On Wind

Why does gravity exist?

So you don't fart through your mouth.

On Generals

The other day, we were driving along the road, and happened to see a Caucasian man walking down the street, a beer can in his hand.

"Look at this angmoh," my mother commented, "he walked all the way to the supermarket just to buy himself a can of beer. How typical."

I mused at how these two simple statements, probably carelessly conceived, and simply spoken, reflected her mental relegation of all expatriates to the beer barrel of debauchery and drunkenness.

Though I could hardly blame her. The human mind is engineered to generalise, to simplify matters into brain-digestible chunks of information. Such generalisation is facilitated by an insidious language that makes such liberal use of collective nouns and nouns alike.

For instance, many hippopotami can be grouped together as a bloat of hippopotami, though two bloats may not have the same number of animals nor even identical animals. Yet they are generalised, for our convenience, into two bloats.

Similarly, two men may be of antipodean tastes, intellect, physique and general character, yet they are still two men rather than two men. Imagine, if you and your mortal enemy could be considered one and the same on the basis that you both have eight orifices and one belly button. Surely, too simplistic a cateogrisation, but an indispensible one nonetheless.

So along we go, day by day, making hundreds of generalisations as our minds process the world around us, subjecting everything around us to our little prejudices and biases that form the enclosures with which we segregate all and sundry.

Now, count the number of generalisations I've made in this post.

On Moods

There was once a boy named Joe.

Actually his name wasn't Joe, but you never have known, would you?

Anyway, Joe had a nervous disorder. This didn't mean he twitched a lot or anything, but that he had a problem with his nerves. His nervous system had been wrongly connected by God or Mother Nature or the Chief Stork (depending on your theological inclinations), so whatever was painful to other people was pleasurable to him, and vice versa.

So every time Joe fell and grazed his knee, cut himself and bled, he'd laugh and clap his hands. He loved falling ill and going to the doctor for injections, and doing all manner of painful activities just for the sheer tingle of enjoyment.

Then one day the French invaded and caught Joe and chopped off his head, and till today he's still laughing.

On Water

Lisa is the most adorable little girl. She has blonde hair, green eyes, and like most six-year olds, a dimply smile that could melt your heart.

However, Lisa has a slight problem - she's the only six-year old from her whole block (and neighbourhood and town and state) who's pregnant.

"Well the good news is that she's not malnourished, but the bad news is that she's in her second trimester," said the gynaecologist, after Lisa's stomach swelled larger and larger.

"She can't be pregnant," insisted Lisa's mother, "she's only six!"

A few years later, Lisa was all grown up and even had a boyfriend; and it was generally agreed that she was the only twelve-year old from her whole block (and neighbourhood and town and state) to be a grandmother.