Sunday Stealing – Doing It for Ourselves

Welcome to Sunday Stealing. Here we will steal all types of questions from every corner of the blogosphere. Our promise to you is that we will work hard to find the most interesting and intelligent questions. Cheers to all of us thieves!

This week we aren’t stealing, we’re contributing! These are questions suggested by our “usual suspects.” They were entertaining, which isn’t a surprise because our participants are bright and fun. Thanks to everyone who took part.

DIY Meme – Doing It for Ourselves

The obvious song.

1. Would you rather have every traffic light turn green or always get the best parking spot? (Kwizgiver) 

As a person who takes the bus a lot and doesn’t have to worry about parking as often as most, clearly the latter. And of course, I’ll always choose green anyway.

2. What’s the most difficult thing you have ever done? (Gold in the Clouds) 

Physically, it might have been crawling/hobbling down a mountain in Utah in 1994 with what turned out to be a torn meniscus.

My contribution

3. What information do you know that you are proud of/happy about, but others say, “Who cares?” (Roger) 

There are so many! It’s faded somewhat, but I could tell you a state by its telephone area code, which remains a geographic identifier to this day. I wrote about it here, and someone I knew well said, “You must have too much time on your hands.”

But the big one is knowing all of the U.S. Presidential terms by year, even those who died in office. So I know there were three Presidents in both 1841 and 1881. This is useful when examining the history of wars, recessions, land acquisitions, and similar events.

4. What mystery do you wish you knew the answer to? (Myra/Mevely)

There’s even a well-regarded book about it: When Bad Things Happen to Good People. And I think even more about the converse, about seemingly good things happening to arguably bad people.

5. What small, ordinary thing brings you disproportionate joy? (Country Dew)

Rainbows, fer sure. As I’ve noted here, we have a rainbow-creating front door, and even little rainbows cause me indescribable giddiness.

6. What time do you go to sleep/wake up?  (Annie)

Oh, geez, going to bed sometime between 10:30 pm and 2 am, depending on how much is running through my head. Up at 5 am to 7:30 am.

7. What is your favorite sleeping position? (Lisa) 

On the side. I need at least two pillows.

8. Describe your personal Utopia. (Pandora) 

No more wars, no more hunger, a clean environment and we can teleport.

9. Imagine that you have a machine that can create any new invention for you based on your description. What do you ask the machine to create, and why? (Plastic Mancunian) 

A miocroplastics/PCB vacuum cleaner that would suck up large bodies of water to separate the bad stuff from the good. You could have them at water treatment plants. The why is that too much of our water is potentially or actually dangerous to us.

Thank you for playing! Please come back next week.