Imponderables

I am presently reading a book by Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything. It’s too bad I didn’t have this book in primary and secondary school. It answers many questions I have had about science since then. It also draws connections that would have made my life (and learning) a lot simpler. Oh well, I have the book now, and that is sufficient. So what if Sister Mary Frances will die thinking I am an idiot?

However, there are other questions and conundrums I have that swirl about in my head from time to time, or pop up uninvited to distract me from something I’m supposed to be doing, like defrosting the refrigerator. I used to know a woman in Virginia Beach, Virginia, who was very religious. When confronted with a mystery or question she could not answer, she would respond by saying, “That’s one of the first things I’m going to ask God when I get to heaven.” I always thought it terribly presumptuous of her to expect that she would ever get an audience to enquire about things like, ‘does the fridge light really go out when you close the door’ or an explanation of the concept of the space-time continuum. On the other hand, this kind of attitude requires the ability to accept delayed gratification, something I’ve never been very good at. The one thing I have always hated about Christmas is that it means 364 more days until Christmas. [I also have issues with ‘living in the moment’. For example, for me, Friday’s arrival means just two more days until Monday. But that’s perhaps a topic best saved for another day.]

I accept there are some questions and mysteries that may never be resolved. I accept it, but I don’t have to like it. Recently, I decided to keep a record of some of my imponderables, just in case I ever meet a wise person, or in case that woman in Virginia is right. By the way, if she is, would one of my surviving relatives please locate this list and bury it with me? I don’t expect that I’ll be able to remember it all, and I have a feeling that after my first audience with the Almighty, I might not get another.

Have you ever wondered:
  1. Why brilliant scientists always have such bad hair?

  2. How many Loch Ness Monsters there really are? (I mean, it can’t be just one – if so, it would be incredibly old.)

  3. Why, no matter where you park, when you return to your car there is always some great honking huge four-wheel drive vehicle blocking your view parked next to you?

  4. Why those who most often get fleeced by con men/women (at least according to Australian television’s ‘A Current Affair’) are always immigrants (this includes immigrants from English-speaking countries like the UK or New Zealand, but seemingly not Canada or the US)?

  5. Why Kirstie Alley never exercises in those Jenny Craig© commercials, but she is usually eating?

  6. Why conspiracy theorists aren’t ever the targets of the evil empires they are tracking?

  7. That if aliens are visiting our planet, what they make of us continually going to our houses with lots of parcels and shopping bags (unbeknownst to them, our shopping) and then leaving our homes, stuffing the same or other bags into rubbish bins, which strangers come, empty and take away?

  8. Why pets are afraid of the vacuum cleaner?

  9. If Fido can understand ‘go for a ride’, ‘walkies’, ‘dog food’, ‘sic ‘em’ (or in Australia, ‘skitch ‘em’) and many other words and phrases, but he can’t understand ‘don’t bark’?

  10. Finally, a bit of philosophy (and something a bit deeper than the previous items). Given that the atoms in your body get replaced over each seven-year period and that your mind both develops and forgets old data, how can you define identity? Are you really the same person, you were yesterday? (See Locke’s Socks conundrum and Heraclitus’s view "no man crosses the same river twice, for both the man has changed and the river has changed”.)
Now that I’ve given you something to think about, [warning – shameless self-promotion ahead] I’ll be off to visit my fellow Flickrites. See my photos at http://www.flickr.com/photos/jocksinoz/. And consider staying long enough to view other talented photographers like sailor5116 (see below).

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