Derek's answers to imponderables
These answers are kindly provided by Derek Blais (so don't blame me for typos, spelling, grammatical, or factual mistakes). If you want to reach him, you can e-mail me and ask for his contact info. This extra step is designed to prevent automated spam bots from flooding his inbox.
| Why do we wash bath towels? Aren't we clean when we use them? | |
| To begin with, no we are not completely clean since we cannot remove all the dirt from our bodies. More importantly a towel will absorb the dirty water from your skin (the water that you were bathing in... all that dirt and grime). It is simple physical chemistry, after at least a couple of washes (if not one) it must be washed for sanitation purposes. I would like to ask... would you like to dry your face with a towel someone else used to dry theirs... I thought not. [I'd also like to point out that the skin excretes oil continuously. The bath towel will absorb some of the oil that has been produced after you got out of the water. Towels will also scrape off some dead skin. These, together with the moisture, make an ideal breeding ground for evil germs.] | |
| Why doesn't Tarzan have a beard? [not that I really care] | |
| Not everybody must have a beard, it could be simple genetics. Also, the real reason why he doesn't in any movies of any sort is because it makes him more marketable and more attractive playing into female fantasies. | |
| Why do people post "Back in an hour" on their office doors, if no one knows when they left? | |
| When showing up to this door and seeing this sign, the inquirer knows that they have at most one hour to wait before the person returns. It's just like waiting for a bus at a bus stop where the bus passes twice in an hour, you can go at any time knowing you have a maximum of 30 minutes to wait (reasonably speaking... if the bus crashes then it's your tough luck). | |
| 24 hours in a day, 24 beers in a case. Coincidence? | |
| Yes pure coincidence. It has nothing to do with the imperial system, it has to do with the fact that 24 beers is quite a good number of beers to be buying. I think 24 hours is horrible, we should have a metric clock!!! | |
| If a man says something in the woods and there are no women there, is he still wrong? | |
| I believe that there are absolute truths and knowledge, thus meaning that people don't have to know it or believe it for it to be true. Unlike the classic "tree falling in the forest" which has a human experience tied to it, a sensation. [And I'd like to say that the classic "tree falling in the forest" question is ambiguous in its definition of "sound", which can mean either physical vibrations or the actual sensation.] | |
| Do Lipton Tea employees take coffee breaks? | |
| Actually, they are probably bigger coffee drinkers than tea drinkers, at least more so than LIPTON tea drinkers. Think of a person working at a certain restaurant who is constantly surrounded by that food. After a while they cannot even bear the smell of it and refuse to eat it, at least a lot less. Besides the fact that a person is working at a company does not mean they must indulge in that companies dealings. | |
| If pro is the opposite of con, is progress the opposite of congress? | |
| The words profess and confess are quite similar in meaning thus far from opposites. So i guess that just because two words are opposites it doesn't mean that adding letters to the ends of them make them opposites as well. | |
| Can atheists get insurance for acts of God? | |
| Of course they can, the only problem is they wouldn't :) | |
| Why do they sterilize the needles for lethal injections? | |
| Just in case. Some one has to use that needle, something could happen where they cut themselves. Also you don't want a potential reaction with the criminal where the needle causes them to die painfully or their body to swell etc. [Nurses seem to accidentally prick themselves with injection needles very often. But in the case of lethal injections, I'm not sure how much difference a clean needle would make.] | |
| What was the best thing before sliced bread? | |
| Before sliced bread people were infactuated with hotcakes, hence the phrase "Sells like hotcakes". However now with sliced bread people used that sentence less and hotcake sales decreased drastically. | |
| When your pet bird sees you reading the newspaper, does he wonder why you're just sitting there, staring at carpeting? | |
| Actually your pet bird's brain most likely doesn't even process that he sees you reading a paper (don't get all TOK on me here). | |
| Before they invented drawing boards, what did they go back to? | |
| Nobody invented drawing boards... they used to be called cave walls, and before that we didn't do much inventing, all we did was hunt, eat, sleep and fornicate. | |
| If American mothers feed their babies with tiny little spoons and forks, what do Chinese mothers use? Toothpicks? | |
| That's the beauty of chopsticks, it can be used to feed children of all ages, you don't really need sizes. Besides, asian kids are so smart that they learn how to use them before they are even a year old. [Yup, I could pick up peanuts with chopsticks when I was 3. Before that I was probably drinking watermelon juice from bottles.] | |
| Americans throw rice at weddings. Do Asians throw hamburgers? | |
| I don't know. But if they do I'm marrying an asian woman and going to a lot more asian weddings. | |
| Why do banks charge you an "insufficient funds fee" on money they already know you don't have? | |
| Not having money is not an excuse to not have fees and payments to make. The bank, knowing you don't have money asks you for more, knowing that you will pay it somehow, because if you don't YOU are the bad guy. | |
| Why do hot dogs come 10 to a package and hot-dog buns 8 to a package? | |
| Actually hot dogs [and buns] come in a variety of packages, the most common being 12 and 12. | |