Ok, this is completely non-travel-related. But it’s so strange that I had to relate it…
So I started to ask Google “Why doesn’t firefox spellchecker handle contractions correctly in gmail?” (which is one of my current tech annoyances). But when I got as far as “why doesn’t”, the Google auto-completer helpfully recommended the following:
- why doesn’t he call (233 Million hits)
- why doesn’t glue stick to the inside of the bottle (114k)
- why doesn’t he like me (53.7M)
- why doesn’t he love me (33M)
- why doesn’t god heal amputees (21k)
I shit you not.
Now this tells us a couple of interesting things:
First, the top three causal interrogatives that concern the web population as a whole are (a) courtship ritual uncertainties, (b) kinetic curing properties of (likely polyvinyl acetate-based) adhesives, and (c) the theological problem of evil.
Second, the courtship rituals cluster overwhelmingly outweighs the other two. By like 3 orders of magnitude. Sex trumps chemistry and god every time, I guess.
Third, the courtship rituals are entirely about the behavior of the male of the species. There are no “why doesn’t she love me?” queries. I won’t touch that.
Finally, the most pressing query about evil concerns the (undoubted) suffering of amputees. While clearly a pressing theological issue, one does wonder about other concerns such as war, famine, plague, crime, poverty, etc.
The web is a far stranger place…
Anyway, as a pathetic attempt to make this post at least marginally travel-related, I’ll note that fruit cocktail tastes exactly the same in Spain as it does in the US. Ah, fond memories of preschool snack time…
Actually I’ve seen the “Why doesn’t God heal amputees” website and theological argument several times. I can’t remember the reason why amputees are singled out, but if I remember right it’s got something to do with there being no stories in the Bible about Jesus growing people’s legs back, and how amputees seem to be the only people who God won’t heal. Then of course it goes into the whole question of why God heals some people and not others, etc.
But I honestly kinda figure that there weren’t amputee stories because there weren’t many amputees back then. If you think about it, with the possibility of infection being so high at the time, if you had to get something amputated I doubt if you had a real high chance of surviving it.
But that’s just my take. ;)
Wow. I hadn’t realized that there was a complete movement about God and amputees. This is such strange reasoning that I can’t even begin to analyze it. I tried, but backed off because it seemed like a pointless exercise. People are bizarre.
As a guess, I would guess that they *did* have amputees back then. Not everybody who loses a limb dies, even without modern medical attention. (Assuming, I guess, that you can at least stop the blood flow, which they have to have figured out for warfare even earlier. E.g., cauterization was known to Hippocrates.)
[...] Randomly… [...]
[...] Randomly… [...]