I Answer 5 Random Questions

As I sometimes do when I can't think of a good topic for a blog post, I put out a call on Twitter, offering to answer the next five questions I got. Lame, but potentially amusing. Ready?

Question #1 comes from @daHob:

The obvious response is, "African or European?". This being Landless, however, I will instead note that the airspeed velocity of an unladen sparrow is equivalent to the velocipede aericity of an unswallowed ladle.

 Question #2 comes from John Hancock:

It's because people fail to understand that self-actualization is not a tension between the pressures of societal externalities and the innate yearnings of the internally co-created autochthon, but is instead a uncreated moving target. The self we are trying to appease doesn't exist, any more than the self we are trying to destroy. Whatever concept of self we think we understand, these are merely reflections in the mirror, signposts of the past which we have left behind. The self we should be working toward is the one yet to exist. Since it is within our power to create it or destroy it, it is the ultimate expression of our will, and is therefore the source of not only ultimate hope, but of ultimate fear. Fallible beings that we are, most people recoil from either, preferring familiar suffering to unfamiliar ecstasy. Or at least that's what your mom said!

Question #3 comes from Jim Breslin:

Ah, this one's much easier. On July 4, the day of the announcement, I wrote a blog post about the Higgs boson. It was hilarious. I had a nice little bump of visitors to my blog as people read it. So for me, the Higgs boson was worth a 700% uptick in daily visits.

Either they all agreed that it was a funny blog post about one of the great achievements of collaborative Big Science, or it was a national holiday in the U.S. and they had nothing better to do than read my blog.

Question #4 comes from Larry Kollar:

I see what you're doing there, Larry. You're trying to sneak a serious question into this dopey roundup. Well, I'm onto you, pal. You might ask a serious question, but I said I'd be as amusing as possible in my answers. Ha! Take that, smart guy! Why do we write? We write because writers get lots of oral sex and as much pepperoni pizza as they care to eat. We write because taking the time to craft words lets us be as funny, as wise and as attractive as we wish we were, but know we aren't. We write for immortality. We write to shove a pencil in the eye of parents who never loved us the way we needed to be loved. We write for the money. We write because we got tired of reading shitty books and thinking, "Damn, I could write better than this dreck." Finally, we write because we don't want to be left.

Question #5 comes from kaolin fire:

In order: OMNI, Scientific American, Penthouse Letters and the Journal of the American Society of Clinical Psychology.

Thanks for the questions, guys! Let's do it again sometime!


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