pointing “north”, I bite the SW corner, then SE, then NE, then NW. With this Iron-Cross, I bite off the bottom, then the East side, then West, then the top. With this octagon, I eat spiralling clockwise reducing it until the last bite. Why such an elaborate system? It’s not. It’s easier than randomly picking where to take the next bite. I don’t even have to think about it.
Not that I’m obsessive / compulsize or anything.
Just a natural result of the fact that (a+1)2 = a2 + 2a +1.
If you take the first four consecutive whole number cubes:
1 8 27 64
and then the difference of each successive pair,
7 19 37
and repeat the process
12 18
you get
6.
What I find amazing is that it works for any 4 consecutive cubes, no matter how big. If you start with 100000**3, (100000+1)**3, (100000+2)**3 and (100000+3)**3, and undergo the same procedure, you’ll still wind up with 6 at the end.
booklover, that’s a pretty bizarre ritual if you sort six colors into five piles. I’ll have to try that sometime
That hardly seems unusual. Me, I’ll play with 'em, but it doesn’t bother me if they’re white.
That’s hardly surprising. It’s a 3rd degree polynomial, and the nth difference of an nth degree polynomial is constant.
As for me, I have some quirks. I have a large mp3 collection, and I can’t stand to have typographical errors in any of the data for any song, so I must correct them as I find them. I’d no sooner lift a barbell where any of the plates have numbers facing out than jump out of a house.
That’s really all I can think of now.
I get really annoyed when a character in a movie or tv show goes into a bar, orders a drink, takes one sip and then leaves. Man that pisses me off.
Also, I really like to make myself sneeze. It’s like a mini orgasm.
No, and this entire (admittedly fascinating) thread demonstrates that. You are one among six billion identical beings. It’s just a matter of perspective.
BTW
Am I the only one who enjoys listening to Robert Mitchum sing calypso ("Calypso Is So… ca 1955) speeded up to sound like Alvin and the Chipmunks? I guess I’ll check back in another two years for the answer.
I hate when they order a “beer.” Who orders a generic “beer”? And what bartender just gives them a beer without asking what kind, or if they want a draft or bottle? I know it’s for brevity and product placement BS, but it still annoys me.
No! No! Oh my God! You’re so not! Ahhh!!!
So…serif or sans-serif? Isn’t Adobe Garamond the greatest? Don’t you hate how people overuse MS Comic Sans? Do you go for really geometric type, like Blackletter, or flowy stuff like Italic, or beautiful, beautiful Foundational? What’s your favourite letter? Mine’s “y”. Okay, I’ll calm down now. ::wanders away::
I feel the same way about socialism, which is why I cannot be a humanist.
My quirks:
- I have to line everything up. Playing 3 point straight line geometry in my head is one of my favourite pass times.
- Everyso often, especially when urinating in a public washroom, I get the feeling that I only think I am in the washroom. I only get this feeling after I start and it is somewhat discomfitting to say the least.
- I read, and love reading, philosophy. Even though I can’t remember shit, nor do I often understand it.
- I used to do this, I would stuff my mouth with Saltine Crackers and swig a shot of coke and just let the crackers melt. It tastes fantastic, but is completely disgusting if thought about.
- I sniff the tips of my fingers, all the time.
That is it for now.
I didn’t know that. Which brings me to my “am I the only one” contribution:
Hated math in school and did very badly at it, but now at midlife I like it much better. And do a little bit better at it, I must say.
Is there a quick formula to determine what the nth difference will be for any given polynomial?
There may be one, but I’d have to play around for a little while. Give me some time.
I’ haven’t proved it, but I’m certain that, for the polynomial a[sub]n[/sub]x[sup]n[/sup] + … + a[sub]0[/sub], the nth difference is n!a[sub]n[/sub].
Speaking of TV, it makes me nuts when people go on-line and immediately find a web page for what they are looking for, no matter how obscure. What search engines do these people use. It takes me 5 to 10 minutes or more to find a simple song lyric, never mind things like “can getting an electrical shock cure psychosomatic paralysis?”
I usually find what I need from a search engine within 20-30 seconds, personally.
Same here. If I don’t find what I’m looking for on the first page of my first search, I’m seriously annoyed with myself.
Check out letssingit.com It’s got a lot of lyrics. As for the electric shock curing psychosomatic paralysis, I say just ask Good Ol’ Cecil.
My god, it’s like we’re twins. Except for the shower thing, that’s just weird.
I see from the replies so far that highlighting the dope is not very odd. I guess my only difference is that I highlight every website, compulsively. It bugs the hell out of people who try to read over my shoulder. Which is fine.
I also heavily associate music with times in my life. And you’re right, it stems from listening to the same thing over and over again while doing something. I used to play a lot of the game Asheron’s Call, and I would listen to my Aquabats CD while I was playing. Now whenever I hear a song from that CD I think of all the good times in AC. Crazy.
I left this one for last though, because it is by far the weirdest. I do something a little different with my fingers, but it’s closely related. What you do is, you drum your fingers to a melody. Only one finger to a beat, and the object of the game is to end on the thumb at the end of the melody. The twist is that you have to follow a specific pattern, which consists of pairs, like this:
1- pointer-ring
2- middle-pinky
3- ring-pointer
4- middle-thumb
…Then back to pointer-ring
You can start anywhere you want in the pattern, but once you start you have to go in order. So to correctly end on the thumb for an eight-beat melody, you would start with the pointer finger and then the ring and so on.
I’ve been doing this for years, and the speed with which I can drum my fingers on a surface in this pattern is terrifying.