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What Common, Everyday Occurrence Do You Find Strange?

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Anonymous

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Or mysterious? Or facinating? Or just plain odd??

For me, its people who play the guitar and sing at the same time. No matter well I know a song, once I start singing it, my hands go berserk and refuse to play. I'm convinced that people who can do both are robots of some sort.

:D
 
The return of spring every year, with it's attendant beauty. An eternal, beautiful mystery.

Also, the pregnancy of my wife and subsequent birth of our daughter was utterly transforming. It was a lot bigger than anything I had ever dreamed.
 
Sleep - if no one slept and you told someone that every night you went into a paralyzed trance and had pschadelic visions they would think you were a right loon .
I can do the singing and playing thing ( chords only though , never tried to learn too much )
 
Snow is really weird. Here is this substance, basically water in altered form, which comes down from the sky in such quantities that one must shovel it away. Odd.

Sleep is also very bizarre- one is paralyzed and unconscious, completely vulnerable to one's enemies and various marauding night beasts....this is somehow an evolutionary adaptation?

It is also very strange the way people talk- a repetetive string of slightly-differentiated sound issues from the mouth, is heard and interpreted by another, who responds with his own string of noise. And then laughing- even weirder. Short, sharp uncontrolled outburts coupled with sharp intakes of breath that are generally associated with a seizure or heart attack, and yet we make these noises to signal our delight or amusement at something we have seen or heard.

Indeed, life is a strange business.
 
A good Fortean thread, looking at everyday stuff through the eyes of an alien.

Language is weird - you only have to go to another country where you not only don't speak the language, you don't have a clue how to read their writing. To me, Russian is half weird, Arabic is totally weird.

Music is another mystery. Why do we spend so much time and money on listening to people make strange sounds? And foreign music is an even bigger mystery, until you become accustomed to it.
 
Yes, music is fortean. Why do some people love 'cool' jazz yet it makes me lapse into a coma. Why are tunes written in the key of C so pleasing to the western ear ?(most nursery rhymes I've been told are in C ). Why is oriental music so alien to westerners?
What is it about drums that make people want to dance?

Dancing? Another one ! People moving around to music in an abandoned manner.

Television? What is it (and I'm as guilty as anyone) that is so hypnotic about that little box in the corner filtering information into our homes and deciding what it wants us to know?
 
Sex - so much pleasure from what is essentially stuffing body parts into each other.
 
I find it strange that people seem to know when they're being watched. For instance if your sitting at a bus stop reading a book and you glance up for no reason and directly meet the eyes of someone whos been watching you. This happens even if the person is behind you or across a crowded room.
 
Yeah, i'm sure i rwead there was an experiment done on just that, i'm sure the results were that it seemed to be true. Dunno any Details. Anyone?
 
lol ... Stuffing body parts into one another, thats just sounds wrong. Thats gonna put me off for a while, sh*t man i just can't get that picture out my mind now.

Chopstix
 
Blame Gary Strang on Men Behaving Badly for the "stuffing body parts" comment. (I hate to steal another's great line).

Re: the being watched experiment - I believe that was Dr Richard Wiseman (who else?) and it suggested that there is nothing in it. Still, it is an uncanny feeling when it appears to have happened... Alternatively, I could be talking a load of Channel 5.
 
Foul Ole Ron said:
I find it strange that people seem to know when they're being watched. For instance if your sitting at a bus stop reading a book and you glance up for no reason and directly meet the eyes of someone whos been watching you. This happens even if the person is behind you or across a crowded room.

This phenom was studied and the findings were not heartening.

An analysis of the experiment can be found here:

http://www.csicop.org/si/2000-03/stare.html

Excerpt:
The feeling, akin to the notion of the "evil eye", has been claimed by supporters of psychic phenomena to be one of the most convincing demonstrations of direct mind-to-mind contact. According to the British biologist Rupert Sheldrake, 80 per cent of the people he has asked claim to have had the experience. Now an American psychologist, Professor Robert Baker of the University of Kentucky, has conducted two simple experiments that appear to disprove it.
 
Foul Ole Ron said:
I find it strange that people seem to know when they're being watched. For instance if your sitting at a bus stop reading a book and you glance up for no reason and directly meet the eyes of someone whos been watching you. This happens even if the person is behind you or across a crowded room.

