Once I slept over my friends (I was about 25) and her extra bedroom had her collection off about 40 Victorian dolls, all around the dressers, facing the bed.
me: (they’re looking at me! WHAT? What? Whata re you all looking at!!!)
So, in the morning, I said, Come in here.
She looked and started laughing-I’d turned them all with their backs to me and facing the walls.
Realizing that somehow, society got itself together enough to get people working in all sorts of different jobs with important functions, figuring all sorts of things out, and that if those people all simultaneously stopped doing what they were supposed to do, we’d all be doomed.
I want to quote something from Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead:
That’s… weird :eek:
Well, here’s a not-so-profound weird thing…Laugh Tracks on TV shows. Think about it: Disembodies voices reacting to the action on screen, even making the characters on screen pause in their action. Like the people at home have to be “cued” on how to react.
I dunno, it’s just a little weird to be, sometimes.
Speaking only for myself (of course) I have books all over the place. I buy books, and I am proud to say, I haven’t one Danielle Steel book. I used to work in a bookstore, I loved the books and brought many home with me. They hang out all over the place too, on the shelves, couch, table, desks…any flat surface really.
My grandmother used to accompany a coach load of deaf children to school. When I was about 8 years old I went with her. It was the strangest thing for me, because the children were all chatting away in sign language, and the only noise was laughter. It made me realise that whatever differences (cultural or physical etc) we may have, all people have the capacity to smile / laugh / cry / feel pain. Quite a realisation for an 8 year old.
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I’d actually debate that to an extent. Other creatures may not laugh, but I’ve observed behaviour in animals that suggests a simpleminded sense of humour.
I once watched a pair of juvenile crows harassing a woodchuck. Out of curiosity, one young crow sneaked up and nipped the woodchuck’s tail. The woodchuck spun around to fight, crow jumped back, woodchuck looked annoyed, woodchuck went back to eating. Crow nipped the woodchuck’s tail, woodchuck spun around, crow jumped back… repeat… repeat… repeat…
As this kept happening, the nipping crow seemed to take great delight in the cause and effect, and the other crow was also doing a celebritory happy-dance after every “performance.”
It was a dumb game. But the crows definitely seemed amused.
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Nichol_storm I’ve known people to have the same reaction when they are in a living room that has no TV. I’ve got books all over the place. A TV isn’t so important to me.
I have a half-brother who not only has cerebral palsy, but is also severely mentally retarded and blind as well. He was in therapy, but hadn’t really been able to communicate except for crying.
When I visited my dad’s family in Texas about 20 years ago (my half brother was 3 or 4 at the time), I slept on a cot in his room; he was in a crib.
He woke me up every morning laughing and giggling in his crib. It was a sweet, joyous sound. And I still wonder what he found so funny, when he couldn’t see and couldn’t understand the world around him.
Sheri
I had the same thing when I was in grade 2-5. The way it was for me was, I’d be dreaming as normal, then suddenly everything in the dream becomes different. It was like everything grew or i shrank. then i would see tons of empty space… grey i guess… and atoms around me. although i didn’t know what they were.
i would see everything with … atoms vibrating like crazy… the atoms looked like a mash of grey coloured stuff… not balls… but… just vibrating stuff. i remember one example. i would be walking by an alley when suddenly i would see a mushroom bigger than me… but the mushroom didn’t look a mushroom but was a bunch of grey vibrating stuff… and if i looked closely i can see the space in between the ‘atoms’…
this would go on until i forced myself to wake up…
then i’d be freaked out as a child and would have trouble sleeping… this happened like every other day for me…
but now i haven’t had that dream since gr5. but i get this weird dream with my teeth falling out. like my lower jaw locks over my upper teeth and when i try to correct it, my lower jaw always breaks teeth. but the teeth don’t break off… they feel like they broke, but they fall out. but i get a lot of these teeth falling out or breaking dreams. freaks me out because it feels so real.
something freaky: singing is just controlled and pleasant screaming.
Lesse… some freaky stuff. My friend blew my mind with this and it still freaks me out if I think on it for too long.
We are always warned not to be alone with strangers because we never know what might happen or what they might do right? Or just cuz they can be totally creepy. Well what if you’re in a room alone… and you don’t know yourself. You can be sitting by yourself in a room and be alone with a stranger, all at the same time.
Other things that creep me out when I think too much on them. Dreams, I mean why does my mind put out these creepy or scary dreams. I’m certain I have pleasant ones but why can I only remember the ones that are just strange or scary as hell (such as the ones where I get shot at and usually die).
