I have finally purged the need to respond in any fashion to someone’s sneezing (it was hard to do), though I do like Penn Jillette’s family’s “That’s funny” as a replacement for “Bless you” and its derivitives.
But I just participated in a major Heroclix tournament this weekend (came thiiiis close to winning the new colossal Thanos… I’m still bitter). My HC kit has dozens of dice in it. For every tournament, though, I always use my FF Starter Set dice - the dice I used in my very first tournament. It is a conscious choice every time and I can’t see my see myself playing without’em.
I know superstition is bunk. You know superstition is bunk. What do you still do anyways?
I fly a lot for work, about 100k miles this year. I always like to touch the outside of the plane as I’m getting on. I don’t know why exactly, but I do and I’m embarrased by it.
I have so many damn rituals. I know they aren’t anything but placebos, but hey - placebos do work!
Most of mine are personal, so they wouldn’t mean anything to anyone, but I do a few that are more normal - Touch wood, jinx, salt over the shoulder, kiss yellow lights.
I’d say that “bless you” after a sneeze is more a conditioned reflex than a practice.
The night before last, as I was watching the live feed from JPL, I was thinking to myself “please please please please puhleeeeeze let this thing work.” And then I realized—“wait a sec. I’m an atheist. To whom exactly am I offering supplication?” My moment of rationality didn’t do an iota of good. I just went right back to muttering “c’mon, bitch—you can do it. You can dooooo it. Don’t fucking crash into the desert.”
Most of my superstitions are Minnesota things or Scandinavian things, like:
[ul]
[li]Never let on that something good or exciting has happened; to do so causes something bad to happen and cancel it out.[/li][li]If you anticipate a positive outcome (“Oh, for sure my team is going to win this game”) you will guarantee its opposite.[/li][li]If you commit a kind or compassionate act it must not be acknowledged by the recipient or it becomes self-aggrandizement.[/li][/ul]
A couple of them are my very own, and I have no explanation:
[ul]
[li]Wheel of Fortune must never be displayed upon any television in my house, not even just in passing while channel surfing, or something terrible will occur.[/li][li]Every household task must be performed in the most efficient manner possible in order to be successful.[/li][/ul]
Surely by now I am owed a lottery win. That’s how it works, right? Karma? Being a good person? Wishing really hard? I do all those things, so surely I’m due a result by now.
There’s a story about the great Danish physicist Niels Bohr, and how he had a horseshoe nailed to the wall in his office in Copenhagen. Someone asked him: “Professor Bohr, you’re such a great scientist and a man of reason - surely, you don’t really believe that a horseshoe on the wall will bring you good luck?” Bohr chuckled: “Of course I don’t believe it! However, I am told that it works whether you believe in it or not.”
Superstition is totally irrational. Except when there is gambling involved. When I am at the craps table feel free to talk and joke with me. Until I’m the shooter. Don’t talk to me. Don’t touch me. Let me roll. First time me girlfriend went with me to a casino she came up from behind and hugged me. 7 of course.
My daughter tells me she and her friends came up with their own response to sneezing. They now say, very rapidly, “Nothing happens when you die”
Makes me proud
It occurs to me… what about the typical funeral? Isn’t embalming and burying a superstitious thing to do? When Mrs. Call and I added to our will to donate our full remains to medical research, our lawyer was visibly surprised, “Are you sure? Well, okay…” (we tell people we donated our bodies to science fiction).
But I still just assumed that after the med students have their way with me my next stop would be an enbalmed burial. Guess I should look closer at the “green burial” option.
I don’t think embalming and burying is superstitious. Burying is one of the few sanitary things you can do with a corpse. I guess you could mulch it and feed it to the animals or use it as fertilizer or people food. I guess you could argue not doing one of those things is superstitious, but I’m not entirely sure.
Embalming preserves the corpse until burial can occur, it’s, again, more sanitary than having it rot before burial.
In addition, in the long term it could be useful to future archaeologists to have at least some buried remains.
Yup. Things like switching to a new d20 because the THIS ONE has been rolling for crap. I know guys who get really bent out of shape if someone touches their dice. A guy rolled off the table and under my chair. I picked it up and handed it back. I noticed that he didn’t use it again for the rest of the game. In fact, he put it off to the side away from the uncontaminated dice.
This makes sense. Unless someone is following me around with a shovel, there will be a delay between my coil-shuffling and interment.
But isn’t there a smidge of superstition considering all of the preservation activities in total (embalming, water tight caskets, etc.) I thought there was some underlying notion to preserve the body for religious sensibilities (to look [del]good[/del] better for the rapture?) - in a vein similar to why the pharaohs had their burial practices.
I spent many years amongst two of the most superstitious of groups (actors and sailors), so it’s surprising I’m not a quivering ball of superstition right now.
I won’t mention Macbeth in a theatre (no sense in putting everybody else on edge, and the last time I did it we had at least three injuries over the run).
I also won’t shoot an albatross. Although I won’t shoot anything else so that’s moot.
There are probably a lot of things that I do which are so ingrained that I don’t even realise I’m doing them. I don’t have anything I do at work, though, which is odd as quite a lot of target-orientated people probably have little rituals.
I’ve been an atheist more years now than not and consider myself pretty rational, but I was raised in a hard core Baptist church and it’s hard not to be saturated in some of their beliefs. My church spent a lot of time on the Book of Revelation, signs of the end times, who the Antichrist was, and what not. Even now, when the number 666 comes up at times, I shudder a bit, even though I know it’s all bullshit, and the number probably wasn’t 666 anyway, but 616.
Apparently I’m not the only one, and I’ve seen other examples of the 666 avoidance. When I worked at Circle K, I rang up one guy’s purchase to $6.66. He immediately grabbed a pack of gum from the counter to add to the purchase. Also, when I lived in Oklahoma a few years ago, a Proposition 666 came up for vote. Supporters begged to have the number changed, but no luck, and it lost abysmally. I don’t even know if anyone even knew what the proposition was for. It didn’t matter.
I don’t think the movie The Omen helped matters much either.
Thank you for not saying “You’re so beautiful”. For some reason, that just grates on me.
As for my superstition, it’s a really weird and specific one. No matter how inviting an empty wheelchair looks, I won’t even sit in one even for a second for the possibility that I’d be inviting one on me for the rest of my life.
