Things that are actually pretty weird when you think about them?

Why is black pepper so precious?

You know how in (some) restaurants the waiting staff come out with a, sometimes huge, pepper mill and asked you if you want some pepper. What's that about? I mean often you haven't even had a chance to try the flipping dish so how do you know if you want it!

Is it as precious and as rare as gold?

Why can't the ordinary person add it themselves? Maybe the giant pepper grinders have a special knack to them - but I'm make do with a small on my table (after a bit of training).

Would any (normal-sized) pepper grinders left on restaurant tables go missing and be sold on the dark web?

Point me in the direction of the proof god exists.....

Going to the moon blew my mind like they actually got there before flat screen TVs and smart phones.

That’s why so many royals aren’t called by their given name - Queen Victoria’s first name was actually Alexandrina because protocol decreed she should be named for her most senior godparent She couldn’t be christened her families preferred name Victoria after her mother because her mother was a more junior royal than the god mum. However her family always used what they thought of as her ‘real’ middle name.

A less aristocratic version exists in my own paternal grandads family. Tradition dictated that the oldest male\female children in every family were called Nicholas\Mary. With this going back at least 100 years there were an awful lot of Nicks and Marys in his extended Irish family so confusion was often avoided by giving them them the traditional official first name and then using the more varied middle names in real life. I only recently discovered that my much loved 50 year old cousin ‘Sarah‘ is officially called Mary.

The Spotify algorithm literally reads my mind. Virtual reality is also mind boggling.

Sometimes I think about the fact that literally every law is there to stop people's feelings being upset.

What's wrong with murdering someone? It upsets the people who love them.

What's wrong with theft? It upsets whoever has lost something.

Etc etc.

Probably Morbid but the whole concept of Death is horrifying to me. Like one day we won't exist, what happens to our souls? do we just go to sleep and not wake up or does something else happen? I hope something else happens!

Also that one day millions of years from now, Earth won't exist so all of the things we do and have built/achieved will no longer matter. Its just mind boggling!

Also another vote for dogs. They are our little best mates from entirely different species and they can't understand a word you say yet ill natter away to them like they do. Bonkers!

And words! who decided what words meant and how to write them? I don't get it at all.

Identical twins. My daughters are identical twins and I sometimes wonder who they would have been if the egg hadn’t split? One of them? Or a weird mix of both of them? Also, how can they have such different personalities when they have the exact same DNA and have the same upbringing. What gives us our own personality?

Oh I've loved this thread!

Things j find weird-

That I made two actual humans, grew them in my body and loved theM before I even knew what they would be like

How they are so very different, different hair colours and different eye colours, different personalities..

How no one but me knows what I'm thinking, that my thoughts don't have a voice... they are just there... mind blowing!

Dreams and how real they can be-I'm having a stressful time at work and have had awful dreams that I swear are real!

Other people. Every passerby has a full life that I know nothing about, they’re just a person walking by in the street. And they know nothing about me either because to them I’m just another passerby. It’s mad.

Crying. Why does water leak from our eyes when we’re upset?!

This thread is ace. It's like having a big chat with Bill Bryson.

3 things-

Poo. If I have produced a particularly sizeable poo, I often wonder how long I've been carrying it round inside me.

Dogs - the fact that I have a creature from another species that I feed, put on a lead and take out twice daily is WEIRD.

Reading - I teach little ones to read. The whole concept is weird. That humans have constructed a whole series of squiggles and lines that we bunch together to make sounds & meaning blows my mind. And that these squiggles made by one person can transport an idea, an image, a feeling into another person's brain to make them feel or think or 'see' something is truly miraculous.

At first I was puzzled by it. As a Catholic I have seen so many If these that I’d become inured to it but the more I thought about it, the more I’ve come to agree with you and her. The whole point of Christianity is that Christ rose again so it would make more sense for our faith to be represented by a depiction of him alive rather than dead.

Writing this made me remember that in Thailand many temples have quite shockingly lifelike waxworks of particularly revered dead monks on display which seems healthier than replicas of their dead bodies and also raises another interesting question - How come the Thais can create waxworks so lifelike I often genuinely thought they were either real, living, breathing people ( or incredibly skilfully embalmed bodies) but Madame Tussaud's waxworks are so shit?

Your body still functions whilst your sleep. I used to worry as a child that I'd just stop breathing lol

It unnerves me that I spend all my life with this face, and yet I can never actually see myself in the truest sense. I am the one person in the world who can never know what I look like as seen first hand, and not in a mirror or through a camera lens.

Also, animal instincts regarding mating and birth. They don't have ante natal classes so how do solo pet animals (who have never seen another of their pack go through this) know exactly what to do when their babies are born? Do they even know they are pregnant or do they just think 'Wtf is happening to me?!' when tiny things start coming out of them?

That you really 'die' twice.
Once when your body and consciousness stop working.
Once when everyone who ever knew or loved you also dies.

This is pretty much how it's explained in the film Coco!

Milk is cow lactation

Eggs are unfertilised chickens ovum

phantomish

Disgusting alert*
I think not cleaning your teeth properly is weird. A dentist I used to know would get a Jacob's cream cracker, scrape plaque from a patient's mouth then spread it on the cracker. Then he would dare the patient to eat the cracker. They always refused. His point being that was in your mouth already

Yes, but that goes for drinking a shot of your own slobber, too.

That you really 'die' twice.
Once when your body and consciousness stop working.
Once when everyone who ever knew or loved you also dies.
(less true for famous people I guess, about whom facts survive, but even then they are not absolute - Napoleon may have been moody, or not, depending on the source, but who knows whether, say, Tutankhamen was frivolous with money, or liked green or blue best?

When I look at old photos, or even watch a drama set in the past, I think about how weird life was, and how hard it was to do things, like cooking or even going to the loo, and the clothes and everything. Then I remember that they thought they were really modern and advanced. One day people will look at our life and wonder how we didn't all think it was weird.

My daughter thinks everyone has the same middle names. So if you're a girl you have her middle name and boys have the same middle name as daddy.

She asked me once why she has a middle name... And then when I thought about it, middle names are weird as they don't have a purpose

I find it hard to grasp that Space goes in all directions, not just "up" or "out"

Why is it that my torso is so much smaller than a man’s yet I can fit an actual baby in there.

To be fair, the majority of the full term baby is sticking out the front :o

December not being the 10th month

There was a Roman (Romulus) calendar with only 10 months of 30 or 31 days each. There seems to be doubt as to what happened with the "missing" months due to the actual length of an earth year though.

Names are weird when you think about it. Just a collection of letters and sounds but they mean so much.

Why did my parents chose my collection of letters and sounds so weird.