I can also agree with a lot of the things posted above… such as the dolls. I love dolls, in fact I have a collection of about 13 porcelain dolls that are all set up on my bookshelves. They freak me out, I always wonder what they are thinking and whispering about at night when I’m asleep. If they are talking about how ugly I am or just about the weird things I do when I think I’m alone.
My cat had to get used to my girlfriend rehearsing in the house. At first he wasn’t entirely sure about it all and didn’t seem to be able to tell the difference between “singing” and “yelling.” Now when she pulls out the guitar, he settles down next to her to enjoy the show.
One thing that I realised when I was about 11 and that kind of freaked me out:
Joy and rage are often expressed in the same way.
Eg/ Basketball player makes the Olympic gold-medal-winning shot! Screams, clenches his teeth, contorts his face into a grimace, and raises his fists. The main difference is that he’s yelling “YES!!!” rather than “Die!!”
This thread is living proof that human beings are blessed -or cursed- with far too much intelligence.
It is also living proof of what makes The Straight Dope Message Board so special.
'T is a pleasure serving y’all.
Supposedly, there is no absolute fraction, at which point something can no longer be further fractionalized. You can always make the bottom number bigger and bigger and bigger. Right?
And yet, if I hold a tennis ball at arm’s length from me, and let it go, in theory I should be able to make the distance between the drop point and the floor fractionalized forever. And yet, the ball hits the floor.
So, what is the point where the distance can no longer be split?
It came to me one day in Home Depot. No sporting goods store I’ve ever seen can compare to the volume of weaponry in a hardware store. From axes to pneumatic jack hammers, there’s enough for a small army. Just how many customers killed their spouses with the tools they bought last visit and are back to buy things to dispose of the body?
"Yeah, that rat poison worked great I tell you what. Now I need to lay the slab for that new barbecue. Yeah the wife was against it. But, I took care of that."
Milosarian- IIRC Aristotle and Democrites debated that very thing. Also IIRC, while objects of less than one Planck length are possible, they’d immediately slip through one of the many holes that compose time/space. That’s right folks-the fabric of our reality is the Sea Of Holes from Yellow Submarine!!
This has happened to me often since I was a kid…
Every once in a while, I’ll think about people living in places I’ll never visit. I’ll think about these people sometimes visiting other places that I’ll never visit. These people are born, live, marry, and die in far-off places. I will never know their names, and may never hear of the place where they live, especially if they live in a small town. And yet they will have lived entire meaningful lives. There are billions of people that I’ll never get to know, which is a shame, for I’m sure that amongst those billions are many people that I would have found absolutely enriching to know.
And these people will never hear of me, either. We will never meet, never interact in any way. The paths of our lives will forever seem like parallel lines, never intersecting.
This train of thought makes the world–currently populated by over five billion human beings–seem like a vast, lonely place.
It freaks me out that my voice doesn’t sound the same to other people as it does in my head. So how can I do a perfect impression of say…Elvis or Sammy Davis when the voice I hear in my head sounds like them and everyone else thinks so too? Does that make any sense to anyone or was that too confusing?
You know what else freaks me out? Reflexes. I mean, there are things that your body does in response to certain stimuli, and you have no control over them. If something whacks your knee, your leg jumps. You didn’t decide to do that, it just happened.
The idea that your body can do things without consulting your will is kind of creepy.
DocCathode, what’s even scarier than the concept of Home Depot tools-for-homicide is the factoid, just publicized a couple of weeks ago, that Home Depot racked up over one billion dollars in profits over the last financial quarter. :eek: Let’s hope that that just means that Americans are in a serious fit of nest-feathering these days!
Milossarian, what you mentioned amounts to Zeno’s Paradox. It’s not really much of a paradox, though, esp. when you consider how Zeno takes traversing the first 1/2 of the distance for granted – when that in itself could be parsed the same way as the full distance debated.
Cats grooming themselves is extremely gross, from our own human POV. I don’t know what’s worse, though – their licking their own feet and groin area, or having to swallow all that hair! Fortunately, they seem to take it all in stride.
Gymnastics and figure skating, in particular – esp. on the Olympic level. These athletes begin training seriously while they’re still little kids, all the while undertaking progressively more ambitious and dangerous moves, day in and day out, for years and years, and yet most of them manage to avoid paralysis and/or death. All it takes is a single missed plant, a single leap not going quite right, or getting a bit off one’s ideal stride… Amazing that anyone can do those routines, successfully, even once. (I know, there are rare exceptions, such as that of the Chinese female gymnast who was paralyzed a few years ago in a competition, but hers was a rare tragedy.) I’ve always wondered about the casualties racked up along the way that we never hear about.
On a related note- How do professional singers and actors handle this? Every time one of their movies or songs comes on, do they turn to somebody and say “Do I really sound like that?”