Shhh!! We don’t talk about Bruno.
I too wonder about cave climbing(?)
Unless there was a gold bar in there, I see no purpose. Well, if you’re a scientist or something looking at a new species of blind newt that cures childhood cancer with their spit.
Yeah, not me. I don’t like up in the air, I don’t like underground. I wanna be firmly on earth.
Thank you so much.
I wonder how many people are close to their families because of perceived obligation and self interest compared to genuine love.
Somewhat less macabre, I see a vacant lot with a path, usually a diagonal shortcut, worn into it. The lot is perfectly flat, there are no obvious rises, dips, or rock outcroppings but as often as not the path will have a slight bend in it.
Did the first person who walked that shortcut realize, “Oops. I have to adjust to get to that corner,” and every single person afterward retrace those exact steps?
Well, you could always take up a safe hobby, like Philippe Petit did when he walked a tightrope between the World Trade Center twin towers in 1974:
As someone with a touch of acrophobia, it makes me dizzy just looking at a picture like that. There’s a movie called The Walk about this particular event, and though it was fascinating I had a hard time watching it.
As I also have a touch of claustrophobia, spelunking is right out for me, too. I even hate elevators.
I do wonder why people do these things.
I have more than a touch, I’m afraid. I don’t even like driving across high bridges.
What I don’t get is this. OK sure you’ve completely mastered all the techniques, have super-buffed yourself to perfection, got all the right gear. But WI your body nonetheless fails you at the worst possible moment? Sprain a ligament, pull a muscle? Just plain fatigue, cardio or muscular? You need ALL of your body to be working optimally the entire time to prevent a tragedy, to just get your ass safely off of the cliff in question. Understand, I appreciate the challenge there, in principle, but the practicalities sure seem daunting, and just seems like a fancy way of playing Russian Roulette.
Wonder no more:
TLDNW: It’s often a calcified amygdala. The Free Solo guy had a touch of it, as well.
Thank you for sharing this! I didn’t watch the whole thing, but enough of it to understand the issue. It does go a long way toward explaining fearless people. Fascinating stuff.
I’m with you. I mean sure, nothing wrong with testing one’s personal limits, but it’s just prudent to take safety precautions. I could share more awful tales of people who didn’t do so, but the thread is about what people wonder about, not Stupid People Playing Stupid Games. I think we have other threads for that. 
As I’ve aged, a fear of heights has hit me. I used to do roofs, exterior siding whatever. Cleaned my chimney by standing on a small platform way in the air. No way now. I think a large part of it is my balance is not as good as it once was.
I wonder about afros. The really big ones. How do you wash that? Does it just pop back up, or do you have to tease the heck out of it.
I have a bizarro discomfort with heights. I’m not thrilled to climb a ladder leaning against our house while, on the other hand, I’ve sat in a Huey helicopter with my legs dangling out the door at a few thousand feet for a couple of hours and had a blast.
Back to the “wondering” thing:
- What would the world be like now if, instead of a Great War, it remained a small, localized war between Austria-Hungary and Serbia?
- would a global conflict have erupted anyway, a few years later?
- would monarchs still have power?
- would there have been a WW II?
- What if the coup against Gorbachev had never happened?
I’ve dropped out of the bottom of a Chinook on a cable sitting on what was called a jungle penetrator (search and rescue training). No problem, I was on that cable. Likewise with rope work. I’m fine if I have protection. That may have taught me to ‘always be roped off’.
But I’m taking this too far afield.
I occasionally wonder if anyone has ever taken a post from the made-up band names thread in Tread Games and used it for a real band.
I wonder what it is like to be a cat.
Cats may fail the classic mirror test, but I don’t think that tells us much. The test was designed around a very visual primate idea of self-recognition: “Do you see yourself in the mirror and think, Ah yes, there I am—magnificent!?”
A cat probably looks in the mirror and thinks: That cat moves exactly when I move, has my face, and is standing in my house—but he has no smell. Clearly an impostor. Possibly a ghost. Either way, he is not paying rent.
Cats live in a sensory universe we barely access. Their hearing reaches frequencies we cannot hear, their noses are absurdly sophisticated, their whiskers gather information about air currents and tight spaces, and their reflexes are basically high speed special effects. They can dodge the strike of a venomous snake and then, because apparently they have no sense of self-preservation, bat it around like it owes them money.
We experience a room. A cat experiences a densely layered crime scene: smells, vibrations, insect activity, refrigerator hum, the emotional residue of yesterday’s tuna, and the suspicious history of every shoe that entered the house this week.
I have three cats: Benny, Olive, and Macaroni (actually, they have me). I have no doubt they are self-aware—not necessarily in the “I contemplate my mortality while staring at my navel” sense, although Benny may be working on that—but in the sense that they know themselves as distinct creatures with bodies, preferences, relationships, grudges, routines, and very strong opinions about whether I have opened the best tasting cat food.
I see it in their behavior. I see it in their eyes. They know when they are being watched. They recognize when another cat is getting favored treatment. They can be affectionate, jealous, gleeful, irritated, curious, territorial, playful, and occasionally so offended by something minor that they would clutch their pearls, if they had pearls. Or thumbs.
And their lives are wonderfully immediate. Three cats doing zoomies at once is not merely funny; it is a full-scale indoor wildlife documentary, featuring sudden chases, parkour, evasive maneuvers, and at least one participant clearly pursuing demons only they can see. There is always a moment when one cat freezes, stares at an empty corner, and makes you wonder whether the house came with a ghost or merely poor wiring.
Then, fifteen minutes later, they are stretched in a sunny windowsill, practicing a level of relaxation humans can only achieve with medication or having absolutely no mortgage.
Cats are no angels. Far from it. My broken knickknacks and claw-punctured leather furniture can attest to that. Also, when I leave my dinner unattended long enough to go to the bathroom, I apparently need to enlist the National Guard. A cat can be asleep in another room, under a blanket, seemingly deceased… and still materialize beside a hamburger before the refrigerator light goes off.
I know we should be cautious about projecting human emotions onto animals. But it also seems foolish to pretend cats are little biological robots. Their emotional worlds may not be identical to ours, but they clearly have rich inner lives. They appear to feel attachment, fear, pleasure, frustration, anticipation, comfort, rivalry, and what sure looks a lot like pure joy.
So yes, I want to experience their qualia. I want to know what a sunbeam feels like when your entire body is engineered for luxury. I want to hear the hidden high-frequency gossip of the universe. I want to smell a cardboard box and receive whatever sacred intelligence cats receive from it. I want to get high on catnip—it is cheaper than marijuana, legal, and apparently produces ecstatic bliss.
I want to mind-swap with my cat(s) for a day.
No—make that forever.
I also wonder what it is like to be a bat.
You may already know this, but Toad the Wet Sprocket took their name from a Monty Python sketch where Eric Idle came up with what he thought were band names so ridiculous that no real band in their right mind would ever choose any of them. One day 20 years later he was driving in LA, and heard the DJ on the radio announce them as the next song, and he about drove off into a ditch.
There was an 80s band called Heaven 17, who took their name from a fictional band mentioned in A Clockwork Orange.