Just tried a little experiment of my own, my colleague works with her back to me, i've been staring intently at the back of her head for the last 5 minutes. she didn't even flinch. I even tried sending Menacing thoughts..... :confused:
 
Music

I heard a story on Radio 4 yesterday that suggested that a lot of music was derived from nature.
For example, European music - particularly gregorian chant and similar choir music - is very similar in rhythm to whale songs. And if you accelerate the songs of whales, you get something that sounds a lot like bird songs.
They also mentionned a coastal people who have developed a particular kind of singing mimicking the sound of waves crashing on the beach - it was pretty eiry.
 
Laughing, yes, definitely laughing. When my kids were a lot younger, I was watching 'A Bridge Too Far' on TV and one of my sons asked, 'What language are those two men (in the film) speaking?'

I told him they were speaking German and he looked puzzled and replied, 'But they're laughing in English!'

I think laughter and tears must be the most universal signs of emotion - you can't rely on gestures, for example, because they can mean totally different things in different places.

That's another thing, the gestures people make when they're talking are, I find, fascinating.

Carole
 
Couple of comments to make.

Related to gestures, facial expressions are universal. Some guy went to different cultures, some of them quite isolated (like those who live in rain forests) and showed them pictures of a person smiling, frowning, etc then asked them what the person was feeling. Almost all the answers were similiar from those he interviewed (smiling man = happy, frowny man = angry, open mouthed, wide eyed = surprised, etc).

Regarding language, I find it neato to take a common word and repeat it over and over again (hopefully, when no one is listening....) after few times, the word loses meaning and I only hear the phonetics and the sounds. It turns into a vocalization that carries explicit meaning into basically nonsense noises. The word "gesture" is pretty good to try it with. :)

Lastly, why do people find curse words to be less offensive when a letter or two is replaced with an asterick. If i write sh*t, everone KNOWS what it means. :)
 
pooter said:
Lastly, why do people find curse words to be less offensive when a letter or two is replaced with an asterick. If i write sh*t, everone KNOWS what it means. :)

Its no less offensive - just less likely to be F***ing censored!
 
Has anybody found a reason for why we cry? I know that tears keep our eyes wet but why do our eyes flood with tears when we're sad?
 
For Tasha: from http://users.hubwest.com/hubert/mrscience/crying.html
"The most interesting part of the question I think is why tearing? I came across only one article--highly speculative--in which the fellow looked at relationships among crying episodes of adults and found that the only commonality was help--either requesting or offering it. He speculates that tears provide an additional signal in requesting help in infants/children--a conspicuous facial signal--and that perhaps tears are selected for this task because they are already present via their reflexive association to physical pain and ocular trauma (e.g., eyes watering to get dust out). "


Anyway, the more I think about it, the more im facinated with the concept of curse words...perhaps even more then the concept of someone who can guitar and sing at the same time (but not as much as someone who can play guitar and sing curse words at the same time).

If you think about nearly every one of the major curse words has at least one synonym that is more socially correct. Yet using the actual curse word causes distress in many people. In a movie, curse words can be the single difference between a movie that's appropriate for toddlers and a movie that's for adults.

Most curse words' definitions are that of bodily functions, the only one that really relates to something "Evil" is damn which means: "To condemn to everlasting punishment or a similar fate; doom" The really bad ones, of course, are sexual or scatological in nature (or a combination of the two) They may be considered crude, but when you look at it objectively, the reaction they cause out of people is incredible.

It gets even more random contradicatory. In the USA, one of the talk radio stations I listen to are allowed to use racial epithets like "nigger" or "kike", but they are bleeped if they say "masturbation."

The only reason I can think that words like this cause such a reaction is that maybe a long time ago curse words were thought to actually summon demons and other various evility and our reaction to curse words today is some sort of societal memory.
 
One of the things I find fascinating is how people can conduct themselves with such blatant stupiditiy while remaining completely oblivious to their own ineptitude. I see it almost every single day and it continues to amaze me.
 
People, yes. Everyone's weird in their own way (apart from me of course :) )

Pooter, why do you refer to words such as **** and **** as curse words? (you what what I mean). I've always called them swear words. Gosh darn it love, no point in saying them if they're not offensive ;) .

Jane.
 
Re: Music

Sally said:
European music - particularly gregorian chant and similar choir music - is very similar in rhythm to whale songs. And if you accelerate the songs of whales, you get something that sounds a lot like bird songs.
Hmm! Difficult to imagine Gregorian monks having much to do with whales!

But then St Brendan was supposed to have camped on the back of a whale, so what do I know?

There was a recent report that the e/m signals emitted by black holes resemble music in some ways, and the interesting thing was that if you speeded up the signals from really massive black holes, you got a near copy of the 'music' from much smaller ones.

