Irrelevant Things You Think About But Nobody Else Does

[MyOctopusFeature]

The rules of this thread are simple. Post something you have wondered about, but is so irrelevant it never really bothers you to ask or bring up in conversation. You don't need a reply. You can merely make a comment. All in good spirit.

Here are some of mine.

1. Do Lottery Winners often give huge tips to National Lottery staff? I can imagine this might happen in practice and may be a key perk of the job.

1. Am I the only person who can clearly taste carrots in Coca Cola? It is a secret vegetable recipe after all, but nobody else I know mentions anything about the flavour. I also detect a tad of beetroot too.

They're... in between. But Wikipedia says blue!

The fruit is a berry 5–16 mm (3⁄16–5⁄8 in) in diameter with a flared crown at the end; they are pale greenish at first, then reddish-purple, and finally uniformly blue when ripe.

@Ifixfastjets

What if grass doesn't want to be cut? Does it hurt the grass? Do plants feel pain?

It seems unlikely that plants/trees etc would feel pain. Surely the purpose of pain is a warning to your body to remove yourself from the source of pain. Bit hard to do that when you're stuck in the ground? Just my thoughts.

Our guinea pigs recently had babies and now the babies are about 5 months old, I wonder, do the mothers still know that they are their daughters? Or do they forget?

Also, how did someone test a goldfish's memory to discover that their memory lasts 3 seconds?

Good idea for a thread by the way

It seems unlikely that plants/trees etc would feel pain. Surely the purpose of pain is a warning to your body to remove yourself from the source of pain. Bit hard to do that when you're stuck in the ground? Just my thoughts.

But then if ash trees do not feel pain, how did they get the gumption to produce 'ash keys' hundreds of thousands or millions of years before humans invented propellers? If they could not feel then what produced that and what with?

@Piglet89

I have had those thoughts about death so many times! It’s a really really scary feeling thinking about your own mortality.

Yes! I guess that’s why people just don’t think about it!

Needhelp, I know bits about the goldfish one (although not the all-essential 3 second question).
They have tested their spatial appreciation with experiments on whether they are in a square or rounded tank in the 60s, and have tested memory for colour with different 'targets' on their tanks, with only one being a button that can dispense food. They remember the colour connection no trouble (as they are greedy herberts).

www.newscientist.com/lastword/mg23130821-000-memory-test/

Even by lowest estimates 50,000 mature chickens are slaughtered every hour across the world. Where do all the feathers go?

Home made merengue smells of wet dog- just me?

And why in book shops or libraries do I always suddenly need the loo- it’s like the books trigger something

@stillcrazyafterall

How many people died (or were very ill) before they realised you could eat the delicious stalks of rhubarb but the leaves will kill you?

I did an Australian Aboriginal bush tucker tour once. There was a root that was poisonous, but after 6 complicated steps it was edible. Steps including leaching in a creek for a week, pounding to a pulp, sun-drying and various others. How many people died perfecting this, and why was this poisonous root so bloody important that people persisted in trying to find a way to eat it?

@NoviceGardenLady

Sometimes I think it's just completely, absolutely bonkers that historical people actually existed as humans. Like Henry VIII was a real person, an actual person. Because people get so much written about them in history books and talked about on TV, they almost become fictional.

Sometimes I feel a bit funny at the thought that a historical figure might have walked on the same ground as I'm standing. Like if I'm at Hampton Court Palace and realise that Henry VIII would have stood in this courtyard or room. I guess it's because we tend to view the past a bit like a story and when it intersects with our present reality we realise how real it actually was, if that makes any sense at all!

[quote Ormally]Needhelp, I know bits about the goldfish one (although not the all-essential 3 second question).
They have tested their spatial appreciation with experiments on whether they are in a square or rounded tank in the 60s, and have tested memory for colour with different 'targets' on their tanks, with only one being a button that can dispense food. They remember the colour connection no trouble (as they are greedy herberts).

www.newscientist.com/lastword/mg23130821-000-memory-test/[/quote]
Interesting!

Why do Inuit have a zillion words for snow and ice when in the UK we have one-ish word for green?

I often think how the sky is exactly the same for us as it was for Jane Austen or the Romans or Neanderthal people.

This sounds really self-absorbed but sometimes I wonder who's been randomly thinking about me on a given day.

I don't mean like parents, friends, family or colleagues but completely random people. You know the way some random person from school 25 years ago just pops into your head and you have a think about them for 2 minutes then forget them for another 25 years? I wonder whether anyone's had those random thoughts about me today, why I popped into their head, and what they were thinking.

When I'm listening to music I often wonder how many other people globally are listening to that track at that exact moment and where they are in the world.

Similar to @phodopus I often wonder if I stood on a particular spot somewhere and the world around me went back in time, what kinds of things would I see happening at that exact spot over thousands and millions of years? Like, if I stood in my back yard, would I see a Saxon peasant family toiling on the fields, would I see Roman soldiers swanning about in their uniforms, was there a dinosaur nest where my raised beds currently stand?

The orange colour in the Flaming June painting makes my taste buds water. Why?

@wtheck pheasants are arseholes. I've lived rurally for 5 years. Not his a single pheasant in all that time. Then 2.5 months ago we hit our first, it took out the water for the windscreen. Got that fixed then 3 weeks ago one jumped just as we were passing it and took out the front light cover. That's nearly £300 of damage.

I mainly think about how mad it is that things got invented - like who stood on a beach and thought "Oh, I know, I'll heat this stuff I'm standing on up and see if it turns into anything." Stuff like that would literally never cross my mind to do.

@NoviceGardenLady

This sounds really self-absorbed but sometimes I wonder who's been randomly thinking about me on a given day.

I don't mean like parents, friends, family or colleagues but completely random people. You know the way some random person from school 25 years ago just pops into your head and you have a think about them for 2 minutes then forget them for another 25 years? I wonder whether anyone's had those random thoughts about me today, why I popped into their head, and what they were thinking.

When I'm listening to music I often wonder how many other people globally are listening to that track at that exact moment and where they are in the world.

Similar to @phodopus I often wonder if I stood on a particular spot somewhere and the world around me went back in time, what kinds of things would I see happening at that exact spot over thousands and millions of years? Like, if I stood in my back yard, would I see a Saxon peasant family toiling on the fields, would I see Roman soldiers swanning about in their uniforms, was there a dinosaur nest where my raised beds currently stand?

I have that thought to about random reciprocal thinking.

Your raised beds are probably 50 or 60 feet above where the dinosaur nest was. Detritus of animal cells and vegetation in the air would have gradually settled, together with dust particles, over time and layered up these different things over time.

@Dacquoise

The orange colour in the Flaming June painting makes my taste buds water. Why?

Orange Starbursts?

That's making my mouth water now!

@TomorrowIsAnotherDae

Do animal species understand each other or do they have different languages like we do?

And what if my 'blue' is someone else's 'red'?

And who was the first human to sing a song? Did they copy birds?

I have always wondered that about colours. I think the exact same thing, what if what I call blue someone else is seeing what I would call pink but knows it as blue iyswim?

I often wonder what a particular actor or famous person might be doing right this minute, wherever they may be in the world.

@wtheck

Why pheasants wait until you are upon them before running into the road.

How some of the people in the area I live in afford not to work. I'm not talking benefits but younger 30/40/50s who float about 'lunching'.

Credit! Lots of it

@BlusteryLake

Does my hamster have an inner monologue?

😆😆 I've often wondered this!