Where’s Nico?

So I flew up to Minneapolis a while back, and as we prepared to take off, the flight attendants did the safety spiel.  It started with the bit about these personal flotation devices underneath our seats.  I was flying from Kansas City to Minneapolis – despite the ‘land of 10,000 lakes’ stuff, I’m not crossing any substantial bodies of water to get here, and I’m going to be 37,000 feet in the air.  I get floatation devices on boats because, y’know – they’re around water and all, but it occurred to me that I’d much rather that they use the space here to put in parachutes.  I realize if we have a big issue in the air, I’m probably screwed either way, but in the end, if I could pick any two things to help me get through that situation, it would be a great beer and a parachute. 

Anyway, I’ve had trouble getting this thought out of my head all that week.  I mean, floatation devices make absolutely no sense.  I definitely don’t lay there at night in the dark, staring at the ceiling very often – but little things like this stick with me.  I thought I’d share a list of some other thoughts that I have trouble getting out of my head.  Please share any thoughts you have in the comments section!

1. Not to stick on planes for too long, but every time there’s a bad plane accident, they figure out the cause by finding the black box on the plane and looking at the data inside of it.  A plane can explode in the air and come hurtling down towards the ground and smash into a million fragments, but the black box is always intact.  What the heck did they make this box out of, and could we maybe make the whole plane out of that?  And by the way, wouldn’t be black box be easier to find at the wreckage site if it wasn’t black?  I’d think a neon yellow box or a hot pink box would stand out much better.
2. When I drive up to my bank ATM in my neighborhood and reach out the driver’s side window, the ATM has braille dots on the numbers.  I definitely appreciate that we’re designing things to help folks with special challenges, but I do want to point out that this is something you access on the driver’s side of the car.  The DRIVER’S side of the car….  And speaking of ATM’s, I’m always a little annoyed when someone calls it an ATM machine, because that’s really saying automatic teller machine machine.
3. This one is very mildly off color, but the automatic teller machine machine reminded me of this.  When my kids were younger, they’d sometimes repeat a phrase I often use – “Holy crap!”.  In and of itself, “holy crap” is a strange term if you think about it.  But when they said that in front of my mom, who has never come close to cursing in her life, she told my kids “that’s like saying holy bowel movement”.  I said, “no it’s really not – holy bowel movement is WAY funnier!”  My kids still say “holy bowel movement” to my mom now and then, despite the fact that they’re now 25 and 22, respectively, and I stand by it – it just legitimately is way funnier.
4. If something is unlikely, we say there’s a slim chance of it.  But when we say “fat chance!”, it also means it’s unlikely.  I feel like fat chance should mean there’s a really good chance that something happens.  If someone told me “fat chance anyone is still reading this ridiculous blog site at this point”, I’d really like to think that means that it’s quite likely that you are.
5. If you’ve ever been to Honolulu, you may have driven on Interstate H-1.  Nothing special about the road – typical interstate.  Except for the fact that it seems super wrong to call it an interstate unless they have a bridge from there to California.
6. I’m a boxers guy myself, not briefs.  But regardless, why are both referred to as a pair?  Same deal with pants… a pair of boxers should be two boxers, shouldn’t it?
7. When they came up with the word ‘lisp’, wouldn’t it have been better to use a word that doesn’t have the ‘s’ in the middle of it?  It just seems like it would be nice for the folks who do have a lisp to have a word to indicate that fact when talking that doesn’t actually sound different because of their lisp.
8. I always found it so strange that we call an orange an orange.  I can’t think of a single other object that we just name after its’ color.  We don’t call a banana a yellow.  So many other citrus fruits have these great names like ‘tangerine’, which is super fun to say – I’m excited to eat it just because it’s got such a cool name.  Oranges are delicious, but I feel like the marketing department really dropped the ball here.  They dropped the ball on grapefruit too, which really has nothing to do with grapes as far as I can tell.  Plus putting the word ‘fruit’ in a fruit just seems really redundant.  That’d be like calling carrots ‘carrotvegetables’.  And by the way, carrots are also orange, which just further confuses the whole ‘orange’ name again…

– Ken 3/30/2024