I'll try to find the URL - here's one!
 
Curse word = cuss word = swear word. They all refer to the same thing. :) Everyone around me calls them curse words instead of swear words so I used the term "curse words" in the post.

The question, of course, is why (for example) is poop acceptable but sh*t not?
 
pooter said:
The question, of course, is why (for example) is poop acceptable but sh*t not?

It's TABOO! ooh. (single or double? Ice in that?) You know the word c*nt used to be perfetly accpetable to the extent there was a road in London called Gropec*nt Lane, but now I fear a banning if I say the word outloud.

Asterixes p*ss me off :D anyway, I feel very patronised. If you don't want to use the word, just don't, has always been my feeling. Does anyone really mind if i say shit? This is not a rhetorical question, I'm actually interested to know.
 
Singing and playing guitar - I can strum or fingerpick while singing (in my normal out-of-tune manner!), but hand me a bass and I totally screw up, singing and playing.

Drums - it depends on how closely the 'beat' matches your own heartbeat. A drum beating at 60 beats per minute or slower is the same speed (or slower) than your heartbeat, and is solemn. 120 and up is twice (or more) your heartbeat, and is 'stirring'. (Marches - apart from pipe bands - are played at 120 bpm, which is also a good walking speed, surprisingly enough. Most of the newer dance stuff is 140 bpm.) 60-120 is no-man's-land, where it depends on major/minor keys, melody, etc.

Foreign music tends to sound strange when it uses chord structures, melodic patterns or harmonies that you're not used to. Modern jazz is just strange.

As for what I find strange - people who wake up in the morning - none of this 'what day is it? what year is it? what planet is it? where's the damned snooze button? *snore*' stuff.

People (usually women) who are that desperate to get the dishes washed, they're hovering over you as you try to eat the last few mouthfulls - 'You finished with that plate yet?'

People who stand, 2 or 3 abreast, behind you in shop queues, and, as soon as you're served, they all try to step forward, and it's your fault for blocking their access.

People.

Alcohol. Why do we do it? We all know we'll end up talking too loud, laughing at nothing, making utter pillocks of ourselves, and we keep pouring the stuff down.

Bus timetabling. The company that I worked for, temporarily, sent a Mini out mid-morning to find out how long it took to get from A to B (rumour has it they now do it at 3 a.m.) They took no account of speed limits, traffic, time spent picking up/dropping off passengers, collecting fares - and with my Head Office privilege ticket, I used to get hell. And the other local bus company seems to think that the 'outer circle' (i.e. right round Edinburgh) takes the same length of time between 8 and 10 in the morning as between 8 and 10 at night.

Chapter 2.

The School Run. - sorry, that's people again.

Soaps - Corrie, Eastenders, etc. - sorry, people again.

"A'body's strange but thee and me, and I'm worried about thee...."
 
Swearing

You know the word c*nt used to be perfetly accpetable to the extent there was a road in London called Gropec*nt Lane, but now I fear a banning if I say the word outloud.

Perfectly true: also f*ck was widely used, a good old Anglo Saxon word: the really bad stuff in Olde Times was blasphemy - saying the word "God" in vain was an instant passport to Brimstone Land, and so various words evolved that implied the name without saying it: eg "Zounds" - meaning "God's wounds" (ie stigmata), "s'blood", meaning "God's blood", and of course "Oddsbodikins" meaning either "God's embodiment" (Christ) or, my preferred definition "Gods bollocks".

Loud thunder: instantly vanishes in puff of blue smoke.
 
I always wondered how we know that the colour that we see as say blue is called blue (i know we learnt it as youngsters but where did it start) and are colour blind people really wrong or are they just rare right people.
 
For an interesting discussion of swearing I recommend 'Your Mother's Tongue' by Stephen Burgen.

Here's the Amazon blurb about it.

"After centuries of war we Europeans are trying to get along together, but we keep treading on each other's toes. Tread on an English toe and you might get a 'Bloody hell!', or on an Italian's and you'll hear 'Cazzo!' (Prick!), a Spaniard's and you'll get 'Hostia!' (Sacred host!). And while a German will bluntly shout 'Scheisse!' (Shit!), a startled Portuguese might say 'Puta que pariu!' (The whore that bore you!). In this tour of anger, exasperation, prejudice, irony and loathing as expressed in some twenty European tongues, we learn that what is invective in one country is sweet talk in another."

I think it's in Greece if you say 'Your Mother' it's regarded as the greatest insult.

Carole
 
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